Sport and the fear of making mistakes: a lesson for coaches and parents

We are not born with a fear of making mistakes, and observing a baby in the first few months of life makes this abundantly clear. While attempting to walk, the infant will fall dozens of times; while forming initial sentences, the child will make countless mistakes, often comical ones. Yet no child, after failing, would decide of their own accord that walking and talking are not for them: failures are not in themselves so frightening as to inhibit the will to try. The fear of making mistakes, therefore, is learnt rather than innate. To understand how this happens, I believe it is useful to analyse one of the most controversial studies in psychology.

In 1920, the psychologist John B. Watson conducted an experiment with a nine-month-old baby named Albert. Initially, little Albert remained calm at the sight of a white mouse (a stimulus which, for a very young child, is entirely harmless). After a while, however, Watson began to associate the appearance of the mouse in Albert’s field of vision with a loud noise, by banging a metal bar behind him. Before long, Albert began to cry hysterically at the mere sight of the mouse, even after Watson had stopped making the frightening noise in its presence: the initially harmless stimulus had been ‘conditioned’ to be terrifying. Albert had learnt to fear white mice.

Applying this mechanism to the world of sport, the dynamic is identical: the technical error is the little white mouse (a piece of information that is in itself neutral, such as ‘you didn’t lift your knee quite enough’ or ‘you struck the ball too much with the toe of your boot’), but the external environment, by associating it with ‘frightening noises’, can turn it into something to be feared. Often, without realizing it, it is the coaches and parents themselves who do this.

When there is a negative reaction to a mistake, the athlete associates the unpleasant consequences of the ‘punishment’ with the mistake itself, and begins to perceive it as a threat. The result? The athlete stops trying and falls back on ‘playing it safe’, thereby losing the desire to push their limits: the game is no longer worth the candle. To prevent this outcome—or to restore the athlete’s right to make mistakes—it is necessary to ‘desensitise’ them, that is, to reframe the mistake as what it originally was: useful feedback for growth. To achieve this, there are practices to avoid and practices to favour, both for coaches and for parents.

Practices to avoid are those that associate mistakes with negative consequences for the individual, such as punitive silence (ignoring the athlete or your child after a mistake: this conveys that esteem and attention are not directed at the person but only at their results); humiliation (all too often I have heard people at the swimming pool say to girls aged 10–15, ‘Are you daft?’ after a mistake); using physical exertion as punishment (this links the mistake to physical pain and the exertion of training to the unpleasantness of the punishment); or post-event interrogations (these turn the journey home into a stifling inquisition of the individual).

The approaches we should adopt, however, if we truly wish to be of help to those around us, are those that reframe failure in a healthy light. For coaches, this means separating results from identity (saying ‘you’re focusing too much here and not enough there’ is different from saying ‘you’re always distracted’); acknowledging the athlete’s efforts that led to the failure (‘I saw that you tried: well done. Next time, let’s try it this other way’); and working together to find solutions (analysing the video of the technical movement and deciding together what to do differently). For parents, on the other hand, this means always being a safe haven, no matter what. A parent’s appreciation must, in fact, be unconditional, and the best way to support your child who plays sport is to take an interest in their activities without intruding. After a competition, therefore, simply saying ‘I really enjoyed watching you compete’ is often the most appropriate choice.

Because, in the end, what Michael Jordan said is true: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career: and that’s why I’ve been successful”.