Self-esteem of people who practice sport in relation to their experiencing the flow state and their style of coping with stress

The purpose of this work was to ascertain the association of the level of athletes’ self-esteem with their stress management and experiencing the flow state. The study included 56 men and 18 women, aged 19 to 25, who practiced sport and lived in Gorzow Wielkopolski and its vicinity. The following tools were employed: the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, N.S. Endler and J.D. Parker’s Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS), and S. Jackson and D. Eklund’s Flow State Scale – 2. For the analysis of variables descriptive statistics, correlation measures (Pearson’s r) and regression analysis were used. It was found that there is a positive correlation at the level of 0.05 between high self-esteem and the task-oriented style of coping with stressful situations, and a significant negative correlation at the level of 0.01 between self-esteem and the emotion-oriented style of stress management. The level of self-esteem also correlates with experiencing the flow state. Self-esteem is an important predictor of the method of coping with stressful situations and experiencing the flow state. People with higher self-esteem achieve the state of a kind of felicity, an autotelic experience. They are aware of their own abilities, have the feeling that they effortlessly control their situation and themselves, and can distance themselves from the surrounding environment. In a stressful situation, they focus on the problem.