AASP Newsletter - January 2019

Kristoffer Henriksen

Kristoffer Henriksen, PhD, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark & Team Denmark

Interviewed by Andrew Friesen, Pennsylvania State University, on behalf of the AASP Newsletter Committee

Andrew: What triggered the need for a shared professional philosophy for Team Denmark to move forward with its sport psych services? 

Kristoffer: Before the 2008 Olympics, Team Denmark didn’t have a sport psychology team; and after the 2008 post-Olympics evaluation, athletes told us that they felt well prepared on most issues and most things. However, in terms of the psychological part they felt that they were not prepared well enough. There had been sport psychology interventions in Denmark before, of course, but what they were built around ranged from one end of the spectrum to the other. Interventions could be anything from survival weekend camps, to talking to people, to doing exercises. The people who provided the services would be anyone from military people, to former athletes, to educated psychologists, to sport scientists.

So, it was basically the wild west—just people coming from all directions shooting in all different directions. And for this reason, a number of sport federations had been reluctant to actually start utilizing sport psychology because they felt that it was complete mayhem and didn't know what they were going to get; that it might actually be more harmful than helpful. So, we thought that it was very important to establish ourselves - right from the beginning - as a scientific-based and theoretically grounded sport science discipline that worked based on a solid and well described professional philosophy.

Andrew: How did you come together to develop a shared philosophy?

Kristoffer: Our management gave us a couple of months to sort it out. We started out with an initial conversation: What do we want to achieve as a team? Having read Artur Poczwardowski’s (2004) work on professional philosophies, we first wrote up about 50 “basic assumptions” about mental performance to start with and then we started distilling them down—some you could put together, and some we simply prioritized. We had agreed that we should have a maximum of 10 to keep it manageable. Moving into the philosophy we found out that we needed to change the order and some of the definitions a little bit to make it fit to our own situation in our culture and what we felt that the sport federation would like to see from us. 

We spent a number of days in a sort of a farm hotel where we would stay and eat and sleep and just work together and discuss professional philosophies. I would write a first draft of the document and then people would come back with reflections and ideas. We also made two versions of it—one for other sport psychology practitioners that we were working with and one for the sports federations, coaches, managers, and athletes, which was a lot shorter.

Andrew: How did the group choose which aspects of the professional philosophy to include and which ones not to include? 

Kristoffer: There was some disagreement in the beginning. We came from different sports backgrounds, so we had differing perspectives. For example, concerning the role of the coach: We had to write something up that emphasized that we can’t talk to the coach about what we are discussing with the athletes and yet we acknowledge that coaches want to be involved in the work and they want to know what are we doing. Also, the more they can support what we’re doing the better it is. We spent a lot of time discussing that. Some people will come from a background that says coaches should not be involved at all; some of us would come from a background saying that client confidentiality was in many situations only one among many key considerations. And so, we discussed the points for and against and tried to find enough common ground to satisfy all perspectives. 

Andrew: How did the Danish culture shape the professional philosophy?

Kristoffer: Well, I think existential psychology is part of our national understanding… it is just sort of who we are, I suppose. And for this particular reason, I think it has been fairly easy to persuade coaches and athletes that the whole work on values and identity, questions like “Who am I?”, “Who would I like to be?”, “What would I like my life to be about?” and handling the eternal fear make perfect sense. That whole set of questions is something that we spend quite a bit of time on when we talk with our athletes. Finding themselves, finding their footing and their values… I think we do that quite a bit more than teaching mental skills.

Andrew: And athletes and coaches are quite willing to engage in that kind of conversation.

Kristoffer: They are, yeah. And I think it’s got something to do with our national culture. With younger athletes, it will sometimes take a different form. But still responsive to the general idea. Sometimes we’ll have small laminated cards that represent ten different values – one on each; and before a training session we might put them on the ground, there will be two or three of each, and ask the athletes to pick a value that they think is important to them and that they would like to live out in this particular training session. And then we’ll discuss how well they managed to connect with that value and were there any situations where they ended up behaving way out of line in terms of that particular value.

Andrew: Is that a mentality / attitude that is shared by the sports psych professionals as well?

Kristoffer: Yes, absolutely. We've done a lot of work to support that thought. We’ve been talking about it, and we’ve also written about it in the Danish sports media. And athletes who are really grounded in their values, we’ve used them as case studies; they've been willing to tell their stories either in videos or in texts. We’ve been sort of writing it up for them, helping them to convey that message. So, we've been doing a lot of work over the last ten years to build up the idea that this is a very important part of sport psychology.

I think it's very healthy for the athletes, because results are not the only thing that matters. All athletes have periods where results are not coming; they’re not succeeding, and they are very much at risk in those periods of dropping out and losing interest. And especially, since Denmark is a small country, we can’t afford to have really good athletes lose motivation and interest just because things are not going smoothly for them. That’s why it’s critical that they know who they are - and are able to connect with that. 

I think it helps our athletes to have a good, meaningful career but also it helps them handle some of the more classic stuff, such as being very nervous. Because some of that nervousness comes from that thought, “If I win, I’m a success; if I don’t win, I’m a complete failure.” It’s often so black and white. We like to take some of that black and white out of it.

Andrew: So, you now have a document explaining the professional philosophy. How do you go about entrenching that, rolling that out and actually making changes so that what you do as a group follows this philosophy?

Kristoffer: We do a number of things. Every month we have four or five sessions where we just discuss cases and relate what happened to our philosophy. For instance, what I’m particularly happy about in the model is that we recognize that the athletes are firstly situated in a complex performance environment. Therefore, we as sport psych professionals can’t limit our focus to the athletes. Sometimes it's the environments that are not working. For example, there might be abusive coaches, or the team atmosphere is not good. So, many times we've been working on creating good team environments. And because that’s in the model, we can discuss that with coaches. 

To give an example, a coach might ask, “Could you do a workshop on commitment?” Very classic. And I would say, “Sure, but I don’t want to.” And they’ll go, “Why?” And I’ll say, “Because if you have an environment that does not stimulate commitment, I can talk to them for 10 hours and it won’t make a difference. It’s what happens every day that makes a difference. But I’ll help you build that committed environment.” And so, we get the five or six coaches who are involved in the team together, and I’ll start by asking them, “What is commitment? How does that look in terms of behaviour?” And already they’ll reply, “Well, the athletes need to train extra. Not just the planned training, but they need to do some stuff beyond that. That would be commitment.” 

And then I’ll say, “Okay, fair enough. So, if you want to stimulate that behaviour, what do we have to do? First, we need to ask how is our environment even structured? If the athletes have 12 or 14 training sessions every week, we cannot expect them to do extra. So, either we should delete that idea that commitment is doing extra, or we should make room for doing extra if we actually expect them to show commitment in this respect.” And then we’ll talk about how you create that culture as a coach. And that’s basically about acknowledging the athletes who do that; prioritizing them when you set the team – so the people on the team will be the ones that actually train extra and the ones that get extra benefits. They’ll not be the athletes who are currently the best, but they’ll be the ones who are actually demonstrating commitment.

Andrew: You had mentioned that the professional philosophy has gone through a revision recently. What was the impetus for that?

Kristoffer: Yeah, I think the main trigger for that was a shift in the way we think about sport psychology. We have moved away from a more classic Second Wave, cognitive approach. We used to do a lot of cognitive reframing, helping athletes change thoughts; helping athletes choose what they want to feel through different kinds of means. But then we realized at the 2012 London Olympics that even our best prepared athletes, when they get under that much pressure, quite a few of them felt that they were unable to change the thoughts that would come to them and to select what type of emotions they would like to feel and to hit the right level of arousal. 

So, we discussed how this might be and we went on study trips to France, Switzerland and the United States Olympic Committee. We knew the Third Wave was coming and we wanted to find out what this was about. We talked to some of the people that had started working with this approach. We discussed what this would mean to our athletes and we started making small test protocols and doing things differently. It made good sense to us that rather than helping athletes think specific thoughts, change their thoughts and emotions, to work much more on the fact that this is beyond control. You know, if what you're doing is important to you, you’re unlikely to be able to only feel happy and self-confident. Doubt and worry are inevitable. So, let go off that inner battle. And when we tried to do this, some of the athletes would say, “Man that's a relief! I have spent so much of my energy trying to control my inner world that I almost had no energy to control the outside stuff.” And that's sort of how that became a change in philosophy for us. And we started testing it with individual athletes, testing it with groups, collecting data, actually asking the athletes afterwards how it worked for them. And slowly we just realized that this was probably better for us. 

Andrew: Kristoffer, thanks so much for taking the time to share with the AASP community Team Denmark’s experiences developing and cultivating a shared professional philosophy. 

References

Poczwardowski, A., Sherman, C.P. & Ravizza, K. (2004). Professional Philosophy in the Sport Psychology Service Delivery: Building on Theory and Practice. The Sport Psychologist, 18 (4), 445-463.