We also found that the training was effective in improving optimism.
It was a little bit of a mixed result though on the grit scale.
And that was quite an interesting finding because I guess it was one of the first
questions I asked Angela, could you train this?
We're still working on this now and Angela and
her team are still doing some great work in this area.
What this experiment showed,
at least, in this individual instance I'm talking about,
was that those who already had high grit, there wasn't a lot of movement to be had.
You could teach them and they were a little bit like, yeah I get it,
I already do that.
But for those who are low in grit, we did show a shift.
So across the entire group, the results were mixed.
But if we split it,
we did find that the lower end of the scale were able to improve somewhat.
The coolest part from my point of view,
as a practitioner, as someone who gets paid to improve athletes' performance,
was that we found that by delivering this program, and when we controlled
it by comparing it to athletes who didn't receive it in the same team,
same age group, same level of performance, those who received the intervention
were more consistent in the following year and did improve slightly.
The biggest change was consistency though, and particularly for young,
developing athletes.
I'm sure a lot of coaches, if anyone out there is a coach or a teacher, often in
a performance instance, that's really the key to getting long-term improvement.
If we can get consistency, the next thing is huge levels of improvement.
So in one year we're able to show that, in one season, from one season to the next.
And that was the most exciting part of, I guess for me, the findings that we had.