Success or Defeat…Who Do You Blame?
Blame sounds inherently negative though…what’s more neutral, and the core of this article, is attribution.
Why do some athletes bounce back quickly from failure, while others spiral into self-doubt? A key factor often lies in how they explain what happened to themselves. This is where attribution training comes in.
Attribution training is a mental performance tool that helps athletes understand and shift the way they interpret success and failure. It's rooted in attribution theory, a psychological framework that examines how people explain the causes of events in their lives. For athletes, these explanations can have a powerful influence on motivation, confidence, and resilience.
What Is Attribution Theory?
Attribution theory was first developed by psychologist Bernard Weiner, who identified three key dimensions of causal explanations:
Locus of Control: Is the cause internal (something about me) or external (something outside me)?
Stability: Is the cause stable (will it stay the same over time) or unstable (can it change)?
Controllability: Is the cause under my control or not?
Consider two athletes who both miss a game-winning shot.
Athlete A thinks, "I missed because I always choke in big moments."
Athlete B thinks, "I missed because I rushed my form. I’ll slow it down next time."
Athlete A attributes the failure to an internal, stable, and uncontrollable cause. Athlete B attributes it to an internal, unstable, and controllable one.
According to research, these differences are not trivial. Athletes who believe their failures are changeable and under their control are more likely to stay motivated, work harder, and improve (Biddle et al., 2001; Coffee et al., 2009).
What Is Attribution Training?
Attribution training helps athletes reflect on their explanations for success and failure, identify unhelpful patterns, and learn to reframe them in a more adaptive way.
This doesn’t mean sugarcoating mistakes or ignoring external factors. It means learning to see performance setbacks as something you can influence. For example, instead of saying, "We lost because the ref was terrible," attribution training encourages athletes to ask, "What could we have done differently to adjust to how the game was being called?"
It’s also reminiscent of a tool I use with many of my athletes: identifying if the wild mind or wise mind is talking. Usually, when you’re thinking like Athlete A from earlier, it’s the wild mind talking. Wise mind is more like Athlete B, thinking about specific things that are controllable and changeable.
A study by Orbach, Singer, and Price (1999) found that swimmers who received attributional retraining improved their performance compared to a control group. These athletes learned to attribute their failures to factors they could control, which helped sustain their effort and improve outcomes.
Why It Matters for Your Mental Game
Attribution training helps athletes:
Build confidence by reinforcing the belief that effort and strategy affect outcomes.
Bounce back from setbacks more quickly by avoiding fixed, helpless explanations.
Stay motivated during slumps, since failures are seen as temporary and improvable.
Develop mental toughness by learning to focus on what’s in their control.
This training helps athletes own their performance without getting stuck in unhelpful thought patterns.
How to Start Using Attribution Training
Here are some simple steps:
Reflect on your explanations: After a win or loss, write down why you think the outcome happened.
Look for patterns: Are you blaming fixed traits or uncontrollable factors? Are your explanations different when you succeed versus fail?
Reframe: Ask yourself, What could I have done differently? What will I do next time?
Practice consistently: Just like physical skills, attributional habits take repetition to build. After awhile, you’ll think more effectively automatically because you trained your mind to do so.
Your thoughts shape your performance more than you might realize. Attribution training helps athletes become more aware of those thoughts and, crucially, more skilled at changing them. When you change the way you explain outcomes, you change the way you respond to them. Self-talk is the ultimate driver of confidence and motivation. This is one of the many ways you
If you’re serious about improving your mindset, attribution training is one of the most research-backed ways to do it.
