Laoshi’s Corner: Mindset, Environments, and Coaching - by Mads Rud
Martial arts blend the domains of everyday life and sport. This allows us to practice skills that we want to exhibit more broadly in our lives. Mindset is one of these. It holds power over everything we do, and it’s especially apparent in situations where we push our limits and try new things. Understanding our mindset gives us the ability to better shape it. Today we’ll be examining some ways of categorizing mindset, environments that effect it, and a teacher’s role in supporting student mindset.
“Goal orientations” are a way to talk about mindset. They are our attitudes, methods, and beliefs about achievement. Sports psychology recognizes two main alignments; task-oriented and ego-oriented. Task-orientation tends to measure achievement through mastery of a skill or situation and often uses self-reference to measure performance. Ego-orientation tends to use comparisons of self to other to measure achievement and competence. Someone can be high one, both, or neither orientation. Typically, task-orientation correlates with more positive outcomes, while ego-orientation is related to more harmful, long-term behaviors. (Interestingly, the most beneficial orientation is thought to be a combination of both high task- and high ego-orientation!)
While these mindsets are relatively stable from person to person, they can be influenced. One strong factor is environment. Sports psychology uses similar terms to examine what types of social environments are common in athletics, calling them “climates.” While orientations refer to the individual mindset, climates refer to how success and competence are viewed in a group space. They are again broken into task (or mastery) climates, and ego (or performance) climates. Mastery climates support effort, learning, and perseverance. Performance climates are characterized by public comparison, a few “star” performers, and authority and low participant authority. Perhaps unsurprisingly, mastery climates tend to promote better enjoyment, dedication, mental toughness, and improved learning compared to ego climates.
Teachers have the ability to promote a particular climate in their schools and can help guide their students to more beneficial mindsets. Thankfully, you don’t need a degree in sports psychology to help build an environment that benefits your students. Mastery climates are characterized by a few common factors: promoting learning, rewarding effort, supporting student autonomy, and building interpersonal coaching relationships. In avoiding an ego climate, a teacher will want to avoid thwarting their students’ needs, removing autonomy, and supporting ego-based assessments of performance.
Again, it’s important to remember that both ego and mastery climates and orientations can exist at the same time, and presence of one does not mean the absence of the other. Promoting mastery climates is not a zero sum game, and any effort is beneficial for both you and your students. See if you can determine what climates and orientations exist in your school now, and what might support the development of mastery traits moving forward.
A great portion of this knowledge comes from the source below. If you’re interested in reading more about this topic, please check out the paper! The entire textbook is open source and contains a wealth of information.
Kingston, K., Wixey, D., & Cropley, B.(2021). Motivation in coaching: Promoting adaptive psychological outcomes. In Z. Zenko & L. Jones (Eds.), Essentials of exercise and sport psychology: An open access textbook(pp. 479–508). Society for Transparency, Openness, and Replication in Kinesiology. https://doi.org/10.51224/B1021