Competition in sport

The word competence derived from the Latin “competere” means “to search together and has several meanings according to the context in which it is used. You can compete with yourself, surpassing your own marks, or those of other athletes, you can compete individually or in groups, aggressively or naturally, suddenly or progressively. Whether in one case or another, there is an innate drive to excel in competition.

Recognition in competition may well be individual as in the case of self-recognition or in a group and will depend, among other factors, on the nature of the specific sport. As long as the competition is driven by high moral values, it benefits not only the individual or group but the institution to which it belongs and the Sport itself. In this Psychology-Online article, we will talk about competition in sports.

Index

1. Early
2. The pleasure of succeeding
3. The perfection
4. Competence and self-esteem
5. Competitive personality
6. Since kids
7. Why do we compete?
8. Observing the competition
9. Chaos or cosmos?

The impulse to excel is intimately linked to survival and to the dominance tendencies that man possesses. This impulse occurs very early in our life and can be seen clearly in children's games. In these, the child actively repeats what he has previously experienced passively. Play also serves as a behavior that shapes, limits, and recreates the child's fantasy.

Deep will be the relationship that can be established between the game and the sport since both have similar aspects with the common denominator of pleasure as the primary affect.

In these games it will be possible to find factors that make competition, a clear example being the exercise of linked roles authority, where the child learns to deal with codes where the leader exists, the one who depends on the improvement, the one who compete. In these games we find the imaginary satisfaction of vital needs implicit, giving meaning to the entire personal structure, both physical and psychosocial. These vital needs will last a lifetime and can be met "later" by professions, sports and other channeling activities.

In all these it is also possible the sublimation of constitutional and natural human aggressiveness, with the consequent secondary benefit.

Adequate child competence favors the evolution to different, later and more structured stages that increase and facilitate the child's physical emotional maturity.
Hence the importance of the "game-sport" at an early age. The child (and the adult) by going self-surpassing in his goals and marks, already acquiring a deep notion of the improvement of his own personal resources.

Although when a sport is beaten against an opponent, there is the consequent quota of pleasure, everything indicates that it is self-improvement that operates with greater intensity in the psychic principle that regulates pleasure human. Imagine the indescribable pleasure of reaching the top of a mountain that had to be conquered.
This level of self-competence allows man to progressively discover the enormous wealth of skills that possesses and that due to lack of learning are asleep in their interior, but, you are willing to offer themselves in favor of evolution personal.

The "best" is a substantial cultural value that acts as a discrete stimulus. in every man who longs for a dignified and pleasant life. This is why the athlete tries to swim "more" and "faster", jump "higher", score "more" goals.

This "more" is a constant linked to "more" pleasure. It is this "more" that produces the greatest vital fulfillment.
Any physical activity without pleasure is not recreational, so the chances of obtaining a consequent victory are becoming increasingly remote.

As in human life certain and certain resistances must be continually overcomeA sporting triumph with its corresponding quota of pleasure gives meaning to the "sacrifices" of training. Sacrifices that by themselves have a therapeutic value linked to the very structure of sport.

Although the other side of the triumph would be the defeat, this in the case of not being repeated or constant is an important source of knowledge and therefore highly usable for regulating self-esteem and neutralizing omnipotent “I can do it” fantasies linked to narcissistic disorders of the personality.

Deep down, every human triumph will always support the idea that life can over death. Although each one of us has the same destiny, life is prolonged in a continuous going forward.

Perfection does not exist but as human idea. Moreover, it is a fundamental part of the imaginary structure towards which we tend through the path of self-improvement and which forms an idealization of "the best". Hence, perfection holds within it a "plus ultra", a plus that calls us to obtain it.
The path that we travel positively will be the progress of that project that in sport is marked by the goals to be obtained and the corresponding performance.

Perfection thus understood it is an engine that drives us to compete with us or with the others. But well, when we have achieved our own level of performance, there may be a temporary need for rest. Which if it is too long can make us lose the improvement stimulus. Traditionally this situation is manifested in the popular saying "sit on your laurels". This will be a form of defeat with multiple and negative consequences. "Sitting on your laurels" will be the "perfect form of defeat."

Although there are perfect sports, although some may seem like that, since no single sport has the possibility of contain all physical skills simultaneously, unless several are integrated as in the figure of the "Tetrathlon"; Sport shows how perfectible that human machine called the body is, which in each of its processes "repeats" the organization of the Universe as we have come to know it today.

Numerous theoretical studies and empirical observations have concluded that, the level of self-esteem increases favored by overcoming one's own performance.

Also, like other activities, the man in sports can show that he is subject to rules and laws that are characteristic of the physical, the psychological and the social. Having a shaped, strong, active, attractive body is an ideal common to both men and women. This aspect is increased by cultural values ​​and fashion, the latter being a kind of tyranny that must be obeyed to be able to act within certain and determined nuclei.

If one has this type of body imposed by society, he feels accepted and integrated into it. In the case in which the person does not correspond with the prevailing patterns in that culture and if he is very aware of the recognition of others, it is possible that feelings of exclusion, marginalization or inferiority. It is coincidentally this last feeling that gives rise to a deficient personal structure.
According to the help that is given to that person, positive modifications will be obtained. This type of help can either come from therapeutic treatments such as from the same field of sports activity or from an integrated combination of both.

This type of people tend to criticize themselves as well as to censor others, they have a low threshold of resistance to frustrations or failures, they isolate themselves and react in an exaggerated way to any indication that is made to them, they are not very competitive, in general they reject group integration, and being next to them forces us to protect them.

Generally people who have feelings or complex of being inferior, they compete but from a negative angle. They exclude themselves and by not integrating in fact and even without consciously wishing to do so, they sabotage both the team to which they belong and the same activity. Depending on the structure of the group, they can become a kind of burden that team members bear for a while, but will ultimately expel from it.

Those types of people with inferiority conflicts who practice some sport can, nevertheless, channel into it the aggressiveness that this complex always produces as self-harm or aggression directed towards others. Sport thus serves, among its other benefits, as an escape valve to the physical-psychic pressure that, even naturally, we accumulate in daily life.

Aggression is not necessarily harmful since it in a coordinated way serves for personal defense and is a positive substrate for activities that require a certain amount of aggression. But when the aggression is not derived correctly it produces deep deteriorations in the personal structure.

In those with an accentuated decreased self-esteem, in addition to the necessary specifically therapeutic help, the practice of an accessible sport will provide you with a certain self-recognition or recognition by others that would favor the acquisition of the well-being necessary for each being human. The sport itself, can make a person achieve prestige, value it, accept it and recognize it.

With rare exceptions, deep psychological deviations are known to a true athlete, but in the face of certain situations that exceed its structure can generate conflicts that alter normal growth professional.

For any reasonable reason The therapeutic role of sports activity has always been praised.
In all those cases that the coach has perceived an inferiority conflict in the athlete that has decreased his self-esteem and negatively increased his competitive aspects, it will not only be able to help you by referring you to the specialized professional but it would be convenient to set possible goals, real and likely to be achieved in order not to introduce into the life of that athlete, other levels that increase his anguish by not being able to obtain the expected success in accordance with the proposed objectives.

In this aspect, the coach-athlete relationship must be subtle and delicate and as the athlete wins certain inhibitions, it will be possible to increase your level of aspirations in order to achieve a better performance. This gradual progression improves sports performance and ensures a better quality of personal life.

In personalities with an inferiority complex the following processes can be found:
In personalities with an inferiority complex, the following points can be found that make up a progressive development within a process of unconscious nature:

• origin of the conflict
• structuring and permanence of the same
• emergence of the complex in the face of certain situations that can be assimilated to the one that originated it
• structural defenses against the complex
• frustration at the inability to access what is desired
• aggression as affect derived from frustration
• deposit of the aggression on the same person
• projection of aggression on others always finding a "scapegoat"

And what happens when the team or the athlete loses? The same public (by mass identification) can feel like a loser and turn anger on the coach (a scapegoat always at hand) or on the team.
This public, too, by means of the sometimes more extravagant rationalizations, defends itself against defeat. The thing is, don't feel like a loser, don't feel inferior.

Throughout the history of sports, glorifying the winner and rejecting, punishing the losing is commonplace.
These data allow us to infer that although reason and rational sports exist, emotion is the one that plays a role as primordial as it is fundamental.

When we speak of competitive personality we should define what is the concept of personality to which we will refer. We understand personality as that singular of man that emerges from his individuality in direct relationship with the environment with which he actively interacts.

Man has always been involved with other peers, he makes him innately a social being. Many are the attempts to cover with a single term the multiplicity of factors that make up the personality criterion. Among them we find a historical differentiation between temperament and character. The first will be for the fixed, bodily, inherited, while the second is reserved for the exclusively psychological.

In turn, the temperament is subdivided into four large groups: the sanguine (affective, happy, excited), the choleric (irascible, of "few fleas"), the phlegmatic (apathetic, not very communicative, calm, isolated) and melancholic (depressive, depressed), personal forms that can be temporarily modified by his "state of cheer up".

We might think that, if sport, as we have pointed out previously, is a promoter of pleasure, the best athletes could be found among those of blood, but we cannot stop warning that not all sports have the same characteristics and that there are sports that due to their structure can be practiced by people who must necessarily be "Sanguine".

What's more each person has a different experience of pleasure, a different way of living what is pleasant. On the other hand, there are sports, rational ones for example, in which pleasure is related to "intellectual movement" and not inevitably to body movement.

Age, socio-economic level, culture, the possibility of leisure time, are also co-determining factors in the choice and practice of sports. There are certain sports whose share of pleasure is in the social that can be found in them, or are those sports that are used as a form of negotiation both economically and professional.

Nor can it be so lightly said that if the person is extroverted he will be more competitive since there are sports in which the introversion necessary for attention and concentration, golf for example, is a predominant factor in making the activity successful. These two personality types, the extrovert and the introvert, are presented in a pure form and there is the possibility that they vary and or are complemented.

In any case, according to the personality structure, some sports will be chosen and not others. the level of competitiveness will be determined by intimate aspects of this structure and the external factors that stimulate it positively.

From the earliest childhood these types of temperaments and characters are modeled, highly determined by the family nucleus and the first institutions (school, church) to which the child accesses. But also in the club, the sport will operate as a modifier, container and channel of children's temperament and character.

Children al compete from both games and sports adapted to their possibilities, they gradually develop physical and psychological skills with which they could later be handled with greater ease and success in adult life. In this regard, studies that confirm or not the present hypothesis would be lacking. But today no one denies the fundamental importance of sport as recreation and as a trainer of positive behaviors. The fact that the child prefers individual or group games would allow us to suppose that he would devote himself a posteriori to the practice of sports with similar characteristics, although this is a hypothesis that deserves to be corroborated. In fact, favoring group sports and games in children could affect the process of socialization and democratization.

All those people who perform group sports activities learn to manage their competitive abilities more skillfully. At the same time, a team will not take into account religious, social, racial, economic differences. When the team competes, these differences tend to be neutralized in pursuit of the common goal, the success of the group.

Tolerance, understanding, esprit de corps found in sports teams, they modify the individual structure of each player, allowing him to channel the negative aspects of him within a comprehensive and inclusive competitive framework.

Always a team will be more attractive to the great masses. In sports in which more than one person acts, it is easier to identify and be one of those who play. In these teams the child will not only learn rules that regulate his individual personality but also integrate him into a group that he can obtain more easily. the recognition of the public, among whom will be found the father and relatives as well as teachers and friends, which consequently increases their self-esteem.

If the sporting activity favors the development of the child by direct consequence it will favor the same family structure and when the sport practiced by the entire community will be the most significant then. family. The generation gap will be attenuated and the integration factor will be much more hierarchical than the age factor.

Competing is a verb that is associated with many others, about living, playing, feeling pleasure, obtaining power, recognizing, recognizing oneself, unloading aggressiveness, channeling personal deficits, growing, etc. But, it will depend on the positive way or not in which we compete that the competition will benefit our lives. Since competition is a comprehensive activity, the entire personal system is at stake. Not only the "muscles" and "organs" benefit, but the psychology of the competing man also perceives it, because competition is also overcoming, courage, dream, fantasy.

There are so many verbs that accompany competing that we could risk saying that life itself is competition, but a competition with values, rules, traditions and models of conduct that make the human being develop a deep sense of dignity and balance.

During the time of the competition there is an accentuated tension that in people could be experienced as a nuisance or as an incentive.

This momentary loss of balance referred to above will force us to try to recover it, for which reason this tension would serve as support and meaning.

It will be in that category of games called "agon" where, according to Roger Caillois (1969), the dispute, the struggle, the competition, the desire to win and the recognition of victory would be found. Of course there will be sports in which competition is less or almost non-existent, but even when invisible, man competes against those "strange forces" such as wind, speed, the height, the vertigo, the ones that even being "unreal opponents", behave with all the fierceness of their powers. This author writes other types of games such as "alea", games of chance, where destiny, chance, is the opponent. Another category is that of mimicry, disguise, drama, imitation and finally the so-called "Ilinx" (from the Greek: whirlpool), within which are skiing, skating and sports velocity.

In all these sports, man is tested over and over again. His desire will be to win or win, serving the victory to self-evaluate his physical conditions, the learning made, his level of effort and the "performance" obtained.

When human nature is deeply studied, it will be observed that it exists in all men, in some more in others less, a constant need to know, to understand what is presented differently, risky and therefore attractive. That "something" will propose a challenge, the one that will generate creative responses in both variety and content. It is here where we will find that, faced with the same sport, different styles emerge which are in accordance with their personalities, abilities, training carried out and exogenous possibilities. Anyway, whether alone or in a team, with or without experience, rigorous or loose, tall or short, white or black, man competes with himself because the impulse to live is innate in him.

Maturation levels in the achievement of certain goals, they are not always objectively measurable, although they are subjectively evaluable. There are many times, progress that stops like someone who has reached a milestone and rest can stop access to a higher level, especially when an athlete has achieved a level of "performance" with a stabilized style of play and changes it for another in order to increase his field of action or simply creativity.

These changes can decrease the performance of athletes, until the corresponding representations are established in them both physically, intellectually and experientially. Success will ensue immediately if the previous stage has been integrated into the new model. The security thus obtained will be an objectively observable factor since its characteristic stamp will be imposed. The public will be able to say, this athlete is competent because even changing his style he is still “good”. This would be a clear model of self-competition. Here the level of aspiration of the athlete has been played within a disciplined field and in accordance with the previous accumulated experiences of the athlete. It is he who, with the help of his coach, will be able to place higher and higher levels to obtain a greater and better development of his own possibilities.

This level of aspiration may well be his own or his coach, but it may well be stimulated by his teammates by the rewards offered both in professional development and monetary, or by the philosophy of the institution to which belongs. Anyway, his level of aspiration will be deeply linked to idealization you have of your staff and the future you want to access. In all these aspects the deep motivation that the human being possesses to overcome everything that forms an obstacle to his evolution is at stake.

We have previously mentioned that the athlete it will regulate its activity within a disciplined field. It is worth adding to this situation the undeniable fact that all men yearn for an order in the face of certain chaotic situations with which reality is presented. This ordering not only constitutes a form of delicate balance between man and observable nature in the object of all intellectual doctrines but in the same structure of sport.

The sport orders, establishes functional hierarchies, channels behaviors, forms characters, it is therapeutic. In all these places the structure of the person in its many aspects is played out in its many aspects. Among them his morals, his honesty, his honesty. These values ​​and the need to succeed within a level of competence appropriate to the activity and its general possibilities, are manifested within a field of discipline.

This discipline is what it is understood as a resource that will serve as an orientation and guide in the learning process of all sports activities. Each person will understand the discipline according to his experience and desire for projection. It is this that will allow him not only to regulate his own behavior but also his adaptation to group behavior.

It is undeniable that a successful sport with a high level of performance will require precise and clear rules to regulate its activity. The athlete will be able to have greater security if he is guided by a coach who in turn is a disciplined person and shows it with his example. This aspect is much more noticeable in cases in which children or young people are treated, which necessarily require another model or pattern with the to be identified, beyond the family area, where generically the one who will propose models of ordered behaviors will be the parents or relatives close.

The maintenance (“holding”) of the discipline is notorious in all those activities in which constant successes are obtained. On the other hand, the sports discipline with its particularities, beneficial to both the individual and the group, as well as the sports activity and the institution to which they are and or their team belong.

The physical discipline manifested in the orderly and systematic practice of a sport as well as in the intellectual one will allow the performance obtained to be evaluated more clearly.

But in this regard it deserves to be noted that this discipline does not lack the necessary pleasant stimulation for the sport since it has in the set of norms and rules that make it up, an immediate sensation not only of bodily joy but of what has to do with the "duty compliment".

All in nature, even when it appears to us superficially disordered, follow a certain plan that allows its survival, its development, its growth and its transcendence. Although still under exuberant forms and some of them, "chaotic", nature provides its mark In the eyes of men, the project that sustains it is subject to norms that are essential. Even beyond the beings that make up the natural fact, all of them are regulated in the so-called ecosystems. I will be the athlete who with a disciplined activity, methodically ordered and in accordance with the prevailing patterns for his activity, will form a style of sports ecosystem in which your person, your coach, your group, the public, the institution. And it will be in the best of cases that this ecosystem maintains its balance through a plastic and creative discipline.

The same human story shows that periodically the achievements obtained based on the effort made by all those beings who propose to the prolongation of life on our planet are lost. It is then when a new rearrangement of the norms that regulate human behavior becomes necessary and in which discipline as a creative resource allows the overcoming of chaos.

If we carefully analyze all sports, we will not only observe that none of them has a chaotic form but on the contrary, they are ordered following a aesthetics that make their structure and consistency and that when a person practices them, they can identify these patterns enriching his life in a judicious and pleasant. For this, among many other reasons, we are convinced that sport has within it a powerful nucleus of creativity that stimulates the orderly progress of man from the most intimate and singular of his structure.

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

If you want to read more articles similar to Competition in sport, we recommend that you enter our category of Sport and physical exercise.

• Dosil Dias, Joaquin - Psychology and Sports Performance -Edic. Gersam 2002 - Spain
• Gonzalez, Lorenzo J.- Psychological training in sports- Editorial Biblioteca Nueva S.L.- Madrid -1996
• Lawther John D. - Sports and Athlete Psychology. Paidos Editions - Barcelona - l987
• Thomas Alexander - Sports Psychology - Editorial Gerder - Barcelona - l982
• Williams, Jean - Psychology applied to Sport (various authors) - New Library - Madrid - l99l