Floorball – Four steps building up stress or arousal

Connected to personality you can also talk about stress or arousal, how you are, perceive and react on things, will affect the level of stress or arousal.

Stress can be described as a process with four steps that will lead to a particular end.
Step 1 – Environmental demand, competition, new skill etc. (physical and psychological)
Step 2 – Individuals perception of the environmental demands. The perception of the demands will vary between your atheletes (Amount of psychological or physical “threat” perceived)
Step 3 – Response, if your player feel an imbalance between demands and capability, this will create arousal, anxiety, muscle tension, attention changes
Step 4 – Behavior (performance or outcome)

Floorball practices for 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 years old players

Stress occurs when there is a perceived imbalance between physical and psychological demands and the individuals capability to meet the perceived demands. Too high levels of stress will affect your floorball players performance, but there are also research done, showing an increased risk for injuries.

The more important the floorball event/match is, the more stress provoking it will be. Mental training and feedback can be used on each step (1-4) to adjust the level of stress and to help your player to perform at his/her best. Some players need help to lower the “stress level” (step 1-4), when others might need the opposite, meaning they need to be “stressed” up a little bit to perform at their best (step 1-4).

Floorball – What makes up personality?

personality, psycholgical core, dynamic, consistent, role related behavior

Psychological core – The deepest component in making up our personality includes our values, attitudes, interests and motives. This is “the real you”, this part also include our beliefs about our selves and self confidence.

Typical Responses – The ways we adjust to the environment, or how we most likely will respond in different situations, happy, shy, open, want to be in the center of attention etc. Sometimes people can be wrongly judged on their typical responses, if you only see a person once or the first time in a team and that person is “shy”, he/she is easily put in to the “shy” box, but it might just be the current situation that created the typical response, it’s not the way this person usually acts.

Role related behavior – This behavior is the most changeable aspect of our personality. Different situations require different roles, during the day you might switch between some of these roles, football coach, dad/mum, husband/wife, employee, friend etc.

Knowing your floorball players will help you in your coach role and in coaching the team and the individuals. You know the basics how your players are and probably will act in certain situations. Knowing your players well, will also help you to understand their “driving force”. Motives may though change over time, so you need to continue to follow up and understand why your players are there, to be able to motivate them in a right way.

Close realtionships

There is a statement that goes, the deeper your relationships, the stronger your leadership. True? I don’t have the right answer, but if you look at José Mourinho it can be true.

Materazzi might not be a “Firts Teamer”, but this video shows how valued he was for Mourinho and the team, even on the bench.

If you study José Mourinhos leadership and relation to the players, it’s sometimes described as father – son relation, or that he is the big brother the players are looking up to. If you have that kind of a close relation, he probably knows his players quite good. Of course you can know your players well without having a father – son relation, and it will work well!

“Compared to Rafa Benitez, Mourinho had more close relation to the players and was more open and humoristic” /Javier Zanetti