I am fortunate enough to be able to work with athletes and coaches day in, day out in my role as head of sport psychology for a youth academy of a very successful football club. There are around 50 positions such as mine in the country and being the youngest to hold this title in the whole of Germany fills me with great pride. So, what do I do? What does a sport psychologist do, who works in such an environment?
The title ‘sport psychologist’ does not automatically mean one thing, such as is the case for a neurosurgeon for example. Different sport psychologists have very different approaches to how they do the job. Depending on the position and the environment, there is a lot of freedom to work in YOUR own way, do the things that YOU deem important and try to influence the people around you in a way YOU think is best. So I cannot speak for all sport psychologists, I can only speak for myself and the way I way think I should do this job.
Who do I work with?
I work both with coaches and athletes equally. With coaching teams and with whole teams of athletes. There is no best setting to work in, they all offer beauty in their own way… In personal coachings you can reach an individual on a level that is not possible in a team setting, but you can influence team dynamics in a group setting that is never possible in an individual setting.
Working with coaches and players equally it is paramount to ensure that both sides have the feeling they can talk, are heard and nobody else will hear what they have said to me. This is the basis for a good working relationship and being a good sport psychologist in my eyes. I aspire to be seen as the most confidential person in the whole club, so when someone has something on his/her mind that is very important to them, there is second guessing if they can tell me and if it might negatively influence them in some shape or form.
I am very vocal about this aspect of my approach and all the coaches I work with trust me that the work I do with ‘their’ players will benefit and not harm their performance, even though they do not know what we work on, or sometimes even know who I work with exactly. It is not my place to talk about, it is the players right to decide if they want to or not.
What do I do?
In general, my approach is to always have the benefit for the team in mind when working with them. I try to never conduct a session because I know the topic very well, because I know I will deliver it well, or because I know it helped me in my own career as an athlete or coach. If there is a benefit to the team, then I want to do it. Sometimes this proves to be hard, because they might want/need me to run a session on a topic that I do not know a lot about initially and have to put a lot of work into to be able to run, but I see myself as a servant to the team’s needs, not a servant of my own ego. Of course, I have ideas of topics that may work or help any team, but I do my very best to reflect for myself if this particular team might benefit and talk to the coaches about my ideas.
Starting off my work in the youth academy I work in currently, my focus was team sessions instead of individual sessions. I worked with full teams, including players and coaches, as well as teams of players, excluding coaches, and teams of coaches, excluding players. Starting to get to know each other both on a content level and a personal level was the basis for our relationship in my eyes. Building on this, players and coaches can talk to me about more personal topics in one-to-one settings later on.
Nevertheless, an important topic I think in any team is the team’s culture. This is what I ended up working on with all the teams at the beginning, to make sure they understand the importance of the team culture, that it is influenced by every single member of the team and that there is a level of conscious choice how they want to form their own culture. If they understand these points, they are completely free to decide on a culture that they feel represents their values. I do not prescribe a culture or an aspect of the culture that I think is most beneficial to performance. I assist where my input is wanted, but the benefit of a team having the feeling that the culture they have decided on represents exactly what they want is far greater than a team deciding on a culture because research suggests this is what they should do. In the end the players and coaches have to live it, even when things get tough, and this is only possible if they buy in to the culture wholeheartedly.
Further topics I think are important to work on include mindfulness, training the skill of attention so that you can be more aware, more present and more conscious about what you pay attention to. It offers so much potential and, when trained, can really enhance not only performance but the way you live (as it has for me).
Other sessions include goal setting, how to set goals effectively, decide on goals as a team and decide on goals individually, roles within a team, what do I do well in my role for the team, what do I think others do well in their role for the team, and where does the team stand in acknowledging each other’s roles, …
Different teams need and want different sessions to help them improve and as mentioned above, I try to follow an individualised approach that involves watching a lot of training sessions and games and working closely with the coaching staff to analyse where the team stands and what might benefit them in any given situation.
If you are interested in more details about different sessions I run, what topics I have covered and what topics could help you, do not hesitate to reach out!
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