A recent study examines sports-injury lessons from the circus — or, more specifically, the link between confidence and injury rate in Cirque du Soleil performers:
When they arrived at the tryout camp, each newcomer completed a series of health questionnaires, including one that assessed feelings of stress, competence, preparedness and general mood. Then they trained for eight and a half hours a day, five days a week, for 16 weeks. Conditions were trying, Dr. Hallé said. The athletes were beginners again after years of being among the best in the world at their sports.
During the four months, more than half of the athletes sustained an injury severe enough to require a visit to the on-site physical trainer. Some injured themselves multiple times.
Hoping to discern what traits separated the injury-prone from the impervious, Dr. Hallé and colleagues from McGill University in Montreal compared data from the athletes’ psychological questionnaires with their medical charts. What they found was that a person’s level of confidence could significantly affect his or her risk of sustaining an injury.
This raises the obvious question of which way the causality runs:
Those athletes who had a low self-efficacy score on the health questionnaire were almost twice as likely to be injured as those who had scored high on that measure.
Dr. Hallé suspects that low self-efficacy lessens a person’s ability to focus. “Instead of focusing all of your attention” on the task at hand, she said, a nervous athlete will waste some of his limited attentional resources on, well, worrying, and stumble or falter during the activity, hurting himself.
What’s interesting is that the athletes who considered themselves unready for the demands of Cirque were not necessarily right. Some of those with low self-efficacy were not physiologically and technically up to the job. But others with low scores excelled.
“How do you differentiate someone who has appropriate self-efficacy because they are not actually as good as others” from those who lack confidence despite being better, asked Dr. Ian Shrier, an associate professor in the department of family medicine at McGill and lead author of the Cirque study.
The distinction matters, he continued, because interventions designed to prevent injury would almost certainly need to differ, depending on whether someone’s perceptions of his or her abilities and risks were accurate. If you’re correct that you’re not physically ready to perform a skill, then the best intervention is going to be augmented coaching and physical training. But if you have the ability but simply don’t believe that you do, intercessions should probably focus on building psychological coping skills, rather than physical technique.
Four predictive (slow/un-changing) factors of personality:
Three-to-one says IQ makes a difference too in injury rates. It does everywhere else as well.
One pattern I’ve seen in athletes is that the willingness to push themselves through pain and discomfort sets them apart at a young age, but that same willingness to suffer backfires as they mature.