Indicación de declaraciones dadas al emisor en relación con los activos

The term “looking-glass self” conveys a striking image of the tendency to reflect upon one’s self and one’s characteristics (James, 1890). The evaluation of one’s self is formulated by attending to the information in the environment. The connection I am trying to make between the self-concept and sport psychology comes from the perspective that the environment influences the way in which an athlete sets goals and uses self-referent thoughts

to achieve those goals. The differences in the internal dialogue or the self-talk of athletes are relative to how different societies and cultures shape the self-concept of different athletes. While research exists on the different strategies of self-talk within cultures, there is little research on the different strategies of self-talk between or across cultures. For example, Papaioannou, Ballon, Theodorakis, and Avwelle, (2004) studied self-talk strategies within a group of soccer players from Greece. They reported that instructional and specific self-talk resulted in better sport performance than general and global self-talk strategies. It would be interesting to pursue a research hypothesis whereby different self-talk strategies were effective based on different cultures and how each of those cultures helped to shape athletes’ perception of social feedback and consequently their self-talk strategies.

Similarly, research exists on one’s perceptions of success and failure that are primarily conducted within, but not between cultures. For example, Elliott and Dweck (1988) demonstrated that success-oriented individuals attribute success to high ability and failure to internal and controllable factors such as not trying hard enough. Once more, it would be interesting to see the outcome of such research from a between-cultures analysis. This approach would shed light on how the self is formed in relation to different cultural contexts and how the mind sets of different athletes can be better articulated with regard to their cultural background.

The Rogerian theory of personality has an emphasis on the self (Rogers, 1959). The self is described as a conceptual, consistent gestalt, wherein the individual perceives his or her own emotions and characteristics as an extension into the social environment. According to Rogers, the actualizing tendency motivates all behaviors. This tendency enables the individual to strive for growth and differentiation by realizing only positive experiences that maintain or enhance the organism. The self-actualizing tendency uses the criterion which the individual develops to enhance self regard. Rogers referred to this criterion as the conditions of worth. The conditions of worth must defend the self-concept in order to maintain self- consistency. As a result, self-experiences that are incongruent with the conditions of worth are either denied or symbolized in awareness in a distorted form. For example, an individual has a strong need for a positive self-regard. When a person learns to evaluate different social experiences in terms of how he or she can improve self-regard, then that person has developed conditions of worth. One can easily see how different cultures produce difference conditions of worth.

In order to maximize potential, it is important for an athlete to know the content and meaning of the self. The self is divided into two parts, the public part that everyone else sees and the private part that only you see. It is the core of our personality. The word personality is derived from the Greek root “persona,”, which means mask. Since we’re all “actors upon a stage,” then the public self is the mask we wear when we’re playing a particular role in a particular situation. By experiencing different cultures, i.e., different stages, we increase the repertoire of interactions to the environment and enrich our personalities. According to Hanrahan (2004), “Traveling to places where one is an obvious cultural and/or ethnic minority can help people, who in their everyday lives are part of a majority, experience what it can be like to feel different or out of place” (p.72).

Much of the success in sport is due to having the ability to adapt to different environments in the competitive arena. Learning about other cultures either by traveling or by reading not only enriches our personalities, but can sharpen the mechanisms we use to react to the complexities of social feedback inherent in different sport environments. For example, I

trained a highly motivated lifter who struggled 8 years through serious injury and intense pain to one day lift 500 lbs. Every time he went to competition and heard the meet coordinator announce “John is attempting 500 lbs.” he would valiantly get under the bar only to be crushed to the floor like a piece of gum. He failed with this particular weight dozens of times until Worlds was held in Milan, Italy, where the meet coordinator announced his attempt in kilograms. Upon hearing the number 227.5, John got under the bar and sprang up a successful lift with ease. He became elated when he learned that 227.5 kgs. actually converted to 501.75 lbs. Obviously, a psychological block was removed by experiencing competition in a culture where, for John’s sake, the metric system was used during competition. The exposure to a different cultural sport environment influenced John to change his self-talk strategy from one that had repeatedly defeated him to one that incorporated “tricking” his mind into perceiving the weight as being lighter than it actually was.

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