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Sports situations in which athletes have an opportunity to display physical competence (i.e., in training or matches) activate their task or ego involved goals. They might be either highly task involved or ego involved in that situation, or they might even switch between the two, because their perception of what they need to feel could change from moment to moment.

For example, imagine yourself as a young football player in a knockout match. You’ve felt great during the game because you’ve worked hard, made some great tackles and accurate passes, and your work on your concentration skills has paid off by allowing you to refocus quickly. You’ve spent most of the game in a highly task-involved state of mind and have received praise from your teammates.

The game is tied and goes to a penalty shoot-out. You are the last player of five selected, and the score is 4-4. As you make that long walk to the penalty position, how does the situation and its potential consequences affect your view of success and competence? Will your feelings of competence depend entirely on scoring or missing? And, if you do become ego involved, how might it affect your chances of getting that winning goal?

All athletes have an innate preference for task or ego involved goals in sport. These predispositions, referred to as task and ego goal orientations, are believed to develop throughout childhood largely due to the types of people the athletes come in contact with and the situations they are placed in.

If children consistently receive parental praise that’s reliant on their degree of input and recognition for personal improvement from their coaches, and are encouraged to learn from their errors, then they are likely to foster a task orientation. It becomes natural for them to believe that success is associated with mastery, effort, understanding, and personal responsibility.

The behavior of their role models in sport also affects this development. Such an environment is far different from one where kids are shaped by rewards for winning (alone), praise for the best marks, criticism or non-selection despite making their best effort, or coaches whose style is to hand out unequal recognition. This kind of environment helps an ego orientation to develop, along with the belief that ability and talent, not effort and personal endeavor, earn rewards.

Goal orientations are believed to be reasonably stable and enduring characteristics that are largely formed by mid to late adolescence. Hence, coaches and parents should attempt to shape a child’s development as early as possible during the 6- to 14-year-old phase.

In this developmental period, children’s cognitive abilities start working overtime as they begin to understand that effort isn’t the sole reason for success at a sport. At about 11 or 12 years of age, they begin to realise that regardless of effort, some children simply have more talent than others. That’s when the fantasy of being the next super-star comes under obvious pressure for some children.

The strength of a goal orientation influences whether an athlete will adopt a task or ego involved goal in a specific sport situation. It is also perfectly feasible for growing athletes to develop both high task and ego orientations if they have been exposed to an assortment of task and ego oriented situations and people. However, never underestimate the power of a particular situation.

The adolescent athlete might be quite high in task orientation, but in a competition with a high degree of public evaluation, judgment, criticism, or comparison based on who’s best, with rewards and benefits for winners and negative consequences for losers, he or she may become ego involved. Competitions accompanied by high perceived expectations and consequences arguably form the natural basis of sport.

Factors such as the stage of the event (e.g., final or qualifying match), whether selection is at stake, previous head-to-heads, financial rewards, age of the opponent (e.g., playing a talented younger player), representing the team or country for the first time, and the hostility of the audience can make a match a natural ego-involving laboratory.

Nevertheless, not all sport is like that; in fact, some sport situations offset the natural importance of superiority by emphasising participation and publicly reinforcing or rewarding personal effort, improvement, and problem solving rather than focusing on comparisons.

An example is a swimming club that encourages all standards of swimmer, with a coach who gives recognition solely based on individual improvements in time or technique. These situations increase the importance and number of task-involving cues. The key message here is that the availability of task-involving cues in sports that are naturally ego involving allows the athlete to develop a more task-involved approach to competition.

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