The Most Important Aspects Of Sport Psychology For Coaches

The Most Important Aspects Of Sport Psychology For Coaches

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Firstly, focus on the relationship you have with your athletes. The coach-athlete relationship is critical to sporting success and there is more and more research being done that shows this should be a key focus area in sport. For example in the 2009 study by the Canadian Olympic Committee they found the most significant contributor to a medal winning performance or a personal best performance at the Beijing Olympics, was a strong coach-athlete relationship.

A quality coach-athlete relationship does not happen instantly, instead it needs to develop over time. As such creating an effective relationship between you and your athletes, is about investing the time and resources. This is in the same manner as you would invest time and resources into a quality weights or conditioning program. The difference between the physical training and your relationship with your athletes, is that the physical training can be hard work and with the associated pain and sweat. Building a better relationship is about conversations, observing and learning about each other always on the look out to have what I call, off topic conversations. This means talking about family, friends and life outside of sport.

One of the most fundamental aspects of sport psychology that is within the coachs role, is to understand their athletes behavioral patterns and their individual personality. All coaches already do this to some extent. The best coaches do this to a deep level. Understanding an athlete gives a window into how to communicate, build an effective environment for them, assist them to build on their strengths and overcome their weaknesses. (You might also enjoy another article about the movie The Blind Side that is a recent example of the importance of knowing your athletes.)

It is often suggested, self-awareness is 75% of any solution to improving performance. A primary role of any sports coach is also to help their athletes understand themselves better. When athletes understand themselves they are in a better position to self-assess and monitor their own performances.

Having a deeper understanding of each of your athletes is not a difficult thing to do as there are non-confronting assessments which can give a coach (and an athlete) all the answers they need. For example, our AthleteDISC and CoachDISC profiles are specifically for this purpose. (If you want to know more about the AthleteDISC and CoachDISC profiles, go to the pages specifically for athletes, for coaches and/or for performance consultants.)

About the Author:
Bo Hanson is 4x Olympian, Coaching Consultant & Director of Athlete Assessments. To learn about Sports Psychologist, please visit http://www.athleteassessments.com



Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com


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