Self-concept is the image we have created of ourselves. It is the thoughts that we have about ourselves and that we believe define us. From this mixture of beliefs about oneself comes the “I”, which will be our overall view.
These thoughts can change. The context or the other people we live with can also make them change. It is important to know ourselves well, to be realistic and to reflect deeply on ourselves so that the proposed task can be carried out properly.
Psychological objectives for the end of the season
During the season it is important to choose which skills to train depending on the time of the season. This time we are going to talk about the time between the end of the regular league and possible play-offs, and the beginning of the holidays.
During this month of impasse, we must take the opportunity to reinforce the lessons learned during the season, encourage cohesion by ironing out any differences that may have occurred during the season and motivate the players to come to these final sessions, where they are more exhausted.
To achieve these objectives we carried out the “Avatar” activity.
Psychological self-concept task “avatar”.
This task is based on the 3 previous objectives. It will help in the updating of self-concept, it will improve cohesion with the exchange of virtues between teammates and being a multi-sensory and team task, it will be motivating for the players.
The procedure is as follows:
- The task starts with a brainstorming on technical, tactical, emotional and physical issues, in order to find out how the vocabulary of the players has expanded.
- They will draw a picture of themselves dressed as a footballer and divide the avatar into 4, using 3 horizontal lines.
- They should place on the right side of the avatar the skills they had at the beginning of the year and on the left side of the avatar the skills they have learnt. In each horizontal strip they will place a different theme, with the first strip containing the tactical skills, the second the emotional skills, the third the physical skills and the last the technical skills.
- After writing down these skills, the players must divide the horizontal stripes and randomly give each teammate a part of each player’s strip. The player must guess which player it is and add a quality that he likes about his teammate, returning his avatar portion.
- The player will receive his avatar with the characteristics added by his teammates and will read what virtue the teammates have highlighted about him.
This activity can take around an hour, it is important that we let the players express themselves and not judge their opinions, as well as giving them creative freedom to make their drawing, which can be another evaluation tool for us.
