One of this century’s most eloquent writers, Wallace Stegner, observed that Americans had come to live so existentially as to lose the historical context that gives life meaning beyond a person’s momentary and often transient pleasures and pains, disappointments and victories. Without sufficient historical perspective, people can be dragged too easily into an overwrought sense of failure or inflated self-congratulation. It is instructive that Maurice Green (Olympic 100m gold) and his coach judge Jesse Owens’ 1936 time - considering the track surface and type of spikes - to be faster than Green’s current world record and hold it up as a goal. Such perceptions created by a rich historical perspective stand in marked contrast to perceptions based exclusively on one’s immediate, personal circumstances. Such limited perceptions are epitomized in the self-aggrandizing displays of finger-pointing, tongue-wagging, and chest-thumping that typify far too many of today’s athletes.
Apparently, Green’s self-perception is rooted in a profound historical context that enriches his sense of who he is, what he has achieved, and what he might achieve tomorrow. For anyone, a larger, more complete self-perception, embedded in historical perspective, can buffer the arrogance of exaggerated achievement and the harmful self-denigration that can accompany falling short of a goal.
This self-perception - or self-schema - is not the same as self-esteem or self-efficacy. It can be pictured like a mental blueprint or schematic that captures the ways in which a person understands him/herself. Like a blueprint that can powerfully represent something more complete and multi-dimensional than itself, a person’s self-schema describes who they are, what they do, etc. Anyone who would understand another person should first know that person’s self-schema.
All of us create self-schema and rely on them to understand who we are, why we do what we do, etc., and many aspects of self-schema are consistent, more or less standard. People interpret their actions (behaviors, words, etc.) in order to understand what caused the action and also in terms of what that says about them. When judging what an action says about them, people rely on social comparisons, judgments against a standard of what they think other people, generally similar people, do in such circumstances. Additional consistency across people occurs in phenomena such as the self-serving bias in which people interpret actions in ways that present themselves in a positive light. Many other factors also influence the creation of one’s self-schema. Feedback from significant others, who are often parents, teachers, coaches, etc. provides important information used to construct one’s self-schema, as do interactions with one’s peers. In a type of feedback loop, self-schema serves as the interpretive filter through which a person interprets his/her actions - just as those actions shape the self-schema itself. Early in a person’s life, his/her self-schema is less set and more flexible. External input from the environment, other people, etc., exerts different influence on the schema of children and youth than the impact of similar input on the self-schema of adults. As it solidifies, the self-schema becomes a powerful filter through people make sense of themselves - interpreting their actions, interactions with others, successes and failures, etc. in light of their self-schema.
What is the relationship between self-schema and sport participation? No two people have identical histories. Even for identical twins, one was born first - establishing diverging histories. With every event, some small history becomes uniquely individual. Two siblings can be so different "despite being raised in the same family, by the same parents, etc." precisely because their respective histories in those families, with those parents, etc. diverged constantly and were always interpreted through individual self-schema, altered and shaped through unique historical contingencies. Sport provides an environment rich in unique historical contingencies. In even the most carefully crafted sport skill, i.e., a golf swing, a pitcher’s delivery, etc., sport generally consists of unanticipated challenges, unexpected deviation, reactions that were never required before, and on and on.
For all participants, sport offers powerful historical contingencies that shape and subsequently alter self-schema. Sport often creates unique, highly visible, public historical contexts that exert powerful effects on the self-schema of all participants. Sport often makes the highs higher and the lows lower. It frequently places responsibilities for many in the hands of a few. For all participants, sport serves as a test for current self-schema. For some, it serves as a defining situation - with self-schema altered forever.
Honest answers to several questions might be useful in connecting sport participation to one’s self-schema.
While each of us has a unique history, each of us also participates in a history that preceded us and follows us. Participation in sport provides numerous, unique historical contingencies in which some athletes find the enrichment to shape them into better, more admirable people, but some find only temporary pride and glory that fades with the moment. What does your participation in sport say to you?