Sports Psychology | cheerleadingscience

Wheel of Excellence

Commitment: As an athlete I know that I must remain committed to everything that I do. I know that I must go to every practice or it will affect me as an individual as well as the rest of my team. I must go in for extra tumbling lessons to continue to work on my skills and gain new ones as well. If I cannot make it to the gym everyday I know that I must work out on my own at home or another facility. Whenever I have the chance to I must go into the gym by myself or with teammates to work on individual skills or team skills. I know that in order for my entire team to achieve great things each member on the team must be willing to sacrifice their time and must commit to everything they do. Therefore, I must remain committed for my own excellence as well as my team's success. I know that working on my skills whenever I can, will ensure that I will be the best that I can be, which will lead to success.

Belief/ Self-Commitment: I know that my coaches believe in the skills I am able to perform because otherwise they would not put them into a routine. From the belief of my coaches and other teammates I am able to gain more confidence in myself. I am positive that I am able to perform my skills properly because I know that I have practiced them many times before and have put in extra time to learn the proper technique for all of the skills. I can believe in myself throughout competitions because I know that I am even able to perform these complex skills even when I am tired.

Full Focus: I remained focused on my skills because I know that in order to be successful and safe I need to remain concentrated. I know that the outcome of how the entire team will do at a competition depends on each and every one of the girls on the team; therefore, I must remain focused in order for the entire team to be able to succeed. I do not need to do my skills solely for myself but also for my other teammates.

Positive Images: I keep positive images of success in my mind throughout each practice and competition. I know that the hard work we go through is not pointless, but it is for our own success. I remain positive by reminding myself of the successful things we have been able to achieve throughout the seasons.

Mental Readiness: I know that I must keep an open mind when learning new skills. This also means that once I have been taught a new skill I must go into the gym with my stunt group or as an individual in order to properly learn the skill. I know that I have planned for success every week because I remain dedicated to the goals I set throughout the week of what I wish to accomplish. I know that going into each "next practice" I have prepared myself as much as I possibly could have because I take each day I have "off" as an opportunity to improve something. Before each competition I enter my "mental readiness zone" and envision the routine going perfectly. While in this mental readiness zone I brace myself to overcome any fears I may have going into the competition. I take this moment to concentrate on my breathing and on clearing my mind. In this moment I before I compete I distract myself from thinking about things that may go wrong, or the audience and bright lights, and only picture success.

Distraction Control: I am able to keep myself from getting distracted because of my belief in my other teammates. I know that they believe in me as well therefore we cannot give up and must always remain committed to everything we do. During a performance if something does not go right I do not let it bother me, I get back up, take a deep breath, and continue. I know that when I remain positive I can perform consistently. Therefore I cannot give myself negative talk going into or during competitions. I know that I must stick with my workout and eating plans, so if that means skip a "night out" with my friends I must decide that it is the right choice. As much as cheerleading is a broad sport and you must succeed as a team I still try to compete my best every single time. I try to improve the little aspect of myself within the routine at every competition. I know that I cannot control how other people perform throughout the routine, only myself. Therefore for each competition I set an attainable goal in order to remain successful.

Constructive Evaluation: Once the competition is over, before looking at how our routine turned out, I highlight in my head what we were able to do successfully. After watching the routine I try to pinpoint the little mistakes that could easily be fixed, then I go into further detail on what needs a lot of work. This fine-tuning helps me set my future goals for the next competition. I reevaluate not only the routine but any point in which my plan may have failed or if I had forgotten to do something. In this time I am able to completely overview what needs to be improved and what has been done well. After I have evaluated this I try to see what lesson I may have learned from the competition and to see how I can use this as an aid in the future.

Good things within my wheel of excellence:

I have a set goal
I rarely left things distract me from my intensions
I am able to keep myself motivated when knowing that other's success is based off of mine as well
I am able to take a lesson from both good and bad things that happen at competitions

Weak Areas within my wheel of excellence:

Sometimes I do get distracted from my goals
When things go wrong sometimes it is very difficult to try to pick myself up from these mistakes
I cannot let failure remain a constant thought in my head, I must remember good things that have happened as well

Self Talk

Throughout competitions or routines I remind myself that I have done these skills many times before. I know that even when I am tired I have been able to perform these skills before. I remind myself of everything that all the girls on my team have done for me and I know I must put my complete effort into my skills. I do whatever it takes to make sure I have a positive mind going into competitions or practices. I know that my coaches trust me with the skills I have learned and trust that I can complete these skills safely. At competitions if we do not do well I continue to positively use self-talk. I remind myself that it was just a competition and use this as an inspiration to try even harder for the next time.

Imagery

Before I compete I visualize the routine, I do a play by play of each section of the routine being performed as best as possible. The night before the competition I lay down and listen to the music of the routine and imagine the same skills we have practiced many times being performed perfectly. I visualize how they have been performed perfect at practice and imagine this is the actual competition. I break down the routine into its sections (opening, standing tumbling, stunts,jumps, running tumbling, pyramid, and dance) and based on how I would feel while normally doing routines I would imagine myself pushing through and what positive words I would be giving myself to keep going.

Success Cycle/ Failure Cycle

In cheerleading the success and failure cycle is very prevalent within every routine, practice and competition. At competitions if we are able to perform the current skills we have then they will make the routine harder, therefore making the routine worth more. This is a way for use to remain in the success cycle because as the routine gets harder skills we still practice them a lot, therefore with all the practice we are able to perform the higher skills successfully and have more points on the score sheets. Therefore increasing the difficulty in the routine helps keep us in the success cycle. In some cases increasing the difficulty could also lead us into the failure cycle. This is because with harder skills in the routine, the overall routine will be harder therefore we might not be able to perform everything to our best and we may get a poor mark. Furthermore, after a competition if we do poorly because the skills are too hard, the coaches realize this and bring back easier skills. This brings us back into the success cycle until we are fully able to move on. Personally I have deal with the success cycle and failure cycle when I was coming back from my concussion. I had to work very hard to get back the skills I had before and I failed many times when trying them again. Therefore once I realized I could not jump back into the old routine I had to gradually get back into everything. I started with light tumbling the progressively got my skills back. Once my tumbling was back I began to stunt. This way of breaking down how I was coming back brought me out of the failure cycle and back into the success cycle.