Gain a Deeper Understanding of What Makes Your Athletes Tick
Explore Two New Additions to the Connect App - Sport MPS-2 and AIMS Assessment
What is the Sport MPS-2?
Sport Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale-2 which measures an athlete’s tendency toward perfectionism highlighting several categories:
Concern over mistakes
Doubts about actions
Organization
Perceived parental pressure
Perceived coach pressure
Personal Standards
What is the AIMS?
The AIMS (Athletic Identity Measurement Scale) Assessment shows how closely tied your athlete’s identity is to their sport. This assessment can be helpful alongside the Sport MPS-2 to give insight into the type of support your athletes may benefit from to maximize performance.
How Do These Assessments Work Within Connect?
These assessments will be available to your athletes as a “Form” within the app. A table with sub-scores and overall scores will be located on a report within their account and a larger team-scale table within the coach reports.
What Can I Do to Support My Athletes Based on the Results?
These assessments can help you to identify what motivates and drives your athletes to perform. The results are put into three different buckets:
Adaptive Perfectionists - An adaptive perfectionist aims for high standards while remaining flexible and constructive. This mindset allows them to maintain a healthy balance between striving for excellence and embracing the inevitable imperfections of any athletic endeavor.
Maladaptive Perfectionists - Individuals who set excessively high standards for themselves and others, often leading to negative consequences rather than positive outcomes. Maladaptive perfectionists often struggle with feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and fear of failure. Their self-worth is often tied to their athletic performance, leading to a cycle of stress and dissatisfaction.
Nonperfectionists - A nonperfectionist is someone who does not strive for or insist on achieving perfection in every aspect of their life or sport.
Finding out which category best fits each athlete is a great starting point. Recognizing that athletes will benefit from a different coaching approach depending on their category will maximize the performance they will produce. For example: What are some of the things you can do to help athletes that struggle with perfectionism? Shift your focus from perfection to progress. Work on setting short and long-term goals with each athlete to encourage them to focus on the process and celebrate the small wins of learning skills along the way. Reframe mistakes. If you can show athletes that mistakes are valuable opportunities for growth and skill acquisition you can take some of the guilt and blame out of them. Discuss the pressures of training and performance with your athletes. Find out where they are feeling the most stressed and get to the root of what is bringing out that response. Set expectations. Talk about the importance of effort, perseverance, and resilience. Let them know that you expect them to put in the effort to execute, but not necessarily be perfect in their execution at all times
*Some definitions based on information from the PN Nutrition Coaching for Athletes Certification Course
