Maldaptive or Adaptive

The ups and downs of perfectionism
By Phoebe Dey

Every athlete dreams of the perfect performance, but how that perfectionism is attained is critical, says a University of Alberta researcher. Dr. John Dunn, a sport psychologist at the U of A who researches motivation theory, found that athletes who perceive undue pressure from parents and coaches will suffer in the long run.

Dunn studied 174 teenage football players to investigate the idea of perfectionism in sport. He created a tool that measured several components of perfectionism, such as perceived parental pressure, setting personal goals, and feelings about making mistakes during competition. Dunn found that two types of perfectionism exist: adaptive (healthy) perfectionism and maladaptive (unhealthy) perfectionism. In other words, there is a good way to try to excel, and a poor way.

Dunn found that athletes with an adaptive motivational pattern tended to set moderately high personal standards, and at the same time they recorded low perceived parental pressure, low concern over mistakes, and low perceived coach pressure. In contrast, athletes who had high personal standards and high perceived parental pressure, high concern over mistakes, and high perceived coach pressure had the most maladaptive motivational patterns in the study.

"Maladaptive perfectionists can still achieve high levels of performance, but these people are motivated by failure and by fear of messing up," said Dunn, lead author of a paper just published in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology. "With that negative motivation comes anxiety and stress. That person is often drained and rarely feels a sense of satisfaction of doing well. In the long-term, that person is at risk of burning out."

Currently, many parents and coaches set standards that many athletes are actually unable to meet, said Dunn. "We should challenge athletes, but the standards must be achievable," he said. "If they aren't, we run the risk of the athletes not achieving the goal, and they will never find satisfaction in anything they do. We want them to come back more and more but if there is no satisfaction in the sport, they won’t.”

Dunn cites athletes like Wayne Gretzky and Tiger Woods as examples of healthy perfectionists. Looking at their practice behavior and the pure joy they receive from their sports shows they have their heads on straight and are motivated by positive factors.

"Tiger Woods may not have shot the best round of his life to win a major tournament, but when he is asked, he is still happy he won," said Dunn. "A maladaptive perfectionist would not be able to enjoy that victory because he would be concentrating on a missed putt."

Dunn's other research projects include the examination of the relationship between perfectionism and anger in high-performance male youth football and hockey players and between perfectionism and body image in Canadian female figure skaters.

FreebNotes:

The same might be said for coaching styles as well. We all know that it starts at the top and runs downhill, correct? So if you are one who coaches out of fear, lots of pressure and concern over mistakes, you may be setting yourself and your team up for constant failure. As Wayne Dyer would say, "Always striving, but never arriving, " never finding any satisfaction in what they are doing.

There is a delicate dance that you must do when dealing with the developing psyches of young athletes. And what does this study have to say about all the highly competitive, pressuring youth coaches across America today.

I have a running argument with little league baseball. To me, summertime is time for playing baseball. Just as football is for the fall and basketball for the winter. But regular season for little league is over in June because of putting together the All Star team for the championship run, leaving the vast majority of kids alone at home.

And then there is the 'All Star Syndrome.' A soccer coach was having trouble at one of the school's I coached at with the parents whose kids were riding the pine - very little playing time. They just did not have the skills to make the varsity field. But they played on the All-Star Select Team!" They had traveled all over the West: SLC, San Diego,LA, PDX, SEA etc. Now they were on the bus to Molalla to play back-up. Many of the kids were burnout or fed up with the whole soccer scene before they made high school.