Food journaling may not sound sexy, but time and time again research proves that it works. In fact, according to a study from Kaiser Permanente's Center for Health Research, keeping a food diary can double a person's weight loss. “Without this tool, many people forget the snacks and bites taken while standing, preparing food for others or munching in the car. Over time these unrecognized snacks can lead to several extra pounds gained per year,” says Gueron. If you’re not the pad and paper type, Ansel recommends keeping a running journal on your smartphone or trying an app like MyFitness Pal or Lose It.
Self-talk refers to the thoughts and words athletes and performers say to themselves, usually in their minds. Self-talk phrases (or cues) are used to direct attention towards a particular thing in order to improve focus or are used alongside other techniques to facilitate their effectiveness. For example, a softball player may think "release point" when at bat to direct her attention to the point where the pitcher releases the ball, while a golfer may say "smooth stroke" before putting to stay relaxed. Research suggests either positive or negative self-talk may improve performance, suggesting the effectiveness of self-talk phrases depends on how the phrase is interpreted by the individual. However, the use of positive self-talk is considered to be more efficacious and is consistent with the associative network theory of Gordon Bower and the self-efficacy tenet within the broader Social Cognitive Theory of Albert Bandura. The use of words in sport has been widely utilized. The ability to bombard the unconscious mind with one single positive phrase, is one of the most effective and easy to use psychological skills available to any athlete.
Shawnte Mitchell is general counsel and vice president of human resources, legal affairs and compliance at Aptevo Therapeutics Inc. At her previous employer, she was offered a coach, Suzi Pomerantz of Innovative Leadership International, to address certain internal team challenges. “[Pomerantz] helped me define the things that were contributing to those challenges — and sort out which of those things were mine.”
Students may wish to become student members of Division 47 of the American Psychological Association: Sports Psychology. Membership may provide them with leadership as well as networking opportunities. They will receive a newsletter and a journal, Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology. The dissertation provides an opportunity to distinguish oneself in the field. Division 47 has an award competition for dissertations.
The popularity of executive coaching owes much to the modern craze for easy answers. Businesspeople in general—and American ones in particular—constantly look for new ways to change as quickly and painlessly as possible. Self-help manuals abound. Success is defined in 12 simple steps or seven effective habits. In this environment of quick fixes, psychotherapy has become marginalized. And executive coaches have stepped in to fill the gap, offering a kind of instant alternative. As management guru Warren Bennis observes, “A lot of executive coaching is really an acceptable form of psychotherapy. It’s still tough to say, ‘I’m going to see my therapist.’ It’s okay to say, ‘I’m getting counseling from my coach.’”
Instead of doing a detox or cleanse in the hopes of resetting your GI system (and speeding up weight loss), boost your gut health naturally with fiber-filled foods. “Fiber is a carbohydrate found in fruits, vegetables and whole grains, but unlike other forms of carbohydrates, it is harder to digest. As it passes through your digestive system, it stimulates the receptors that tell your brain you’re full. People who consume more fiber tend to have healthier body weights,” says Gueron. If you’re looking for more specific fiber-filled foods to reboot your gut, eat the three P’s: prunes, pulses, and pears. Prunes help maintain good digestive health and can positively affect the bacteria living in the gut. Pulses, which include lentils, beans, and peas, improve gut health by strengthening the gut barrier. And pears contain prebiotic fiber, which help promote intestinal health by providing food for beneficial probiotic bacteria.
In FY2009, DAU launched an initiative to train and qualify a cadre of experienced acquisition practitioners to serve as executive coaches. Using a refined, proven coaching model/process, we’ve continued to train and qualify 58 internal coaches, who have engaged over 360 defense acquisition workforce (DAW) leaders and received great results and feedback. To complement this one-on-one and team coaching, our leadership development courses, including our Leader as Coach course, have reached over 5,500 leaders and supervisors. These collective efforts emphasize the responsibilities of each leader to develop, coach, and mentor members of their workforce, while creating a long-term culture change, future business successes, and a learning enterprise.
Sports psychology can be offered as a concentration within a counseling or clinical psychology program. A student in an applied branch of psychology will have coursework in biological, cognitive-affective, and social bases of behavior. The program will also provide a foundation in understanding and treating psychological disturbances, utilizing psychology methodologies, and adhering to professional standards. In addition, a sport psychology program typically includes coursework in the physiological or biomechanical bases of sport.
The challenges can come from a few different aspects. There is the level of difficulty that clients have in overcoming obstacles that they may be facing. Then there are outside dynamics that can make a difference, such as pressure that athletes may feel from their family, relationships, coaches, or even the media. One of the biggest challenges is when an athlete may lack some of the motivation necessary to bring change or develop a necessary skill—perhaps it was their coach’s or family’s idea that they see a sports psychologist and they are still uncertain about whether or not they want to put in the time to address the mental side of their game. Sports psychology is not a magic formula for success. It is an approach to performance enhancement that requires motivation and participation by the athletes themselves. So when that cooperation and motivation are lacking, it is perhaps the biggest challenge.
Practice, practice, practice. Get in with different consultants and see what they’re doing. Work with younger athletes on their mental game using your own experiences to start developing your models. Volunteer to be the mental coach of a youth team based on your credentials as an athlete. And keep reading and applying what you read to your own competitive experience. Keep being an athlete and test your skills on yourself first.
“Unlike therapy, which goes into depth about various issues usually dealing with the past and consulting which generally results in giving the client answers, coaching is more action-oriented and focuses primarily on the present and future.” Coaching focuses on what the client wants and utilizes a process through the one-on-one coaching sessions to enable the client to self-discover, learn and determine their own “answers”. It is the client who determines the goals and commits to their goal, while allowing the coach to help hold them accountable.
Life skills refer to the mental, emotional, behavioral, and social skills and resources developed through sport participation. Research in this area focuses on how life skills are developed and transferred from sports to other areas in life (e.g., from tennis to school) and on program development and implementation. Burnout in sport is typically characterized as having three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a reduced sense of accomplishment. Athletes who experience burnout may have different contributing factors, but the more frequent reasons include perfectionism, boredom, injuries, excessive pressure, and overtraining. Burnout is studied in many different athletic populations (e.g., coaches), but it is a major problem in youth sports and contributes to withdrawal from sport. Parenting in youth sport is necessary and critical for young athletes. Research on parenting explores behaviors that contribute to or hinder children’s participation. For example, research suggests children want their parents to provide support and become involved, but not give technical advice unless they are well-versed in the sport. Excessive demands from parents may also contribute to burnout.
There is also a range of options available, from one-on-one meetings to phone sessions to CDs and tapes. McGrail and Grossman agree that while potentially useful, recordings are not usually as effective as personal sessions. And there’s no shortage of opinions on the best ways to quit smoking; the gamut runs from hypnotherapy to Zyban and Nicotine Anonymous.
Consider Rob Bernstein. (In the interest of confidentiality, I use pseudonyms throughout this article.) He was an executive vice president of sales at an automotive parts distributor. According to the CEO, Bernstein caused trouble inside the company but was worth his weight in gold with clients. The situation reached the breaking point when Bernstein publicly humiliated a mail clerk who had interrupted a meeting to get someone to sign for a parcel. After that incident, the CEO assigned Tom Davis to coach Bernstein. Davis, a dapper onetime corporate lawyer, worked with Bernstein for four years. But instead of exploring Bernstein’s mistreatment of the support staff, Davis taught him techniques for “managing the little people”—in the most Machiavellian sense. The problem was that, while the coaching appeared to score some impressive successes, whenever Bernstein overcame one difficulty, he inevitably found another to take its place.
There are many ways to help executives grow as leaders. High-level training, mentoring, reading, job rotation and special assignments are just a few. The most overlooked alternative is attention from the individual's own manager. As coaching has become more fashionable, I've seen too many managers abdicate their own coaching responsibilities, turning a struggling executive over to a professional. Sometimes the problem is beyond what the manager can handle. But often managers hand off executives because they'd rather not deal with messy people stuff.
Since the mid-1990s, coaching professional associations such as the Association for Coaching (AC), the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC), the International Association of Coaching (IAC), and the International Coach Federation (ICF) have worked towards developing training standards.:287–312 Psychologist Jonathan Passmore noted in 2016::3
Skill commonly used for enhancing motivation, focusing attention on the aspects of performance that are most in need of improvement, or facilitating rehabilitation from injury. The establishment of a goal-setting program often includes several common components, including: emphasis on skill development (not the outcome, such as winning), identifying target dates for attaining goals, identifying goal achievement strategies, and providing regular goal evaluation.
At least in business and executive coaching, I believe we will see more coaches who have strong industry and line experience. As leaders face increasing pressure to deliver results in the short term and create exciting futures for the long term, all while developing leaders, they themselves will require coaches and advisers who can help them think deeply through this range of complex issues. - Rose Cartolari, Rose Cartolari Consulting
When therapists attempt to uncover so-called repressed memories, they may create false memories in their patients. In the 1980s and 1990s, the notion of uncovering repressed memories via hypnotherapy was very common. Because people are highly suggestible while they are under hypnosis, they may be more likely to “remember” things that did not actually occur, and then fervently believe them when they come out of the hypnotic trance.
Passion, making it about the athlete and not about you, and clear communication. You have to be willing to say what the athlete doesn’t want to hear and to go in deep with what’s stopping them. They might, and probably will resist, so you have to really present the coaching in a way that’s not confronting, but rather in which they can really see the opportunity that’s available in taking the coaching.
The program is delivered in five modules and students do not have to commit to the full degree until the end of Module 3. For Module 1 you can choose one of two options: Coaching for Organization Consultants (click link for more information) or Team Coaching for Consultants. Module 3 enables you to prepare to become an Ashridge Accredited Coach, a popular certification that has been helping coaches to excel since 2002.
Even when coaches adopt a more empirically validated approach than McNulty did, they still tend to fall into the trap of treating the symptoms rather than the disorder. That’s because they typically derive their treatments from behavioral psychology. Of course, behaviorism has been a great boon to psychiatry in recent years. Findings from this discipline have helped people enormously in controlling specific behaviors and learning to cope in particular situations. But treatments derived from behavioral psychology are sometimes too limited to address the problems that disrupt executives’ ability to function.
Sports have always been a big part of my life and culture, so it is a great fit for me personally to be involved in a profession that allows me to make an impact in areas for which I have a true passion. I also enjoy the fact that I am able to address both performance enhancement and mental skills training while still being able to offer assistance to athletes and performers who are stuck, or are experiencing issues that hinder their performance or life satisfaction. Additionally, compared to other branches of psychology, sports psychology utilizes many techniques and interventions that require very active participation from both the psychologist and the client. That is another factor that is very fitting with my approach.
Take Rich Garvin, the CEO of an athletic shoe manufacturing company with sales in excess of $100 million a year. Despite his company’s size, Garvin had never hired a coach for any of his direct reports. He knew that his HR director used trainers and coaches, but Garvin was a finance guy first and foremost. And since the athletic shoe industry was flying high, he left personnel matters to those who were paid to worry about them. But in the late 1990s, the market for athletic shoes collapsed. In Garvin’s world, the most immediate casualty was his COO, who snapped under the strain of failing to meet sales estimates for three consecutive quarters. The COO began venting his frustration on store managers, buyers, and suppliers.
Bush has difficulty adhering to his physical therapy regimen after a sports injury; Dr. Banks is able to help him with motivation and consistency in maintaining these appointments and exercises. Bush is also experiencing pain from his injury, and Dr. Banks is able to teach him mental exercises like meditation that will help relieve some of the pain.
Several attempts have failed due to "I don't want to stop smoking because I love it" excuse. This time I really decided to quit and also was trying to go back to my own profession as physician (I was doing marketing training in the pharma industry). I had a chance to train in hypnosis and psychotherapy consecutively. During hypnosis training I decided to quit by the help of hypnosis but to be on the safe side I also started Zyban. I could not find a proper hypnotist here in Turkey (a non-expensive one I mean), so I decided to go through a downloaded recording.
Executive coaching is hot. What was stigma ("You're so broken you need a coach?") has become status symbol ("You're so valuable you get a coach?"). Tiger Woods and Michael Phelps have coaches. Even President Barack Obama has a coach, if you count David Axelrod. Microsoft 's young high-potential leaders get coaches. If elite athletes and organizations think they need coaches, shouldn't you have one too? Shouldn't we all?
"FMI's Executive Coaching provides opportunities for key leaders to identify specific areas of focus and work one on one with a coach to become stronger leaders. The personal time investment can be significant, but the potential benefits to the individual and firm makes FMI's coaching an incredibly valuable tool. FMI took great care in understanding the firm's needs as well as my personal development goals in matching me to a coach that worked with me to maximize the benefits of this coaching. "
His coach challenged him to identify what was important and align his behaviors accordingly. With his coach’s help, Jagtiani redesigned his life. “I’ve been asked to join the senior partner ranks several times, but I’ll only consider it after my daughter is in college, and I have a year to support my wife in finding her next chapter.” For the first time, Jagtiani said he feels aligned. “I can feel the difference in the way clients trust me. They know what they see is what they get.”
It is far easier to describe what hypnosis is not rather than to describe what it is. For example, it is not one person controlling the mind of another. The patient is not unconscious and does not lose control of his or her faculties. People will not do things under hypnosis that they would be unwilling to do otherwise. The person being hypnotized is always in control. The hypnotized person decides how deep the trance will be, what suggestions will be accepted, and when to awaken. Therefore, a hypnotyized person cannot be forever "lost" if the therapist should fall dead during an induction or while the patient is deep in trance.
Although there are different techniques, clinical hypnotherapy is generally performed in a calm, therapeutic environment. The therapist will guide you into a relaxed, focused state and ask you to think about experiences and situations in positive ways that can help you change the way you think and behave. Unlike some dramatic portrayals of hypnosis in movies, books, or on stage, you will not be unconscious, asleep, or in any way out of control of yourself. You will hear the therapist’s suggestions, but it is up to you to decide whether or not to act on them.