Why We’re Different

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​Research in sports psychology, educational psychology, health psychology, and social cognitive psychology over the past 30 years has provided strong evidence that a set of mental skills can be measured, developed, and self-managed to the benefit of athletes. By assessing individual mental skills, and those of an entire team, head coaches and performance coaches can more clearly understand the overall team makeup and guide athletes to develop their strengths and deficiencies.

Just as with strength and conditioning for the body, the MSA is used to identify, measure and evaluate athletes’ beliefs and behaviors that affect performance and can help a player, team and coach win more games. It is by developing such mental skills as leadership, satisfaction, coachability, self-worth, personal control, task confidence, goal identification, goal implementation and goal orientation that a player and team's peak performance can excel.

 

Background

 

​First developed in 2009 and refined in 2019, the MSA was developed to assist athletes, coaches, and sport psychologists/performance coaches in improving the mental skills that are critical to an athlete’s success–on and off the field. The MSA measures categories of beliefs and behaviors research has found to be important to behavior change and success. These categories of beliefs and behaviors are the MSA mental skills, and the scores on the MSA reflect ratings of both behavior and beliefs that influence performance.

Consistent with the views of cognitive-behavioral theorists of behavior change, such as Aaron Beck (1970, 1985) and Albert Ellis (1979), changes in beliefs lead to changes in behavior. Empirical evidence for the role of beliefs in sport performance is provided by a study of self-talk by Conroy and Metzler (2004). They found distinct patterns of self-talk accompanied failure and success and these patterns were different for fear of failure and sport anxiety. Consistent with the evidence for the importance of beliefs and associated behaviors, the MSA obtains information about an athlete’s beliefs and behaviors because to improve an athlete’s performance both behavior and beliefs must change.