Every year in October my professional organization (Association for Applied Sport Psychology) hosts their annual conference. When I was a graduate student, going to the conference every year was a great opportunity to learn new skills that I could bring to my burgeoning mental skills coaching practice. Today, it certainly still serves that purpose but it’s definitely more of an excuse to catch up with old friends and colleagues.

But, last year in Toronto I attended one session that has literally changed the way I approach my work and I still think about that session a whole year later. In this session three mental coaches (all working at IMG at the time) talked about the work they’ve been doing at the academy over the last year to incorporate more of a constraints-based coaching model in their work with coaches and athletes.

They made compelling arguments, stringing together literature to demonstrate why this approach to coaching matters, gave us an opportunity to design our own drills that incorporated the main ideas from a constraints-based model, and we chatted about our experience— it was clearly an experiential workshop intentionally designed. 

I don’t remember what my group talked about or what our drill was, but I do very clearly remember the end of the presentation.

As they were wrapping up, one of the IMG coaches advanced to the last slide and the only text on the screen read as follows:

That’s it. That’s the question that has made me question everything I thought I knew about performance coaching. 

And it should make you question what you do too.

I’ve been fortunate over the last 8 years to have worked for and with hundreds of clients and other sport psychology professionals. I’ve seen all kinds of different approaches to practicing sport psychology consulting in a bunch of different contexts. Across every context and (in my opinion) more often than it should be, this one idea is abundantly clear: we are selling our clients short.

WHAT WE’RE DOING WRONG

What traditional pedagogy tells us is that there are certain ways to help individuals learn new skills that are more effective than others. Life tells us that too in many ways. We hear parents say all the time that they can’t give their children the answer because the best way to learn is to figure it out themselves. Grade school teachers and professors use that model in the homework and projects they assign, challenging students to apply what they’ve learned. We know it to be inherently true through our lived experience— situations where we’ve had to muddle through and figure things out stick with us far longer than times when we were handed the answer. But in mental coaching? Apparently we think those same rules do not apply here.

In some of the most general terms there are two ways to provide folks with new information: explicitly or implicitly. When someone is new to a topic area, it makes sense that some degree of explicitness from the instructor/coach is necessary; often you’re providing foundational knowledge. Coaching is no different. There is a reason that fundamental skills clinics exist. But where we go wrong is that we do not adapt what we do as our clients adapt. 

Let me be clear: if you’ve always coached your clients the same way, you’re doing it wrong.

As folks begin to grasp ideas and understand concepts, you have to change the way you continue to advance their learning. Revisiting fundamentals from time to time never hurt anyone, but not allowing individuals to apply skills in the context in which they’ll actually use them is a critical failure. Unfortunately, as a field we do far too much explicit instruction in fundamentals of mental skills and not enough to facilitate exploration and development of those skills in context.

SPEAKING INSPIRES, APPLICATION INSPIRES CHANGE

A lot of us (myself included) have fallen into the comfortable routine of working with different clients and speaking on topics related to mental performance— confidence, imagery, attention strategies, decision-making and the like.

In order to be taken more seriously as a field and stop selling our clients short, we have to find ways to more effectively integrate into the athletic environment. If you want to stop being called a motivational speaker or a “guru” then you have to stop acting like one. You have to act like a coach. I think that means explicitly speaking on concepts sometimes, but more often providing strategies for application and helping athletes implicitly figure out what works best for them. Besides, if we’re being honest, most of us would be hard-pressed to find a client that actually gives a damn about the theoretical sources of confidence; they just want you to help them develop skills to be more confident in the pressure-filled situations in which they often find themselves.

THE FUTURE

So what does all this have to do with the AASP conference in Toronto and constraints-based coaching? Well, I think what the folks at IMG presented (and are doing) is ahead of the curve. In the sport context, I think they’re doing mental performance coaching the right way.

Constraints-based coaching is a style of coaching designed to be able to take a skill or tactic from the general “whole” of the game and isolate it for more focused skill development. And mental performance is just another part of the whole, isn’t it? You have to find ways to isolate those skills in context by manipulating constraints, give athletes time to work through and implicitly learn how those strategies work for them, and provide opportunities for them to test the mental skills as they are incorporated back into the whole once again. 

If you want to develop a particular skill, practice plans must be designed in a way that includes games or drills that teach those skills; there is no way around that. Sure, doing so takes a lot (more) work on our part— but it also gives you a lot more return on investment in the form of actual skill development. It’s worth it for you, and it’s definitely worth it for your clients. And, I think this is exactly how we get away from merely doing “activities” and doing drills that help develop the mental skills that are so crucial for performance.

HOW DO WE STOP SELLING OUR CLIENTS SHORT?

To be sure, this whole approach is predicated on the idea that your clients want you to provide mental coaching that can be quickly and directly applied to their sport performance. Some don’t. Some want (and need) some educationally-focused programming before they can dive head-first into training. But I’d be comfortable saying that population is the minority. In fact, I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard coaches and administrators share that they’re looking for “high impact” work because of the disparity between their needs and the resources they have at their disposal; programs simply do not have the money to have mental performance coaches there all the time.

But this demand is not unique to mental performance coaches. Sport coaches deal with this. Athletic trainers deal with this. Strength coaches deal with this; somehow, we all have to make it work. And most do! Maybe I’ve just been fortunate, but in my 25 years of sport participation I’ve never met a strength coach who, when they’re brought in to help improve functional strength, merely talks about strength. They talk about it, show you, and have you do it. Mental performance coaching doesn’t have to be any different.

We need our field to be better. And even if you’re doing it all right most of the time, I know from personal experience that it can be really easy to fall back into “speaking or teaching mode” when our clients can often benefit a lot more from a “coaching mode”. I think the easiest way you stop selling clients short is by asking yourself the same question I make sure to ask myself before I head into any coaching session: am I helping to create a knowledgeable trainee or a skilled performer?

A PROCESS FOR CONSTRAINTS-BASED MENTAL PERFORMANCE COACHING

If the goal is to create a more skilled performer, I think you have to consider whether or not you are helping those athletes to integrate mental skills into their larger sport context… and if you are, how exactly? Has that approach been effective? This shouldn’t just be a post hoc question, but rather something that you consider before you even begin designing what is to be covered in your coaching session with your athletes.

Below is a general approach that I use to make sure I’m being intentional about integrating mental skills into sports performance.

1. Begin with the end in mind. You first must consider what you would like the learning objective of the drill to be. That is to say, which mental skill or mental process is the target here? When and how is this mental skill utilized within this sport context?

2. Design a drill to target the learning objective. Consider how you will manipulate the individual, the task, or the environment to do so.  Think about how you will take pieces of the game as whole and use them to exploit the mental skill or mental process you want to work on developing. Consider drills that already exist to develop physical skills. How could you tweak the task, environment, or individual in service of your training focus?

3. Outline your options to facilitate skill acquisition. Consider if there are certain situations in which you may have to be more explicit with instruction; either to provide foundational information about the skill or to aid with application.

4. Plan how you will allow for implicit learning. Strategies for teams could be giving them a time out to discuss or leading a short athlete-directed Q&A after a drill. Plan questions that help athletes reflect on their experience.

5. Equip coaches with resources to reinforce your coaching. Acknowledging you can’t be there every second is important. Think about ways the sport coach and other athletic staff can help reinforce the ideas and skills you covered. Consider different mediums through which you can continue to follow-up and support them (e.g. email, text, print resources, online learning platforms.

If any of this resonates with you, shoot me a message! I’d love to chat about how we can bring mental performance coaching to your team.