Subject's Cognitive Self-Talk

Subject is a 14 year old female competitive dancer. Her aspirations for joining the team are due to her enjoyment of dancing and competing. According to the results from the SCAT and POMS evaluation, subject struggles with a high level of anxiety. She may lack self-efficacy and confidence in her performances. She does not believe she is a good dancer, despite being moved to the advanced team as a freshman, and has been given special routines to perform for competition. The subject may feel these stresses due to fear of failure . The subject may have extremely high expectations of the outcome of her performance and the team. Cognitive Self-Talk may assist her by teaching to speak positive words and think positive thoughts. Such
This anxiety and stress may raise her arousal level to go towards the negative scale of stress. Providing aid with attentional focus, learning a filtering method to ignore the audience and judges may assist in the nervousness felt. Recommendation to redirect the focus on the familiarity of the music and skills she has been working on for the last several months. Imagery of the performance in her head rather than focusing on the win can help her focus and prepare her for performance. Doing this visualization technique may also help her feel more confident by knowing she remembers the piece clearly. Subject should learn how to use the feedback provided from competition judges as information to help her progress and not view it as negative criticism. Learning to incorporate feedback from performances to improve skills in the activity vs. thoughts of I wasn’t good
Recommend doing progressive relaxation technique. Competitive State Anxiety Interpret -2 (CSAI-2) has been shown to be benefit athletes when dealing with anxiety (Martens, Vealey, & Burton, 1990). It is a technique developed by Jacobson.
“The athletes is asked to inhale and tense a specific muscle group for approximately 7 – 10 seconds followed by releasing them for 15 – 20 seconds. The athlete then exhales and releases the tension from the specified muscle group, concentrating on the feelings of relaxation. This procedure is repeated for a number of muscle groups with each group begin tensed and relaxed three times. The muscle groups used with the athletes are listed.”(Rajan &Pushparajan, 2011) I believe with time and practicing the skills above will assist the subject to begin to feel less tension and stress. Rewiring her way of seeing things may alleviate the pressure she is placing on herself. Changing her perception of dance as competitive to using dance as an outlet to express her emotions to be able to, “leave it all on the stage” may also lessen the stress she is feeling. In-turn she may also find self-motivation by feeling positive and taken in all information provided to help her grow as a dancer.