Your Stats Do Not Define You: Separating self-worth from stats & scores
In the world of athletics, players are often under a spotlight with fans, journalists, coaches, and even other players seeming to be watching their every move. Their games are analyzed heavily, and many people take to social media to give their opinions on how that athlete is playing... Positive or negative as if they are forgetting the athlete is a person too.
As an athlete reading these things, it can truly destroy your confidence and cause you to lack any sort of self-worth. One bad game and sports articles talk about how the team’s incredible season is going to come to an end. These comments seem to be everywhere and feel like they are unavoidable. That is a common wall we must climb as student-athletes. At least for me, I had not had any experiences like this during my highschool career, so when I got to college and was exposed to what it felt like being under this metaphorical spotlight, it was a struggle to separate my self-worth from my scores.
Now, I am no expert on this subject. I still occasionally slip back into a mindset where other people’s negative thoughts and opinions on my performance influence me, I am human. However, as years have passed and I have had conversations with other athletes, I have learned ways to try and ignore all the outside factors that do not matter.
I recently saw a graphic posted on Instagram by @soccergrlprobs (link to their account at the end of the post) that talked about the way we are taught to measure our success in sport vs how we should be measuring our success in sport. The post showed two pie charts and in the first one it showed the traditional way we are taught to measure our success in our respective sports. Half of the pie was "playing time" and the other side was "goals scored". While this post was specific for the sport of soccer, the same principle can be applied to any sport so you can replace the "goals scored" with something that resonates with your sport, whether that be a score, runs, touchdowns, etc.
This is obviously a toxic and harmful way to measure an athlete’s success within their sport. It subconsciously teaches us that we are only valued and considered successful if we are to play well during a game. The post then included a second pie chart with many different slices, those being, athlete's mental health, physical health, having fun while playing, overcoming failure, pushing their limits, and being a good teammate. These factors are all so important and in the grand scheme of things, matter more that how many points you put on a board. I believe that if, we teach athletes that this is the true way to measure success in sport, mental health in athletes would be so much better than it is today. We as a community focus too much on stats, numbers, wins and losses, breaking records, etc.
Do not get me wrong, those things are incredible. I will never forget the joy I felt when I went up with my team to accept our conference trophy. It is okay to want to win, you just cannot define your worth based off if you end up winning a game or match. There should be a separation between self-worth and sport.
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