Yani L. Dickens, PhD, MBA, CMPC

Several times a year, students aspiring to become sport psychologists ask me how to pursue a career in sport psychology. I happily mentor students interested in pursuing the profession, and here is what they typically ask and what I say:

What are the job prospects in sport psychology?

It is difficult to find a job in sport psychology. According to LeUnes (2008), the job picture in sport psychology is “not overly reassuring.” This is probably primarily because sport psychology consulting is not reimbursed by insurance companies and is viewed as not medically necessary; in other words, sport psychology consulting is a boutique service. Others are more optimistic. 

How do I know if I should become a sport psychologist or consultant or mental performance coach?

Here are some questions to consider in deciding whether to become a sport psychologist (aka sport psychology consultant, aka mental performance consultant): 1) Are you intellectually curious, 2) do you like working with people, 3) are you interested and experienced in sport and human performance beyond being just a fan, 4) are you a strong student, and are you dedicated to going to graduate school? If answered “yes” to most of these, especially graduate school, and you decide that you want to pursue this career, you should also consider which of the following activities would be of interest to you: teaching, research, and/or practicing applied sport psychology.

What education, training, and experience do I need?

Graduate education is essential, so consider reviewing the Directory of Graduate Programs in Applied Sport Psychology. The best program for you is whichever program matches your professional goals. It will also be helpful if the program has a good reputation and excellent faculty scholars and supervisors, and if you want to practice in sport psychology, make sure that supervision is available and faculty are interested and engaged in doing high quality supervision. Also contact current students and alumni of the program to ask about their experiences in their program.

Getting a masters degree is a good start, and you can become a sport psychology consultant with this. A doctoral degree in psychology is the only way to become a licensed psychologist. A doctoral degree in psychology or the exercise sciences such as Ph.D. or Psy.D. may put you at some advantage because you will have more education, training, and experience by the time you graduate. If the degree is a Ph.D. or Psy.D. in psychology, you will most likely be able to meet requirements for licensure as a psychologist, especially if you attend a regionally accredited school with APA accreditation as well as an APA-accredited doctoral internship.

Programs that help you to work toward AASP certification may be the best – even if the public doesn’t know the difference between non-certified and certified professional,  certification helps you demonstrate your competence, and your job prospects are better. Combined with a doctoral degree, you’ll be competitive for many sport psychology jobs. You may also be eligible to be listed on the USOC (US Olympic) registry if you have a doctoral degree, AASP certification, and APA membership. 

In short, practicing sport psychology is challenging and competitive. A more realistic career path in sport psychology may be to pursue a degree that leads to a license to practice in mental health with part-time sport psychology work, but the decision about whether to become a sport psychologist and how to do so is certainly yours. 

So, you want to be a sport psychology professional?

The webinar below featuring Mark Aoyagi, PhD, CMPC, Kate F. Hays, PhD, CMPC, Judy Van Raalte, PhD, CMPC was created to help students identify a graduate training path for their career in applied sport psychology. It was co-sponsored by the Division 47 Society of Sport, Exercise & Performance Psychology of the American Psychological Association (APA) and AASP. Check it out, along with  Kate Hays’ website, to learn even more about sport psychology education. 

http://www.appliedsportpsych.org/students-center/video-resources/#Professional

Despite your best practice, preparation, and intentions, do you ever worry you’ll still mess up? You’re not alone! Performance anxiety takes multiple forms including somatic anxiety, your body’s reaction to a challenging situation, and cognitive anxiety, your worry thoughts and other negative thoughts about failing to perform. You may have thought to yourself or heard from someone else “Just don’t worry!” Evidence shows that trying not to think about something like worry, also known as thought suppression, backfires, paradoxically leading to increased negative thinking and much worse performance.

How to Prevent Others From Worrying Too Much

Coaches in particular can reduce paradoxical effects on sport performance by emphasizing and teaching what to do instead of what not to do. Statements like “Don’t Worry,” “Don’t Fall,” “Don’t Miss,” teach people to focus on mistakes. Keep it positive instead, focus on goals, and teach the skills that help performers achieve them.

How to Help Others Who Worry Anyway

If you’re trying to help someone who worries or has other negative thoughts, DO NOT move immediately to simple problem-solving with statements like “look at the bright side,” “at least you can perform,” “just get over it,” “just don’t worry,” “you should…,” or other “at leasts…” and “just….” Despite your best intentions, these encouragements often backfire because they sound invalidating, showing you’ve skipped the listening and understanding process and rushed to solutions. They oversimplify the situation and are not likely to help. For more, learn how to validate and check out Kate Hays’ one-two method.

How to Help Yourself With Worry & Recover

If you’re trying to help yourself with worry, you may experience similar thoughts like these “justs,” “at leasts,” or “should” statements, which we call self-invalidation. Instead of buying into them, trying to be kind to yourself, validate yourself, practice self-compassion, and move on. You can also…

Replace this pattern:

1. negative thought, 2. invalidation, 3. thought suppression…

With this pattern:

1. negative thought, 2. validation (normalization), 3. acceptance/refocus or 4. challenge/reframe/refocus.

Worry Shows You Care

Worry thoughts are part of life. They show you care about something enough to worry about it. It’s how you handle these thoughts and recover that matters. Start by normalizing and other ways of validating yourself. Work hard, practice better focus, adopt a positive mindset, and be prepared for negative thoughts and worries to come up. When they do, know that they’re normal, don’t take them too seriously, acknowledge them and challenge them or move on, refocus, and perform.

References

Beilock, S. L., Afremow, J. A., Rabe, A. L., & Carr, T. H. (2001). “Don’t miss!” The debilitating effects of suppressive imagery on golf putting performance. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 23(3), 200-221.

Janelle, C. M. (1999). Ironic mental processes in sport: Implications for sport psychologists. The Sport Psychologist, 13(2), 201-220.

Wenzlaff, R. M., & Wegner, D. M. (2000). Thought suppression. Annual review of psychology, 51(1), 59-91.

One of the greatest challenges of using mental skills during performance involves knowing which mental skills to use, how, and when to use them. Just like with physical skills, performers should practice mental skills until mastering them. The off-season or pre-season may be the best time to learn, practice, and master mental skills because performers can make adjustments, learn which mental skills work best for them given their performance tasks, and how to use them under less pressure to perform. In addition, these skills can be practiced repetitively enough to become habit, eventually automatically showing up when needed with much less effort, freeing up effort to focus, just play, and perform in an optimal flow state.

Sierra Mercier | Andre Mercier Photography

Unfortunately, many performers seek mental skills training when performance isn’t going so well, often in the middle of a season, hoping to apply them readily and quickly turn around their performance. Performers can still certainly learn to use mental skills effectively mid-season, but selecting and timing the use of mental skills based on the context of performance tasks may require more time, effort, thinking, and practice, straining effort and resources that could otherwise be devoted to performance itself. Consulting a certified mental performance coach or certified sport psychologist can help performers reduce the mental and emotional burden of learning, applying mental skills, and performing mid-season.

One of the many ways athletes get tripped up when learning new mental skills, for instance, is by using step-by-step focusing and/or positive self-talk for well-learned tasks. Attentional focus and positive self-talk skills have been shown to benefit athletes as part of an evidence-based mental skills package, but research also shows that when and how performers use focus and self-talk can determine whether self-talk helps or hurts performance. For skilled performers, step-by-step attentional focus strategies, and self-talk consistent with self-instruction, have been shown to decrease the quality of performance in both skilled golfers and soccer players. For novice performers just learning tasks, this strategy may actually acquire physical skills and performance.

If you’ve mastered physical skills, thinking about the steps involved is overkill, and overthinking can interfere with optimal performance. While focus and positive self-talk can be helpful, instead of using them to overthink well-learned physical skills during competitive performance, it’s usually better to apply these skills before performance as a mental warm-up or after performance to learn which adjustments to make in the future. The take home message here is novice performers just learning physical skills should focus and perhaps use instructional self-talk to acquire skills. Advanced performers should typically clear their minds and just play, although they may need to acquire mental skills to get to this point, skills often best learned in the offseason or pre-season. The subtleties of sport psychology can make all of the difference for performers, so consider deeply learning mental skills by reading and practicing extensively and/or consulting a certified mental performance coach or certified sport psychologist. 

The 2018 World Cup highlighted the relationship between immigration, diversity, and team performance against the backdrop of intense international backlash toward both immigration and diversity. Many observers and commentators pointed to France, England, and Belgium, attributing part of their successes to immigration and their team diversity. Do similar or diverse teams actually perform better?

Organizational Research

Organizational psychology research shows that companies with the most racial and ethnic diversity are more likely to have above average financial returns, and those with the most gender diversity show better returns as well. Why might this be? It appears that diverse groups analyze information more accurately, make fewer errors, and are more innovative. For an excellent, easy-to-read summary of these findings, see David Rock’s blog.

Research in Sport

When diversity is embraced in sport organizations, performance also appears to improve, and additional benefits result. For instance, Fink and colleagues (2003) suggest that sport organizations may use reactive, compliant, or proactive approaches. Reactive approaches take fewer actions to change attitudes toward diversity, wait for problems to occur before taking actions, and usually adopt a narrower view of diversity (e.g., race, ethnicity only). Compliant approaches make efforts to comply with employment laws but do nothing to leverage diversity as a competitive advantage, failing to help diverse individuals succeed in the organizational culture. Proactive approaches genuinely reflect an understanding of the benefits of diversity. Proactive organizations commit to diversity and inclusion, exercise greater flexibility, address diversity more frequently and directly before problems occur, and strive to increase employee success and satisfaction. Research suggests that sport organizations that use proactive approaches report greater productivity, talented workers, retention of talent, diverse fan bases, satisfaction, involvement in decisions, creativity, diversity in the workplace, and lower liability.  

The United States has historically displayed an uneasy relationship with immigration and diversity, but its rise to the status of a global superpower has certainly coincided with substantial immigration and diversity. Teams, sport organizations, and entire countries that proactively embrace and commit to diversity can reap the social and performance benefits of diversity. Take a proactive approach to diversity so that your organization can benefit from the diversity you have. 

Finishing short-term and long-term goals and performing one’s best requires effort, persistence, and optimal focus. Focusing is directing attention toward things relevant to meeting one’s goals (e.g., task relevant information). Athletes, students, employees, and other performers face challenges but also facilitators that help them finishing their goals. Sport psychology research shows that mental preparation, mental skills, and optimal focus can certainly improve performance, helping performers effectively finish and attain goals.

Challenges

Performers must sustain both physical and mental efforts consistently to perform their best. As they approach their goals, performers may begin to experience diminishing physical and mental resources.

• Physical adversity, competition, injury, and fatigue can strain their resources.
• Mental challenges can include:
  • intrapersonal factors (e.g., attentional strain, distraction, increasing stress, anxiety, diminishing coping resources, fatigue, exhaustion)
  • interpersonal factors (e.g., teammates, coworkers, students, coaches, supervisors, instructors)
  • environmental factors (e.g., weather, infrastructure, distance)

Mental Skills: Goal Facilitators

In order to sustain physical and mental energy and finish goals, performers should adopt the following mental skills:

• Adopt a mindful focus on the present
• Use clear, objective, nonjudgmental thinking
• Tailor attentional style to the task (e.g., broad, narrow, internal, external)
• Focus on doing what works
• If possible and appropriate, take breaks to reset
• Use effective time management strategies and prioritize
• Adopt a growth mindset to foster grit
• Use positive, realistic thinking and self-talk
• Use bargaining (e.g., “just a little longer/faster/farther, and you’ll be done)
• Adopt autonomous, intrinsic motivation
• Focus less on outcomes, more on effort, process, and performance
• Prepare for and learn from setbacks, adjust efforts and strategies accordingly
• Stay positive even when mistakes and setbacks occur; use both simply as information to learn more about the self, adjust, and perform even better

Follow this blog and check out these resources to learn more about the value of sport psychology for improving performance.

Sport psychology consultants that use evidence-based mental skills training typically teach interventions like goal setting, positive thinking strategies, relaxation and intensity management techniques, and imagery to help performers overcome problems that interfere with performance. How well do these interventions work?

During the Summer 2018 Semester, I taught a sport psychology course at the University of Nevada, Reno for the 14^th time. In addition to covering academic subjects in this course, we practiced in-class mental skills training exercises. Students actively practiced:

• SMART goal setting
• positive thinking via mindfulness and cognitive reframing
• diaphragmatic breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, cold water for relaxation and intensity management
• and imagery

Students also learned about evaluation, measurement, and assessment in sport psychology, and they took the Athletic Coping Skills Inventory before and after learning these mental skills. This allowed us to compare their self-reported mental skills strengths and weaknesses before and after learning mental skills. The results were promising:

The 11 students who participated in pre-post testing reported statistically significantly increased coping with adversity, concentration and achievement motivation, confidence, and goal setting and mental preparation, and total personal coping resources. The more frequently students attended classes that taught sport psychology, mental skills, and related subjects, the higher they performed on the final exam and with respect to their final course grades (after removing their attendance grade from their final grade). In other words, the more students received and practiced mental skills training and related education, the more they reported having solid mental skills, and the better they performed academically in this course. Follow this blog and check out these resources to learn more about the value of sport psychology for improving performance.

Athletes, coaches, and even sport psychology consultants sometimes focus so narrowly on developing physical or mental skills only to realize they’ve overlooked a major problem interfering with sport performance – the lack of adequate nutrition. This sometimes seems surprising if a common implicit bias is operating – that athletes look fit and healthy, therefore they are. Physically and behaviorally, athletes can actually be undernourished. How widespread of a problem is this?

One study found that 91% of female college athletes failed to get adequate energy intake from food, the majority skipped breakfast, and only 16% monitored their hydration¹. Athletes are also at a higher risk of eating disorders², particularly in lean sports, those in which athletes believe that weight impacts performance, whether or not it actually does. Dieting can also increase the risk of eating disorders. Not only does the lack of energy impact performance, but efforts to improve performance without addressing eating first may prove fruitless. 

Depending on the sport, athletes may need a much larger amount of calories than they realize. Michael Phelps reportedly used to consume 12,000 calories a day, but he later reported the true amount was lower. His revised amount was still something between 8,000-10,000 calories. 

Working with a registered dietician or practicing principles of intuitive eating can help athletes make sure they avoid energy deficiency, giving them energy to perform, focus, think clearly, and make the best decisions. Only after this are athletes likely to profit the most from physical and mental skills training. Use these links to find a registered dietician, learn about intuitive eating, or learn more about eating disorders. 

References

¹Shriver, L. H., Betts, N. M., & Wollenberg, G. (2013). Dietary intakes and eating habits of college athletes: are female college athletes following the current sports nutrition standards? Journal of American College Health, 61(1), 10-16.

²Sundgot-Borgen, J., & Torstveit, M. K. (2004). Prevalence of eating disorders in elite athletes is higher than in the general population. Clinical journal of sport medicine, 14(1), 25-32.

Most of us know that exercise is good for the body, decreasing the risk of health problems. Fewer people know about the mental health benefits of exercise, including decreased depression and anxiety, increased self-esteem, improved sleep, and improved cognitive functioning. In fact aerobic exercise is about as effective at reducing depression as therapy and antidepressants. Despite the benefits of exercise, most Americans fail to exercise enough to experience these benefits, even with the best intentions.

People who start exercising often fail to continue for a variety of reasons. Common reasons for quitting include lack of time, lack access to exercise options, poor choice of exercise, and injury. When people are successful, they select exercise options that are close in proximity, have social support, find a workout partner or group, and adopt a positive mindset with commitment and determination.

If you’d like to experience the benefits of exercise, here are a few things you can do:

1. Make sure you are healthy enough to exercise by consulting a physician or medical practitioner to reduce the risk of injury.  
2. Expand your definition of exercise to physical activities beyond working out in a gym; people are even more likely to stick to sports and outdoor activities, even walking counts, and a variety of activities can be healthy and rewarding.
3. Select an activity that you’ve done before or something that sounds fun.
4. Find ways to make it easier to exercise, remove barriers by scheduling and using effective time management skills, and get new comfortable exercise apparel or gear appropriate for the weather and the activity.
5. Use music to enhance the experience or find a partner or even a pet, if you walk or run, and if both of you are healthy enough to keep up.
6. Be mindful, breathe, and pace yourself to make sure you have a safe and positive experience that you’ll want to practice again.

To start exercising and keep it up, adopt a positive mindset, learn about sustaining motivation, and don’t forget to have fun!

Having observed the similarities between soccer, basketball, hockey, and other sports that include a clear target for scoring and interacting team offensive and defensive positions, I’ve often wondered what mental skills help these athletes achieve high-level performance, and what are the best mental skills for scoring? Performers pursuing excellence in team sports such as soccer, basketball, and hockey face a complex set of challenges. When the goal is to kick, throw, or hit the ball or puck past the defense toward the target, opportunities to score must be weighed against passing and dribbling or moving to create a better opportunity. Success in these sports clearly requires physical speed, strength, and endurance, but also technical, tactical skills, and mental skills such as effective focus, creativity, flexibility, and effective decision-making.

External Focus

Although research generally supports the widely used cognitive behavioral sport psychology interventions for team sports including relaxation, imagery, and self-talk, but not necessarily attentional focus, very few sport psychology studies directly measure mental processes during sport performance, making it difficult to know how interventions help performance^2,3. Specifically, should athletes in team sports focus internally or externally during sport performance? Some indications suggest that an external perceptual focus on the environment may be more beneficial in these sports, helping athletes recognize important meaningful patterns, allowing them to react quickly and effectively^4,5. By contrast, internal focus may result in missing important external information and may even interfere with quick, effective decision-making¹– in these sports, it may be better to maintain momentary focus on the external environment, so consider scanning the external environment and waiting until the time is right to pass, dribble, move, or shoot.

Creativity & Cognitive Flexibility

For games that require athletes to make simultaneous moves, being predictable clearly places one at a disadvantage as defenses focused externally quickly adapt. Not surprisingly, mixed strategies are predicted to be best by game theorists and shown to be the most effective⁶. After attending to the external environment, mental skills that allow athletes to change course and make different decisions allow them to adapt best to dynamically changing environments. In team sports, do whatever it takes in the moment to help your team, and be willing to shift strategies, so consider having a game planbut bewilling and able tochange your plan on a dime to pass, dribble, move, shoot, or score depending on whatever the best decision might be in the moment for your team.

Optimal Timing, Automaticity, & Decision Making

Research shows that external focus may improve performance in team sports by encouraging athletes to automatically react effectively to the environment instead of focusing internally and possibly overthinking their actions^4,5. In addition, greater creativity, response inhibition, and cognitive flexibility are found in higher-level soccer players⁷. Taken altogether, to perform your best in team shooting and scoring sports, rather than forcing a shot, DON’T BE A HERO:

• focus keenly on the external environment, scanning it constantly for relevant information;
• be ready for the unexpected, and be unpredictable, mixing your decisions to see what works best;
• make it your goal do the right thing for your team, whatever it is, at the right time;
• wait for the opportunity to pass, dribble, move, shoot, and score, and react automatically;
• and attend to the results of your efforts, adjusting your strategies as needed.

References

¹ Thelwell, R. C., Greenlees, I. A., & Weston, N. J. (2006). Using psychological skills training to develop soccer performance. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 18(3), 254-270.

² Dickens, Y. L., Van Raalte, J., & Hurlburt, R. T. (2018). On investigating self-talk: A descriptive experience sampling study of inner experience during golf performance. The Sport Psychologist, 32(1), 66-73.

³Dickens, Y. L. (2007). Inner experience during golf performance (Doctoral dissertation, University of Nevada, Las Vegas).

⁴ Wulf, G., McConnel, N., Gärtner, M., & Schwarz, A. (2002). Enhancing the learning of sport skills through external-focus feedback. Journal of motor behavior, 34(2), 171-182.

⁵ Wulf, G., & Su, J. (2007). An external focus of attention enhances golf shot accuracy in beginners and experts. Research quarterly for exercise and sport, 78(4), 384-389.

⁶ Chiappori, P. A., Levitt, S., & Groseclose, T. (2002). Testing mixed-strategy equilibria when players are heterogeneous: The case of penalty kicks in soccer. American Economic Review, 92(4), 1138-1151.

⁷ Vestberg, T., Gustafson, R., Maurex, L., Ingvar, M., & Petrovic, P. (2012). Executive functions predict the success of top-soccer players. PloS one, 7(4), e34731.

Mental skills training has been shown to improve sport performance^1,2,3. Performers can also benefit from sport psychology consultation to cope with injuries after they occur. Few performers or coaches though realize that mental skills training can also reduce the probability of injury during performance, so many are surprised to hear this.

Mark Andersen and Jean Williams first suggested that personality factors, perceptions, history with stressors and coping style, and yes, having mental skills, predicts the probability that an athlete will get injured^4,5. Although the research has not always consistently supported each and every aspect of this model (e.g., personality no so much)⁶, research more consistently shows that athletes with greater life stress are particularly at greater risk of injury^6,7. Certainly physical factors such as insufficient training, overtraining, fatigue, and muscle imbalance can predict injury⁶, but one study found that up to 18% of time lost due to injury was explained by psychological and social factors⁸.

How might stress be related to injury? Stress may interfere with performers’ concentration, narrowing their attentional field. This may cause them to miss important information, lead to negative thinking and excessive muscle tension, and can put performers at greater risk of injury^5,6,8.

What can performers do to prevent injury? Research suggests stress management and mental skills training can help including progressive muscle relaxation, imagery, goal-setting and planning reduces time lost due to injury⁹, and a controlled study showed that similar cognitive behavioral stress management also reduced time lost to injury¹⁰. Follow this blog and these others (1, 2, 3) for more information about mental skills training to improve performance.

References

¹Feltz, D. L., & Landers, D. M. (1983). The effects of mental practice on motor skill learning and performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of sport psychology, 5(1), 25-57.

²Hatzigeorgiadis, A., Zourbanos, N., Galanis, E., & Theodorakis, Y. (2011). Self-talk and sports performance: A meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(4), 348-356.

³Weinberg, R. (2008). Does imagery work? Effects on performance and mental skills. Journal of Imagery Research in Sport and Physical Activity, 3(1).

⁴Anderson, M., & Williams, 1988. A model of stress and athletic injury: Prediction and prevention, Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 10(3), 297.

⁵Williams, J. M. & Andersen, M. B. (2007). Psychosocial antecedents of sport and injury: Review and critique of the stress and injury model. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 10, 5-25.

⁶Weinberg, R. S., & Gould, D. (2011). Athletic injuries and psychology. Foundations of Sports and Exercise Psychology, 447-461.

⁷Cox, R. (2012). The psychology of athletic injuries and career termination. Sport Psychology Concepts and Applications, 440-461.

⁸Smith, R. E., Ptacek, J. T., & Patterson, E. (2000). Moderator effects of cognitive and somatic trait anxiety on the relation between life stress and physical injuries.

⁹Maddison, R., & Prapavessis, H. (2005). A psychological approach to the prediction and prevention of athletic injury. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 27(3), 289-310.

¹⁰Perna, F. M., Antoni, M. H., Baum, A., Gordon, P., & Schneiderman, N. (2003). Cognitive behavioral stress management effects on injury and illness among competitive athletes: a randomized clinical trial. Annals of behavioral medicine, 25(1), 66-73.