Coaches Ask a Sport Psych, Episode 05, Books vs. One-on-One Sessions: Maximizing Your Mental Game
I'm excited to bring you the fifth episode of our "Coaches Ask a Sport Psychologist" series. Today, we're addressing a question that many coaches and athletes might have considered:
"How much can reading books help versus a one-on-one session with a psychologist?"
In this episode, I explore the benefits and limitations of self-help resources like books and videos compared to working directly with a sports psychology professional. I'll discuss how each can play a role in your mental training and how to decide which approach might be best for you.
Join me as I delve into this topic to help you maximize your mental game.
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Edited Video Transcript:
The question asked today is: "How much could reading books help versus a one-on-one session with a psychologist?" The context provided was that this coach tried working with sports psychologists, and the experience was not good and was expensive.
So, first of all, coach, I'm sorry that was your experience. Hopefully, it was nobody within Wear Performance Group, and I hope that if you ever come back to working with a professional directly, you have a much more constructive experience.
Now, to answer the question of how much can reading books help versus a session with a sports psychologist—the truth is, it can be very helpful. The challenge is that once a book is written, it's fixed. The structure is fixed, the material is fixed; it's all set in place, and it takes a lot of effort to update it, to restructure it, to adapt it. That adaptation is probably the biggest value difference when it comes to working with a competent sports psychology professional.
An hour session or a workshop with a competent professional should work for you the fastest because that professional is going to be responding to how you present in that moment. They should be adapting their style as you present and as you respond to the various elements of the discussion. A book can't do that.
We're getting a lot better with apps as far as being responsive in that kind of case, but again, humans are really, really dynamic. It's really hard to program an app to be that responsive. When we're talking about an actual printed book or ebook, it's similarly hard to build that out in a way that's so responsive to the individual.
The other side of that argument is it doesn't discount what a book can do. One of the biggest values of a book or a video is how many people it can reach. Books, videos, and apps are all part of the triage and dissemination resources that are available to you. One of the things that books can do really, really well is be available to you whenever, wherever. You can take the book with you in ebook form or in physical form. You can buy a book off of whatever your favorite book retailer is and download it almost right away.
You can rarely do that with a professional, especially if it's your very first session. A lot of times, there's intake stuff, there's kind of getting started stuff that is a little bit challenging with actual live professionals. So a book has its place and it has its value, but it's going to be more fixed, less responsive to you, and it's going to take a little bit more time and a little more investment on your part to get the most out of the book relative to the kind of guided and structured discussions that's going to come from working with a live professional.