The color association method in sports psychology: research, application and future direction
Athletes work in a discipline and stick to training routine in order to achieve their best at the competition. But more often then it is expected, athletes are not able to show their full sports potential due to metal state in performance situation.
Aspects of mental readiness
There are four aspects of mental readiness for sports competition. Two aspect reflects awareness of one’s own mental state for competition and two aspects reflects lack of personal insight about mental state in performance situation. Also, athletes might be either mentaly ready or not ready for competition. Both athlete and coach need to discover wether athletes is ready or not mentally ready for competitive situation and if he or she is aware of that or not. There are numerous examples of peak performance in sport when mental readiness was optimal and also many examples when athlete belives he/she is ready for competitive situation when he/she actually was not.
Predictive power of the diagnostics
Throughout recent years, we used color association method both in research and in sports psychology practice. SportMind energy diagnostics showed some significant correlations with other psychological tests and very well predicted the performance of each athlete. But also, when different psychological tests bring inconsistent information, data collected by CA method were more congruent with information based on introspection reports and observed behavior.
Information about actual ‘’real’’ mental state of athlete just before the competition, makes it possible to create useful psychological counseling to turn athletes mindset toward victory.
Prof. dr Marijana Mladenović, sport psychologist
Read more about Marijana´s participation in SportMind: