Personality: The Overlooked Key to Athletic Performance

Every athlete knows that physical attributes like speed, endurance, and mobility influence performance. But did you know that personality also significantly impacts athletic development? It’s true!

The science

Proof comes from a 2020 study of elite ice hockey players by Pamela Karp. A standard personality inventory measured the traits of 126 athletes drafted into the National Hockey League between 1987 and 1994. Additionally, Karp talked to team scouts and collected their assessments of each player’s physical ability, then waited five years to see which was the better predictor of a player’s success in the NHL: personality or physical ability. The answer was clear.

“Analyses revealed that personality . . . significantly discriminated among players who have achieved or underachieved based upon draft expectations,” Karp reported, whereas “physical ability ratings did not significantly contribute to the prediction of professional hockey achievement.” Among the strongest predictors of success were the personality traits of boldness (a composite of fearlessness, confidence, and self-assuredness) and competitiveness.

Another personality trait that’s useful to athletes, according to research, is conscientiousness. “Individuals with high levels of conscientiousness are described as orderly, industrious, and disciplined,” noted a group of St. Louis University psychologists in a 2017 paper. “On the other hand, individuals with low levels of conscientiousness are described as undisciplined, lacking attention to detail, and unreliable. This trait has been positively associated with many types of performance including occupational performance, academic performance, and athletic performance. Conscientiousness is related to higher levels of sport achievement, better training and preparation, and greater levels of athletic success.”

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Certain personality traits, meanwhile, are known to negatively affect athletic performance. Chief among them is neuroticism, a predisposition toward anxiety and other negative emotions. A 2019 study led by Guodong Zhang of China’s Southwest University found that, within a group of 210 boxers, higher levels of self-control (a component of self-regulation) were associated with greater competitive success, and the most self-controlled and successful boxers were the least neurotic. When confronted with challenging or stressful situations, neurotics tend to fixate on their emotional state instead of taking active steps to bring about a desired outcome. They are also more impulsive and less resilient than those who are less neurotic. For these reasons, it’s easy to see why neuroticism is a barrier to athletic greatness.

So should you change your personality?!

The upshot of all this science is that if you want to be the best athlete you can be, you need to change your personality so that it matches those of the most successful athletes—heavy on helpful traits like boldness, competitiveness, and conscientiousness and light on unhelpful traits like neuroticism. Just kidding! Personality is notoriously resistant to change. If you were highly conscientious or very neurotic as a teenager, it’s likely that you’ll still exhibit these traits in middle age. Like it or not, you can’t just will your way to a different personality for the sake of your athletic performance.

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Instead, I suggest you simply account for your unique nature in ways that enable you to take advantage of your most helpful traits and mitigate the negative effects of less-helpful traits. All of us have character traits that aid us athletically and others that tend to limit us. Identifying these traits and their effects will help you make the most of your strengths and contain your weaknesses.

For example, I am naturally impatient, and over the years this trait has caused many avoidable setbacks. But I’ve gotten better at resisting the impulse to hurry things in my training, and as a result I don’t set myself back as often. I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve become more patient—those impulses are as strong as ever. I just don’t behave as impatiently as I once did.

In my coaching work, I rely on personality profiling to help athletes understand how to better account for their character traits in pursuing their goals. I like the My Skills Sports Personality Questionnaire in particular because it’s athlete-specific and easy to use and understand. The purpose of such tools is not to determine whether you have a “good” or “bad” personality for sports. Think of them rather as guides to better performance through heightened self-awareness.

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Successful athletes aren’t all the same physiologically or psychologically. No one would mistake free-spirited Sifan Hassan, who has nine Olympic and world championship medals, with meticulous Jakob Ingebrigtsen, who at just twenty-three has five medals. You can reach your full potential as an athlete and still be you. But to do this you must really know yourself, and to know yourself it helps to understand your personality so you can use it to your best advantage.