Tips and Advice

Motivation: Getting the push and pull right

Written by Aiden Choles.

· By Bike Hub Features · 0 comments

What does it take to achieve your goals at an event?

Whether you’re lining up a specific time at the Cape Town Cycle Tour or just hoping to cross the finish line at the ABSA Cape Epic, there are two things you need to master in order to achieve that goal: firstly, you need to overcome your body’s desire to limit damage to itself, and secondly, you need to foster a psychological drive that motivates you enough to push on.

These two aspects are in tension, competing with each other all the time. Your psychological drive to perform optimally and your physiological protection requirements are in a constant to-and-fro as you cycle, one wants to slow you down while the other is trying to move you quicker. The resolution of this inherent tension lies in training your body to endure more physiological stress over time, while fostering a deep, resilient motivation that is rooted in realistic, achievable goals.

Let’s focus on the goal side of your psychological drive to success and how best to foster it.

Broadly speaking, there are two mindsets an athlete can hold about achieving their race goals: an athlete can either want to approach success or avoid failure. Take a quick assessment of yourself as you read this – do you tend to want to approach success in your cycling, or are you more motivated by avoiding failure? They sound like the same thing, don’t they? But they aren’t and they are fundamentally different ways of seeing your performance, both of which have tangible influences on how you perform physically.

A mindset of ‘approaching success’ is a positive goal orientation that is focused on achieving success in relation to your goals, be that in your mastery of what is required to complete the event, achieving your own maximal potential or performing better than fellow competitors. You are driven to achieve by wanting to perform better than you had done previously, as well as wanting to do better than others.

The counter to this is a mindset of ‘avoiding failure’ which is a negative orientation focused on making sure you stay as clear of failure as possible. You are driven to achieve by a desire not to perform worse than you had before, paired with a desire not to perform worse than others. Here the concern is whether you’ll be able to meet the task requirements of the event e.g. training harder and harder out of fear that you may not complete the race; be concerned about not achieving your potential due to your perceived weaknesses or focusing on winning an event just so that you don’t lose to a competitor.

Research has shown that the Approach orientation is the positive mindset you want to adopt and foster in your training as you line up an event and set goals for it. The negative, Avoid orientation is littered with anxiety and nasty psychological landmines that run the risk of limiting your physical performance. Given that your protective physiological drive wants to slow you down, choosing a positive, approach-orientated motivation to perform will lay a solid foundation for motivation levels that will push you harder and faster than before.

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About the author: Aiden Choles

Aiden suffers from an Ultra MTB race affliction and has a background in psychology, which means he lies on his own couch, asking himself how it feels. He runs MentalWorks and is passionate about helping athletes overcome their mental demons and redefine what they thought was impossible on the bike.

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