In today’s world, professional athletes have become the new gods and goddesses. Players like Tiger Woods, Roger Federer and Serena Williams earn hundreds of millions per year, and are adored by fans in every nation in the world. Nearly every young boy and girl harbors secret fantasies of becoming their sports next superstar and to achieve fame, fortune and love.
My day-to-day work as a sport psychologist is to treat many of these athletes in order to remove all obstacles getting in their way during their climb to the top. You may find it interesting to learn from where my most valuable techniques emerge from. The following are some of the key theorists that form the foundation of my work as a sport psychologist.
The bulk of these techniques and theories, though well-known, have been largely ignored by the field of sport psychology. At this point, the field is trying desperately to help the athlete to suppress any undesirable emotion that gets in his way. But the problem with all those techniques is a that they just don’t seem to do much good. What does seem to work is the following:
1. Carl Rogers and the art of listening: Rogers was a professor at the University of Chicago and founder of humanistic psychology. His technique is known as client-centered therapy and consists of attentive empathic listening without judgement. Whether wittingly or not, my guess is that the bulk of good that accrues in any sport psychologists office is based upon them having the good sense to shut up and let the athlete talk. Empathy, sympathy, ventilation and solace go a long way in obtaining mental health for the athlete.
2. Sigmund Freud and aggression: Freud is the founder of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and is considered to be one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. He wrote over 60 books and his writings have suffused contemporary Western thought in philosophy, science, psychiatry literature and art. He believed man’s behavior was dictated by either the sexual or aggressive drives.
Sport is primarily the sublimation of aggressive drives and so it is clear that the athlete that has free access to his or her aggressive drives without the encumbrance of guilt will be at an advantage. A good example of this is in TWoods, the wealthiest and one of the winning-est golfers in history. His father was a Green Beret, and as the youngest, before he left for a tournament his mom would look at him and say, “Go kill them all, Tiger. Go kill them all.” In other words, he got in touch with his aggression. And everyone is by now familiar with that aggressive Tiger fist pump.
3. Carl Jung and the shadow: Along with Alfred Adler and Freud, Jung was one of the founders of depth psychology. His notion of the shadow was that part of us that is disowned and unconscious. Many of us have been brought up to always be nice and friendly and to suppress our aggressive and more powerful side. But nice and friendly will not get you too far on the playing filed. Hence it is crucial that the athlete be given techniques which allow him or her to get in touch with their shadow side. Robert Bly, the poet, author of Iron John and leader of the men’s movement in the 1970s amplified the idea of the Jung’s shadow and how men had lost touch with their masculine or aggressive nature.
4. Carl Jung and the zone: Jung pointed out that in order to grow one must go through a “liminal space” or a doorway to the next level. The image of liminal space is crucial for athletes if they want to enter the zone of calm since they must learn how to separate from others in order to do so. An athlete in the zone has gone through a liminal space and is functioning at a higher and transcendent level in order to win.
5. Alfred Adler and the desire to win: Although his work is now out of style, I am certain that his theory of inferiority as a source of motivation is central to winning in every field. The only way one is able to exert disciplined effort year after year is if they feel they have something to prove. Every star athlete I have ever met suffered greatly as a child. Woods was tied to a tree in his neighborhood and had a racial epithet painted on his chest. Jimmy Connors and the Williams sisters grew up in poverty. In addition, Adler’s seminal work on birth order revealed that the middle child syndrome of feeling neglect was a strong source of motivation.
6. Ram Dass and “Be Here Now”: The Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert changed his name to Ram Dass and wrote the famous Zen Buddhist best-seller, “Be Here Now,” which is a guide to staying in the present. I use his tips on Zen walking and Zen breathing to help my athletes to avoid getting ahead of themselves and as a way to stay centered and calm.
You may recall the classic tune by Ann Murray about all this. It went like so:
“Don’t throw the past away,
You might need it some rainy day.
All our dreams will come true again,
When everything old is new again.”
The field of sport psychology is a discipline assigned with the task of helping athlete’s reach full potential. The field is now slowly coming to realize that the best way to do that is to use all those tried and true techniques given to us by Freud, Adler, Jung and Rogers, the founding fathers of psychology.
