ATTITUDES
ATTITUDES
Presented by Macka Jensen
INTRODUCTION
The big question: In lawn bowls, the correct attitude is not inborn, it’s a mental outlook that is developed from game experience and knowledge on how we approach and react mentally and physically to the game. Everyone thinks and reacts different to various situations and what we say and do at that particular incident in time is what others make attitude judgements. Now I emphasise the word “judgements” because everyone judges you different and it’s generally in accordance with the precepts of their own personality. The only thing they agree on is that your attitude has to change. Now the big question here is; if they are all different in judgement what the hell should we change! Now that I’ve got your attention read on.
JUDGEMENTS
Judges: In Lawn Bowls many judges of player attitudes are untrained and who at times make controversial judgement on people who, if told, respond with rage, anger, abuse that invokes heart break decisions such as members leaving the club. Despite approximately one hundred years of game behavioural in all sport research, our models, relative to the key variables in judgement are incomplete and inadequate. In particular, the impact of two widely used variables, such as judge’s attitudes and their role orientation towards its playing members, is poorly understood. While there appears to be a consensus that attitudes and roles orientation are important predictors of behaviour, no research in the bowling world has successful come forward in developing a comprehensive model capable of predicting fair and just judgement on playing behaviour. The following paragraphs depict areas that will help those who wish to begin to learn but those who have already been judged may have to make some slight attitude changes concerning themselves to assimilate and use what is being described below.
THE PROBABLITIES OF ATTITUDES
Probabilities: When it comes to the judgements and responses to attitudes there’s always an “if”. There’s always a “but”. More often than not, there’s always a “what”, sometimes expressed with shock. On their own, these words are all harmless but in combination they can be devastating. The most powerful alignment of all is probably “but what if?” A question like that is a kind of infection. You only have to make contact with “if” for a moment and it can rob you of sleep for a week. Both judgers and responders should ask themselves the above “pros and cons” until they are satisfied that they have a reasonable answer. If we don’t use these words, our attitudes will never change. If we just accept the status quo nothing ever changes. If we don’t explore options and alternatives, we won’t even recognise their existence. The “what if’s” have great merit and value even if they sometimes take us into mind boggling territory. We can’t say quite the same thoughts about the “if only”. As to responses, it’s particularly pointless raging or crying over the points of your poor attitude when you are, to all intents and purposes, in the middle of a competition. “Read on you haven’t got the answers yet”.
Judgement: If you keep looking over your shoulder for selectors, you’re going to get a crick in your neck. And what are you going to see anyhow? Selector’s looking back over their shoulders at you? The bible says “Judge not lest ye be judged”. It probably ought to add;”Because even if ye are not judged, you won’t get any satisfaction out of judging”. Judging is what people do when they don’t have enough imagination to see how other people experience life. You probably feel nobody has a right to judge your characteristics of life. But believe it or not, you have every right to feel proud of yourself that they have taken the time to point out the attitude errors within the mental capacity of your game.
THE DISTINCTION
Passage: The passage of attitudes judgement can go in two distinct ways as follows;
Negative: Where a negative attitude exists within a club environment, sides and teams or at training, bowler’s are quick to blame each other and feel a sense of injustice. With a negative attitude, you are less likely to be accountable and reliable to yourself and others.
Optimistic: Where an optimistic attitude exists with the majority you will find it enables you to take risks; innovate, communicate, have confidence and create a better environment. This means you are more productive and achieve more.
PERCEPTION
We carry our attitude around with us like a pair of rosy coloured sun glasses that tints your perception to a bowling club, side or team environment. In the extreme, there is no environment at all, just our interpretation of it. How does this relate to attitudes? Well, the fact is that your view of the club, side or team is limited by your perception of it. Your experiences, education and personality shape your attitude to everything around you. So, depending on how you perceive the club, side or team, you will interpret and react differently to situations than someone who has a different view. Your tinted sun glasses (meaning your attitude) will affect how you think, how you behave and even how you emotional feel.
ATTITUDES IN THE CLUB ENVIRONMENT
Peak performance: In the club environment a positive attitude will prepare you for reaching a peak performance in either team management or on green playing performances. The cause and effects of attitudes are developed gradually and they change through descending generations, usually to a more highly organised condition. The following subject matter is presented to make you aware of areas that relate to good and bad attitudes.
Resilience: Bouncing back from adversities is quicker and easier if you view failure as a learning experience and look for new approaches, rather than blaming yourself or others and thinking that the task is too hard or the club selection is unfair.
Optimism: Success, longevity and happiness are all by-products of optimism. With an optimistic attitude, you will see yourself as being able to influence the environment and will carry a flame of hope that enables you to take risks and accept failure.
Confidence: Confidence stems from optimism. If you are confident, you believe in your own abilities and think you have the ability to impact your environment. Your confidence remains steady during setbacks, because you see them merely as challenges, and are ready to take new risks.
Creativity: Positive attitudes are at the heart of innovation, because it takes a risk to try something different. Without confidence and hope, you would not attempt a new idea.
Conflict resolution: If you pause and think, you can probably think of dozens of examples of where differing attitudes have caused problems or conflict in your personal and professional relationships. Conflict arises because we expect everyone to have the same attitude as ourselves. But, with a positive attitude you can build your empathy and can more readily see how other bowlers think and emotionally feel.
Emotional intelligence: Once you have a good attitude, you will find your emotional intelligence moving into overdrive. This will enable you to better manage and express your emotions and understand others.
Achievement drives: The attitude of achievement (the will to get results), enables you to set challenging goals, take calculated risks and learn how to improve your performance.
Motivation: Surveys show that most bowlers’ motivation in their teams comes from stimulation and challenge, the chance to learn. Bringing an optimistic attitude to the playing field will create culture of innovation. The creativity and stimulation of ideas from your team briefings, game plans and debriefings will keep you and your fellow members motivated and keen to learn.
Focus: if you are focussed; you are committed to tasks, take responsibility for them and are able to align your goals with the club’s, side and team’s goals.
Humility: The opposite of humility is often heard after the game when certain players brag about the overwhelming skill of their game e.g. “If I had not done this and that blah, blah, we’d lost the game”. Being humble is the quality of having a modest sense of one’s own significance e.g. modest, meek; without pride, being courteously and respectful of what other players had also attributed to the game.
CAN ATTITUDES BE CHANGED
Awareness: We develop our attitudes and over time we form habits of which we usually have little awareness. Not all our habits are helpful and some can be destructive or goal defeating. But, since our attitudes are learned, they can be unlearned. A good place to do this is at debriefings without naming players or individual. This can be controlled at training sessions and within the game plan.
Knowledge: Many negative attitudes stem from ignorance. This means you can often change your attitude with the right knowledge.
Compassion: For example, if your colleague is short-tempered with you, you might have a negative attitude towards him/her, you will feel angry, you will think he/she is moody, and your behaviour towards him/her will reflect this, you might be unpleasant back to him/her or avoid contact with him/her altogether. But if you were to learn that he/she had just been diagnosed with cancer, your attitude might alter somewhat. Your attitude could be positive; you will feel compassion and your behaviour will be kind and understanding.
Beliefs: Changing an attitude starts with self-awareness and usually includes changing a belief. Over the course of our lives we develop many beliefs that are bias and cause us to look at the world in a particular way. It is not surprising that the way we think effects our behaviour. But, research has also found that behaviour can affect attitudes just as much.
Following-up: Therefore; a change in behaviour will change an attitude. Allied to training and the playing green, this means if you can get team members to behave a certain way, for example, by keeping members well informed, their attitude will change towards many issues, they will believe that following up with the information is important.
Improvement and bonding: There are two ways that your attitude can change;
1. Education: learning helps develope your attitude. For example, after learning about emotional intelligence, participants will show an average of 55% improvement in their ability to deal with negative emotions.
2. Experience: Experience shapes our attitudes. You can provide bowlers with the opportunity to think differently. For example, bowlers may have poor relationships until they are given an opportunity to bond together through team building exercises.
Note: We use theoretical and experiential learning as the basis for our training. By combining scientific research and self-analysis with activities and case studies, we are able to offer the best opportunities for bowlers to develop proactive attitudes.
Developing Attitudes: Briefings, game plans and debriefing feedback and coaching will benefit your attitude. Training programs can improve leadership, handling changes; projects team management, team building, communication and membership service.
Change: Change requires self-awareness and motivation. Some of us are resistant to change, or don’t know where to begin. Your help will overcome this obstacle by identify your strengths and weaknesses. This can be done by reliable psychometric questionnaires to create self-awareness and then work with your team to create an action or game plan.
RESILIENT ATTITUDES
Control: Having resilient attitudes is the power of optimistic thinking, resilience is like an elastic band that when stretched it retracts back to its original shape. If you are resilient, you handle problems better while others are frozen by stress; you are able to take control. You are proactive and future focussed, because negativity doesn’t overwhelm you.
Optimism: Building a resilient attitude means becoming more optimistic. Optimists are happier healthier, and live longer. During play the job satisfaction is higher, they are more creative, they handle change better and they make better leaders. That, in a nutshell, is the case for optimism.
Pessimism: On the green sometimes pessimism runs amok; anxiety and depression can take a grip. Depression is predicted to become the second biggest killer, after heart disease. After hearing this who would like to be a pessimist!
Playing culture: Low playing satisfaction and disdain for the team causes a negative playing culture. But not only is coming to play a drain, the whole team is suffering. Its effects are a serious motivational loss.
Helplessness: Pessimists are in a constant state of helplessness. They tend to think of themselves as victims, unable to control the situations around them. They blame themselves for problems. They see negative events as permanent and insoluble.
Negative events: Don’t worry, be happy: but it’s in the optimistic moments that brilliance shines through. Optimists don’t internalise negative events, but they often take credit for positive ones. They are confident and live with hope, so they are more ready to take risks and cope with failure.
Pioneers of change: Optimists see themselves as being able to influence their club side and team environment. So they are resilient, able to accept change. In fact, they are often pioneers of change. Creativity and innovation stem from optimism.
Negative thoughts: The can do attitude that comes from optimism is often self-fulfilling. Very little progress would be made if everyone sat around fuelled by negative thoughts like “I’m hopeless” or I will never be able to do this”.
SIGNS AND SYMPTOMS
Learn: Learn to recognise the signs and symptoms of poor attitudes: Listed below are some of the signs and areas of poor attitudes;
- Poor practical attitude: This is often recognised when the skipper leaving the head and being several shots down, and in passing his team members he/she hears: “You can fix it skip”!
- Poor harmony attitude: This is detected when team members begin to doubt and loudly voice their views in front of their own team member and the opposing side about the poor playing ability of their own team members such as; the lead, second, third or skip,
- Poor mental attitude: This is noticed when players go mentally ballistic by changing their character by; over yelling instructions, obsessive driving, go into silence or abusing their own team members, blame their team members for their own mistakes etc.
- Poor communication attitude: This stands out when member(s) are reluctant to partake in briefing and debriefings and commencing the game without a game plan,
- Poor training attitude: This is borne out when they regularly fail to turn up, or turn up late and have some of the most unbelievable excuses for their absents or lateness,
- Poor selector attitude: They criticise every decision the selectors make to their own or other teams that strengthen or bind them together for a winning side or team,
BUILDING A POSITIVE TRAINING CULTURE
The environment: Motivation, productivity, quality work and retention are the results of a positive training culture. Your attitude is influenced by the training workplace itself, and this usually comes down to its leadership.
Leadership: Good leadership will promote positive attitudes from club members, a negative culture will dampen the mood and results in more members calling in late, feeling unhappy and unmotivated and eventually handing in their letter of resignation.
Build: There are many ways for coaches to build a productive culture at training. You do this by looking at your current situation and finding ways to improve the training culture by changing people’s attitudes to their playing positions, their environment, to each other and themselves.
Identify: Firstly, you need to identify any deficiencies that are causing negative attitudes. These could include issues like favouritism, lack of recognition or different sets of standards for different team players.
Positive influences: Coaches and team managers who get the best from their teams inspire a positive training and playing culture. Some of the positive influences include;
- Fair and equal treatment of all bowlers,
- Achievements recognised and rewarded,
- Open management style,
- Regular feedback from briefings game plans and debriefings,
- Open and honest communication,
- Clear goals set out,
- Regular training,
- Equal opportunities for all club bowlers.
The first step: Creating a supportive training and playing culture is the first step to creating pro-active attitudes. To develop your bowlers’ attitudes further, you will need to provide them with the opportunity to assess their feelings, beliefs and behaviours. You can encourage attitudes change by using some of the articles on this site. Remember though, you cannot change other people’s attitudes; they need to change their own. But, you can provide an environment and the resources to encourage self-awareness and effective behaviours.
Compatibility: Capable of existing together in game harmony, Capable of orderly, efficient integration with other elements in a cultured system of resilience power, elasticity and vital action.
Sleepers: Training eliminates the prima donnas bowlers who utter: I told you so, I don’t care who wins, I just play for the enjoyment of the game or who expresses how well you played with their support, hold positions in the team because they are your friend or because of their popularity. Training makes them perform with the playing skill, rather then with the mouth. Debriefing will also point out what they did and what they didn’t do.
Training: being orientation towards the development in oneself or another of certain playing skills; habits and attitudes, the resulting condition, undergoing such discipline, physically fit as a result of training as follows;
- Fitness: This involves the perfection of the three types of fitness; mental, game and physical fitness as follows;
- Mental fitness involves your thoughts and feelings that affect your performance,
- Game fitness involves muscular and tendon atonement to play the various shots,
- Physical fitness is the strengthening of body muscles and expanding the respiratory system to withstand the endurance required for the time period of the game or series of games.
Cohesion: This is the results of training; it is the act or state of cohering; uniting, or sticking together the state or process by which the player’s individual playing position and playing skills are effective enough to support the tactical requirements of the game.
Mentality: The selection of any competition team is not a make do endeavour e.g. to get along with the resources available, but a selection of a team of bowlers that have, or can be indoctrinated with a do or die mentality e.g. bowlers who make a supreme training and playing effort from team’s initial composition to its conclusion irrespective of the results (its a fight to the end attitude).
THE LINK TO EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Emotions: Emotions have long been overlooked in the competitive area, with the focus on hiring and developing people based on intelligence, knowledge and technical skills. Intelligence is important to success, but now many coaches and players realise that emotions play a significant role too. After all, organisations are made up of people and relationships, not just spreadsheets, computers and flow charts.
High achievers: The emotionally intelligent bowler is more motivated, the emotionally intelligent coach or manager is a better leader, and the emotionally intelligent selector makes more progress. Emotions have been statistically linked to performance, with studies showing people who are emotionally intelligent are high achievers. Find out more in linking to other articles written on this net page to performance. By focusing on emotional intelligence in your training program, you will see improvements in communication, interpersonal interactions and initiative. The result is a team with strong leadership, where members listen to each other and handle change effectively.
SUMMARY
The Culture: The combination of the subjects above creates an alliance of competitors into an attitude culture showing determination to perform to their best ability. If the required cultured attitude is not there, then indoctrination should start right here an now; it’s the way in which bowlers should react under all tactical playing conditions or how they should fulfil the tactical purpose for which his or her appointed playing position was intended. It becomes the sum total of ways of behavioural culture built up by single’s players; sides, teams, groups, or individual player’s of which in turn is transmitted from one player or generation to another. There is something to be said about culture, which in bowls-jargon is merely character of a group. It’s what makes a bowler lift his or her game performance when the tactical deployment goes against the run of play or at the time the poor ability of their own players becomes apparent. It all amounts to playing the required shot, such as; the draw-shot, on-shot, running-shot or drive-shots that involve the tactical skills of attack, defence and recovery. Tactically it’s filling the gap, removing the danger, backing up the team’s break-down. It goes against the screaming in the team’s mind for somebody else to fix the problem, when all inside their head tells them they’re going down the drain. Yet, if the resilience is there, they find a way because they don’t want to let their team members down. An attitude culture within lawn bowls is about making it easier for your own team member who follows you, even if it means it will be tougher mentally and physically for yourself. In reality many bowlers experience this dilemma e.g. stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea, perhaps these utterances will remind you; “Oops sorry!” “Its up to you skip!” “You can fix it!” Believe it or not, bowlers who use such utterances need to be indoctrinated or reindoctrinated into the correct playing culture.
The lesson conveyed throughout this précis is to indoctrinate your judgement and attitudes towards the tactical employment of your team game,
not for individualism.
