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Blogging on Peer Reviewed Research in Sport and Exercise
One of the comments that we've had back from members is that they would like more reference to peer-reviewed research. Well, thanks to Dan Peterson (an Information Services Director from Wisconsin, USA) and Mark Helme for leading the way, and showing how it can be done.Practitioners in the field don't have access to the latest databases and journals a lot of the time. When someone like Dan blogs on a subject that relates peer-reviewed research to the practical world of sport, it is very helpful. It gives someone like me a reference to explore. And as I've argued before, the more we all blog, the more we all learn and develop as professionals.
What Dan also shows is that you don't have to be an academic to blog on research and make yourself a valuable part of our community. But, let's be fair, there are many students and academics on iStadia that have peer-reviewed research at their fingertips.
I'm sure that I speak for many sport and exercise professionals when I say that, no matter how confident you might be in your writing style, or whether you think you have anything unique or interesting to say, blogs that keep us informed about what is going on in the world of research are of great value.
So thanks, Dan and Mark, and to the rest of the community: Next time you see an interesting piece of research, please tell us about it!
P.S. It also gives us another place to promote your material, which we love to do:
Rob Robson
iStadia - Networking for Sport & Exercise Community
New Coaching Framework Announced by Sports Coach UK
This week Sports Coach UK announced their new UK Coaching Framework, which is designed "to create a cohesive, ethical, inclusive and valued coaching system where skilled coaches support children, adults, players and athletes at all stages of their development in sport, and that is world-leading by 2016".The emphasis appears to be not only on elite sport, but on helping create coaches that can build participation at grass-roots level too. The framework will also create a clearer career structure for sports coaches, "within a professionally regulated vocation".
I'd be particularly interested to find out if anyone knows more about this. I was only able to find the executive summary of the framework. The rest of the story is here.
Join the world's sport and exercise community today!
Sport business development: How do you respond to enquiries?
I received a call this evening from an athlete that wanted some help.So, I did what I would normally do. I asked her what was happening and instigated a conversation.
After about 15 minutes we started to explore some of the practicalities - where was she, could we meet etc.
At that point she made an interesting comment. She said that she had called a few people and only felt that she'd clicked with me. This wasn't the first time I'd had a comment that suggested we were developing rapport already, and I was genuinely interested to know: What was different about me?
She said she was put off because the other professionals she spoke to didn't seem to really be that interested in her issue, but just wanted to set up a consultation. In other words, they were rushing to get to second base without getting to first.
I've been in consulting for 10 years, and I'm still a relative novice when it comes to business development, but I thought I'd share some thoughts on how to deal with consulting enquiries.
1. This is first step in a process. Don't try to rush to next steps.
2. Find out what the key issues are from the enquirer's point of view. Ask questions and more questions, and demonstrate understanding by playing back the issues to them.
3. Be prepared to invest some time in the person on the phone. It doesn't matter if you don't know straight away whether they have a budget, or whether there are other barriers to you working together. Yes, establish these, but not at the expense of rapport.
4. Try to help them, even if that means passing them on to someone else in your network. What goes around, comes around.
The first call is about establishing that you are competent and trustworthy enough to move to the next step with. For an individual client the next step might be a paid consultation, while for a bigger prospect it might simply be a meeting to discuss their needs in detail. If you treat the person on the end of the phone as a person, you're more likely to get to that next step.
Share business development tips and experiences in the sports entrepreneurship and business development club.
What's harder to find? A Sport Psychologist or a consumer of Sport Psychology?
I'm not sure how much the question in the title makes sense, but let me enlighten you. By no means for the first time this year I had a call from someone in another part of the country that was looking for a sport psychologist and was having trouble finding one. That's a customer (a professional sports person, by the way) that can't find someone to buy from.How crazy is that?
I immediately thought of two people in this guy's area that are members of iStadia. He wanted to get started with some face-to-face work very quickly, so needed phone numbers. One, it turns out, the guy had done some work with before and he was looking for something different. Fair enough. The other didn't have a phone number on their profile. A consultant that doesn't want to be called by a prospective customer...?
From where I'm sitting, it seems like this:
Sport psychologists often believe that the market for their work is limited or hard to access, that it is difficult to make a living in sport psychology.
Sportspeople that don't have access to sport psychologists through a programme of support often find it difficult to find the help that they need.
Think about that. If you aren't a sport psychologist, maybe you could just substitute the words and the issue would be just the same...
Are you making yourself easy or difficult to find?
Maybe you've got lucrative work coming out of your ears and don't need to put yourself out there....
Maybe you do, but don't know how.
If it's the latter, I'm not a marketing guru, but I'm more than happy to share what I've learned through my own experiences. Give me a shout. That's what networking is about.....
One small thing you can do if you are a member of iStadia: tick the box near the bottom of this page. It will certainly help us to promote you.
Something else - check out Keith's blog on forming an entrepreneurship and business development club.
If you aren't a member, maybe it's time to sign up?
Rob Robson
Sport and Business Psychologist, WarwickshireBASES and Human Kinetics Guide to Careers in Sport and Exercise Sciences
The British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences (BASES) have, in conjunction with Human Kinetics publishers, released a guide to careers in sport and exercise sciences.It includes:
- Choosing courses at school and college
- Choosing undergraduate and postgraduate courses
- Funding for postgraduate courses
- Career opportunities
- Managing your careers
- 17 Career profiles
Download the guide here.
The pendulum swings... ...is positive psychology simply a new blindess?
For those that are interested in psychology, you will have noticed the rise and rise of "positive psychology" since its conception towards the end of the 90's.Positive psychology is "the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive." (according to the University of Pennsylvania, Positive Psychology Centre). It focuses on positive experiences, positive emotions, and generally "optimal human functioning". "Employee Engagement" as a concept is a product of the positive psychology movement.
According to Dr. Martin Seligman, its founder "The most important thing, the most general thing I learned, was that psychology was half-baked, literally half-baked. We had baked the part about mental illness; we had baked the part about repair of damage...The other side's unbaked, the side of strength, the side of what we're good at."
I'm in no doubt that psychology was blind to the positive before, focusing on deficit, mental illness, emotions such as anxiety and anger rather than happiness, but to me, building a whole psychology, as a reaction to the past, that excludes all of the negative aspects of humanity, is just as blind as that which went before. OK, so they may be addressing an imbalance, but it seems that students and professionals are signing up to positive psychology as a "paradigm", and not as one half of a complete whole.
There have, however, been frameworks developed that allow us to coherently explore both the positive and negative aspects of human experience and functioning. One such framework is Reversal Theory, which was conceived by Michael Apter in the 1970s and now has over 30 years of research and application behind it. It gives us the mechanism to understand the positive and the negative side-by-side rather than having to figure them out separately.
In doing so we can explore what really motivated people, what makes them happy, what makes them unhappy, why they perform and why they don't, why they change and why they don't. We can put all of these explanations on the same page.
Surely any movement that excludes one half of human experience simply limits our ability to understand - and therefore to act.
Rob Robson
Sport and Business Psychologist, WarwickshireWhere is the value-add in sport psychology?
I often find myself thinking about where the real value is, or should be, in sport psychology, and whether we have the balance right.I've always been struck by how much emphasis there is in the literature on the tools of the trade - the interventions like imagery, goals setting, self-talk, counselling skills, etc.
As a profession, we do talk about "evidence-based practice" but I do wonder to what extent this ideal is really achieved.
Is our value in sport a function of our practical skills or our depth of analysis? In reality, it has to be both, and more than that it has to be our ability to turn insight into intervention. But I have a nagging suspicion that there are "sport psychologists" out there that are more intervention than insight.
I believe that because of the language that I see written out there - the implication is that sport psychology equals goal setting plus imagery plus relaxation plus self-talk - although I'm aware that you have to make material accessible to the customer and they can relate to practical stuff. But I've also come across practitioners that have no real sense of what underlying principles are guiding their work.
I also find that an awful lot of the sport psychology literature - the frameworks and theories out there in the mainstream - lacking in real insight. What does it explain? I get frustrated when I read journals at what seems to me to be a lack of ambition in the academic sector to really get to the bottom of the big issues, whether that be in sports performance or exercise promotion. There's just so much incremental reseach out there. There's also a lot of rubbish. I remember reading that we need more sport-specific models in sport psychology. "Funny, I thought. Almost everything I ever found useful in my practice came from elsewhere in psychology".
If we can offer deep insights into performance, then we become valuable. If we focus on the toolkit, the we become a commodity. The imapct of this is that it will never become a really well-paid profession. Sure, a few people can do well on the golf or tennis tours, or maybe in professional football, but on average sport psychology is just not a lucrative business.
Why do I say this? Well, surely a good coach, with years of experience, that can learn to teach imagery, relaxation, goal setting or go on a counselling skills course will add more value than a sport psychologist who cannot demonstrate that they bring the insight required to fundamentally improve performance?
Rob Robson is a Sport Psychologist and Business Consultant based in Warwickshire, UK who specialises in helping individuals to and organisations to achieve high performance.
