In sport, self-talk and verbal persuasion from others are effective tools for raising motivation and maximizing performance, and various case study research has been published. Feedback from others can have a good or bad influence depending on their relationships and the level of their rapport. In other words, coaches and teammates need to understand the athlete’s characteristics and conditions for appropriate verbal persuasion (Horikawa et al., 2016).
The purpose of this study was to explore how the use of verbal persuasion for athletes can have a positive effect on them during times when they are not performing to the best of their ability. Participants were 16 of university athletes and world class athletes (8 men and 8 women).
From this research, we found that when athletes are underperforming, the form of verbal persuasion that is most effective in improving their performance is ‘confirming mistakes and focusing on constructive points of the next action’. We also discovered that some voice calls can actually worsen the athletes’ performance when the call focuses on ‘sticking to mistakes, scolding and inducing regret’. In this study, we focused on voicing, but found that attitudes such as ‘nonverbal communication’ are also important. For players, ‘negative messages without words’ may have a stronger influence than voice when they fall into a state of underperformance. The overriding conclusion was that it is important to ‘make vocalizations’ during a game that focus constructively on the next action.
View full abstract