Sport Psychology is a growing discipline and one that I find myself privileged to be involved in. Despite this growth, I still wonder why it can often be viewed as a last resort for some. This was highlighted in a recent article on Laura Robson utilising Sport Psychology services to ‘revive’ her tennis career. This […]
Psychology is a word that is thrown around with the likes of therapy and psychiatry. Adding sport on the front, still does not seem to shift these negative connotations. It is often thought that the athlete will be lying on a couch with the therapist wearing a white coat and using their clip board to […]
Sport psychology means different things to different people, as I found out when the question was put to a group of football coaches in a sports performance workshop recently. To some, it meant being observed, and to others it meant lying back on a sofa and being analysed. Such views are reflected in a general […]
Not so long ago I was asked by a friend of mine, who is an athlete as well as me and has been for most of his life, whether I would encourage my own children into the competitive world of athletics. After a lot of consideration there was an uncertainty over the answer, but more […]
In addition to the standards and competencies that sport psychologists must demonstrate to achieve accreditation with the relevant governing bodies, effective sport psychologists have been well-documented within the literature as possessing certain skills and characteristics. For example, Weigand, Richardson and Weinberg (1999) found coaches and athletes valued sport psychologists who were helpful, knowledgeable, caring, understanding, available, […]
Jones, Evans and Mullen (2007) recently suggested that texts which choose to adopt the perspective of trainee practitioners within sport psychology “have the potential to not only inform the supervision of trainee sport psychologists but also enhance the effectiveness of sport psychologists’ professional practice” (p.211). Amongst others, Holt and Strean (2001), Tonn and Harmison (2004), and Tod and Bond(2010) have […]
In recent years, the field of applied sport psychology has broadened to encompass not only the use of problem-solving approaches concerned with mental skills training, but also more humanistic, person-centred approaches that utilise skills grounded in counselling (Hack, 2005). Within the counselling psychology profession, the personal qualities of the practitioner, such as empathy and congruence, […]