Coaches Ask a Sport Psych, Episode 10, Tried and True Techniques for Everyone
I'm excited to bring you the tenth episode of our "Coaches Ask a Sport Psychologist" series. Today, we're exploring a question that many athletes and coaches might wonder about:
"Are there any tried and true techniques everyone can benefit from?"
In this episode, I discuss fundamental psychological skills that can enhance performance and well-being for both athletes and coaches. I'll delve into acceptance and commitment training and how its core principles can be applied to help everyone in the sports community.
Join me as we explore these valuable techniques that can make a positive impact on your athletic journey.
Submit Your Own Question
If you would like to have a question answered on a future episode, submit your question by email. If I make a video using your question, I’ll give you a free 1-hour consult as a thank you.
Edited Video Transcript:
The question asked today is: "Are there any tried and true techniques everyone can benefit from?" I'm assuming that the coach asking this question is referring to everyone in the context of athletes and coaches.
I'll be upfront and declare my biases. I'm trained in acceptance and commitment training because I feel that the research supports these psychological flexibility skills as tried and true techniques. To make this relatively clear, the six skills of acceptance and commitment training are:
Being willing to experience things—openness.
Holding lightly to the things we've learned—this is called diffusion.
Building our skills around attending to things in our environment and noticing them—this is called present-moment awareness.
Getting in touch with who we are as our ever-present or persistent self. Self-as-context is a particularly brain-bending concept, but when we're able to help clients—be it athletes, coaches, or anybody else—connect with that part of themselves that is there no matter what, beyond the various hats we wear, it can be a pretty transformative experience to know that they will always have that part of themselves with them.
Getting clear on what is meaningful to them in the different contexts of their life. An athlete is not just an athlete; they're a human being, which means they're somebody's child, somebody's partner. They may be a student or a professional. There are all these different hats they wear, and each of those contexts, each of those hats, has different priorities and meaningful outcomes to the individual. So exploring those and getting really clear on them, and staying in touch with them, is foundational to guiding action that is meaningful.
Translating what our values are into explicit steps to move in meaningful directions—committed action.
Those six things—being open, diffused, present, in contact with who we are, clear on our values, and translating our values into committed action—tend to be the tried and true techniques that everyone, coaches, athletes, and even others, can benefit from.