cambio
Jul 18 2020
How to deal with lack of motivation to change?

We all now of the importance of keeping an active lifestyle in order to prevent diseases and improve our physical and mental wellbeing. However, the road to change (and maintaining this situation) is a treacherous one and it definitely isn’t a straight path. It’s filled with obstacles that’ll test our motivation and our self-belief.

The goal of this article is to unravel the process of change going from not wanting to change a thing, to suddenly deciding to turn our worlds upside down and how we can accomplish this.

The Stages of Change

Figure 1: Stages of Change model (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1983).

This model starts off at a precontemplative state where the person isn’t yet considering change; going onto contemplation, where the person starts to evaluate pros and cons of actually changing; then, moving to the preparation stage, where commitment is secured and a plan starts to take shape; leading to taking action to begin actual change; and finally, the person works towards long-term maintenance while battling opportunities for relapse (DiClemente & Velasquez, 2002).

When someone has trouble committing to a workout routine it’s because they’re going back and forth between precontemplation and contemplation (turns out the model is cyclical for good reason). Precontemplators will say things like: «I don’t need to workout, I feel perfectly fine the way I am now.»; while the contemplators say: «But I feel good when I get my workouts in and I miss that feeling.»

For this article’s sake we’ll be focusing on giving tips to contemplators who are considering changing towards an active lifestyle and how they can lock down a serious commitment to change. Precontemplators… we’ll have a little talk in another article.

The tipping point

Let’s look at how someone transitions from unwillingness to readiness for change. Mat Fraser once commented that his first experience with fitness was when he was about 12 years old. He was playing soccer and kicked the ball so far out that another kid called him a fat-ass and sent him off to get the ball. Mat felt so bad that he decided to change his diet and start working out in his garage. He started eating cans of tuna, bags of spinach and doing pushups, sit-ups and running on the treadmill.

For him, the tipping point was a comment made by another peer, but these causal factors can come from all sorts of places. There’s people who decide to change because of serious medical illness and others who watch a CrossFit Games event on YouTube one day and drastically change their lifestyle the years following that (this was me).

Something must trigger you into actually considering the possibility of change. It must create a sort of inner tension between your ideal self and your real self to make you question if what you’re doing right now is really cutting it for you.

Contemplation: the tricky point

Once you begin to seriously ponder the possibilities ahead, you may think you landed on the green. But, of course, it’s never that easy. Although you’re actively gathering information about the pros and cons of the unwanted behavior and the one you’re striving for (even becoming experts on the subject!), you can suffer what Prochaska & DiClemente (1998) called «chronic contemplation».

This happens when you find that the positives and negatives associated to the unwanted behavior are in equilibrium. It’s like you counterattack every con with a pro and it’s a tight race between the two. Here’s where you need to get creative and list every single thing that comes to mind (however «stupid» they may sound).

At some point, something will take over (either pro or con), and it’ll clear up the path for you. In my case, once I legitimately set the goal to become an Rx athlete, I decided to go for change and was ready to make a move.

Preparing for change

Once you got the willpower, you have to develop a detailed plan that will help you be successful. This plan needs to be «acceptable, accessible and effective» (DiClemente & Velasquez, 2002). You need to anticipate possible barriers (triggering situations, environmental cues, etc.) and also identify potential support systems.

The point of making a realistic assessment of the difficulties you can find down the road is to be prepared for each of these contingencies. The ambivalence between approaching or avoiding change doesn’t stop during this stage, so we need to be aware of the fact that we may fall off the tracks at any point.

«It’s not like you press pause and when you relapse, you press play and start where you left off. Your addiction is out in the parking lot doing pushups. It’s getting stronger.» – Mat Fraser

Discussing his path to sobriety in an interview
lack of motivation
Mat Fraser in his garage gym in Vermont. Source: NZ Herald.

Maintenance: how do you keep it alive?

First, let me say that maintenance takes more than 21 days. Even after 6 months of action you can still relapse and return to square one. So, what to do to help keep the ball rolling?

The one variable that can make or break the process of change is self-efficacy. Knowing you have the ability to succeed in a certain task keeps you moving in the face of self-doubt, external triggers and even relapses. That’s why it’s important that you play an active role in the process of change on the whole, so that you experience success as a byproduct of your own actions.

  • Relapse is a very real possibility

Spoiler alert! You’re not out of the woods yet. How many people have successfully quit smoking for 10 years and all of a sudden just fall back into it? When you ask them, they don’t even know how it happened but ride the wave anyways and all those years of «maintenance» feel useless… or are they really?

You need to understand that you may be willing to change and prepared to act; but your environment won’t necessarily change with you. Maybe your family keeps eating junk food or your friends keep pressuring you into going out for drinks with them. You can’t just cut clean from your friends and family, so you need to rely on that thing I mentioned earlier (self-efficacy, remember? stay with me!)

  • But if you do relapse…

It can go one of two ways: either you return to a precontemplative state or you successfully reach maintenance stage. Here’s where self-efficacy kicks in. If this relapse affects your self-efficacy to the point where it confirms what you knew all along (that you suck and you can’t change for shit), then you’ll go back to the very beginning with little to no energy to start over.

If, however, your self-efficacy is strong enough to know that this relapse is a minor setback, you’ll be prepared to learn from it: why did it happen and what can I do next time to prevent this? At this point, you might look into more personalized and effective actions. When I started to clean up my diet, I started counting macros; then I went to strict non-processed foods; and now I’ve settled with a «flexible» plant-based diet, low in processed foods and not heavily restricted (because I’ve found that restriction triggers abandonment).

If you did your homework when you started preparing for change, you probably know why it happened. Also, – and this may surprise you -, not everything is a relapse! Just because you skipped class one day, doesn’t mean you have to quit for 3 months. If your self-efficacy stays strong, you’ll show up the next day ready to get after it. Change is an everyday battle and feeds off every tiny decision we make throughout the day; make sure you keep it hungry.













- DiClemente, C. C., & Velasquez, M. M. (2002). Motivational interviewing and the stages of change. Motivational interviewing: Preparing people for change, 2, 201-216
- Prochaska, James O., and Carlo C. DiClemente. "Stages and processes of self-change of smoking: toward an integrative model of change." Journal of consulting and clinical psychology 51.3 (1983): 390.
Desiree Mejia-Naranjo 0 Comentarios
facilitación social
Jun 6 2020
How does the presence of others influence performance?

Applying social facilitation to athletic performance

We’ve all experienced the effects of social facilitation to some extent. From having your parents watch your soccer game to having a teacher watch you complete a written exam; the presence of others definitely influences performance. Unsurprisingly, this line of studies can be traced all the way back to the late 19th century.

In this article, I’ll discuss social facilitation in sport settings to try and explain how being observed or joined by others produces changes in our pacing strategy, intensity levels and overall performance.

Why does it happen?

Decades of investigation have failed to find a solution to this question; however, during the process, it has come up with useful explanations that have to do with competitiveness, social modeling or arousal among others (Guerin, 2010). For the purposes of this article, I’ve chosen the most salient variables out of these studies: competitiveness and personality type.

«What one man can do, another can do.» – Charles Morse

The Edge, movie released in 1997

Competitiveness is a psychological trait that is heavily rooted on social interaction since it’s characterized by a desire to outperform a perceived rival in a given task (Smither & Houston, 1992). The notion of competitiveness is as old as time and it’s the first plausible explanation that comes to mind if we’re talking about social facilitation.

The reasoning behind this association is that social facilitation maintains a direct relation with competitiveness; the more competitive you are, the more influenced you are by social facilitation. This relation was studied among elder individuals and it revealed that the more competitive subjects performed even better on a cycling task than those less competitive when faced with a virtual competitor.

In the box, we see it on a daily basis. Although we’re just casually doing the WOD together, for many athletes there’s an implicit competition going on to see who puts the highest score or the fastest time on the whiteboard. But is it pure competitiveness or could personality traits also be playing some kind of role?

[on competitive traits he got from his father] «He loved getting in front of an audience. That got him going». – Mat Fraser

Interview with Nutriforce

In relation to social facilitation, personality is considered to provide one of two orientations: positive self-assured or negative apprehension (Uziel, 2007). A negative orientation (characterized by high neuroticism and low self-esteem) will perceive social presence as threatening, apprehensive or distracting.

An individual with a positive orientation (low neuroticism and high self-esteem) will approach the same situation with self-assurance and enthusiasm (in Stein, 2009) mainly because they expect positive consequences from social situations (social praise after achieving success, drive to pursue ideal self that emerges when observed).

As a result, positively-oriented individuals will experience performance improvement when observed by others while negatively-oriented individuals, on the other hand, will experience performance impairment (Uziel, 2007). Therefore, the junction of competitiveness and a negative or positive orientation towards social presence, will determine the direction and the intensity of social facilitation effect.

To know yourself is to own yourself

In summary, one can integrate all theories of social facilitation and consider its effects as a result of the combined action of increased alertness for survival purposes, learned drive mechanisms, self-awareness of one’s abilities, competitiveness or personality traits (Uziel, 2007). The reason I highlight competitiveness and personality is because it’s more easily identified.

There is no universal recipe for proper management of social presence. While other athletes thrive on observing other competitors for pacing purposes or feeding off the energy of the audience, others will perform better by staying in their lane and paying little to no mind to situational circumstances.

Although much of this knowledge will come from accumulated experience in competitive settings, a lot of it will also stem from introspection. Know yourself as a person and as an athlete to work with social facilitation in a way that suits you best. 










- Guerin, B. (2010). Social facilitation. The Corsini encyclopedia of psychology, 1-2.
- Smither, R. D., & Houston, J. M. (1992). The nature of competitiveness: The development and validation of the competitiveness index. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 52(2), 407-418.
- Snyder, A. L., Anderson-Hanley, C., & Arciero, P. J. (2012). Virtual and live social facilitation while exergaming: competitiveness moderates exercise intensity. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 34(2), 252-259.
- Stein, L. M. (2009). Individual differences in social facilitation (Doctoral dissertation, Rutgers University-Graduate School-New Brunswick).
- Uziel, L. (2007). Individual differences in the social facilitation effect: A review and meta-analysis. Journal of Research in Personality, 41(3), 579-601.
Desiree Mejia-Naranjo 0 Comentarios
autoeficacia
May 19 2020
Self-efficacy: why is it important to believe in yourself?

Where there’s a will, there’s a way?

By definition, performance in sport is heavily dependent on our ability to complete given tasks faster and better than our opponents. Sport psychology has placed its efforts in seeking out psychological variables that influence athletic output.

At a first glance, one had assumed that willpower was strong enough to enhance performance: willingness to beat our rivals, to improve our stats, to progress as athletes. Therefore, motivational processes had caught up most of the attention. However, performance would suddenly go awry in very capable and highly-driven athletes. How come?

Turns out there was this one psychological variable that had been meddling in the process. We were on the assumption that wanting to perform would suffice to improve these efforts. It wasn’t until Bandura questioned the relevance of actually believing one was capable, that we begun speaking about perceived self-efficacy.

What is perceived self-efficacy?

Perceived self-efficacy is the belief that one has the ability to influence events and produce a desired outcome. In sports, this would be overlooked because somehow this perception had been engulfed by motivation, and yet it has proven to be quite decisive in terms of performance.

These expectations influence the initiation of coping efforts, the expenditure of said efforts and how long they will be sustained in response to setbacks (Bandura, 1977). It makes sense if we think about sport-specific stressors. When dealing with failure, athletes don’t question the strength of their motives, in fact they tend to ask: am I even good enough?

How to improve expectations of self-efficacy

  • Managing expectations. These expectations must tackle two dimensions: efficacy and outcome. For example, if I want to run 5k in 20′ I know that running an average 4:00 min/km will produce that result (outcome expectancy) and if I regularly train at this pace for an extended period of time, my chances of being successful will increase (efficacy expectancy). When creating these expectations one must take into consideration the difficulty of the task, the generality of the task (building self-efficacy for one specific task or for anything) and the stability of one’s expectations.
  • Creating performance accomplishments. Bandura considered this to be the most valuable source of information for expectations of self-efficacy. It takes time to build up these expectations but most importantly, it depends on personal experience. Having successfully accomplished a task thanks to my effort will heighten my sense of self-efficacy. And if I run into failure down the road, these past experiences will remind me that sustained effort ultimately brings success («hard work pays off»).
  • Walk into the storm. Avoiding situations we believe exceed our personal skills will only feed our fears and self-debilitating expectations. I’m sure many of you struggled to get into a handstand the first time, or doing box jumps; but after you actually got it done it reinforced your sense of efficacy and helped break that mental barrier. «Self-efficacy is both a cause and effect of performance» (Moritz et. al, 2000), so it’s important to get involved in «threatening» situations in order to gain valuable experiences.
Scott Panchik at the 2015 CrossFit Games. Source: CrossFit HQ

«If you don’t believe you can beat everyone you might as well not show up because you’re losing already» – Scott Panchik (8x CF Games Athlete)

Source: interview with CrossFit HQ

The point of this article was to illustrate the impact of perceived self-efficacy on athletic performance. It’s just as meaningful to have an appropriate skill set and well-established motives as it is to believe one is actually capable of outperforming their competition.

While most actions are focused on improving sport-specific abilities and motivation, self-efficacy tends to be forgotten. Think of those athletes who are just as driven and athletically gifted as their rivals but fail to rise to the occasion. What if it’s a debilitated sense of efficacy what’s holding them back?










- Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological review, 84(2), 191.
- Moritz, S. E., Feltz, D. L., Fahrbach, K. R., & Mack, D. E. (2000). The relation of self-efficacy measures to sport performance: A meta-analytic review. Research quarterly for exercise and sport, 71(3), 280-294.
Desiree Mejia-Naranjo 0 Comentarios