My experiences as a Practitioner in Sport Psychology at University

Background:

I study a unit in Sports Psychology at University and this allowed us to profile and interview an athlete on their strengths and weaknesses in their sport before delivering a five week intervention – aiming to improve their weakness. The athlete we used was a male footballer who identified aggression as their weakness.

This included using a semi-structured interview and performance profile, as well as observing the athletes matches to understand and identify their weakness. Before diving into questionnaires that allowed more depth into why this weakness was shown.

The intervention included mental skills training of goal setting, imagery and self-talk in order to improve the stated weakness.

My experiences:

Early on in the intervention I realised that my communication skills were a weakness within my personal style of delivering Sport Psychology. This was because I was less confident working with an athlete that I wasn’t familiar with and this was reflected in my communication skills. I found it difficult to explain the mental skills tasks to the athlete in a way that they could understand and replicate. For example, imagery – for imagery I needed to give a physical demonstration in order to communicate effectively with the athlete and this was an improvement in my communication skills.

By week five of the intervention, my communication skills had definitely improved as the intervention moved to more practical based session which suited how I worked better. For example, moving to a football pitch meant that I was able to lead the goal setting session with more ease.

Summary:

When performing interventions in Sport Psychology, it is important to reflect on your own practice in order to improve the next experience. A lot of practitioners use reflection regularly when working with athletes and find it an effective way of gaining feedback from their work.