Holistic Athlete Weekly Newsletter

Journaling and Getting to Know Your Players

Individual clients of mine journal on a regular basis. The research is clear and essentially unanimous that it improves mood, psychological functioning, reduces symptoms of anxiety, helps with sleep, and helps those who may tend to be avoidant act with more intent.

Journaling can be a de-facto therapy session — hitting on some of the main components of counseling such as getting thoughts out of your head and putting them on paper to look at them more objectively. It may be difficult to analyze and challenge our thoughts when they go un-checked in our head due to our bias, predisposition, personality, and mood. But oftentimes clarity comes from writing the thoughts down and untangling them from the web of consciousness — even if you never show anyone what you wrote.

Here’s an example of a journal prompt my clients may use as a template to invoke thoughts and emotions they may need to process:

A tactic available to coaches to help build more meaningful relationships with your players, to learn more about them, and to task them with mentally healthy homework could be to have your athletes fill this template out weekly and share 1-2 answers with you — with them choosing which ones they’d like to share.

4 Domains of Performance

Just a reminder that just because you have a thought doesn’t mean that it’s true! In fact, our thoughts are riddled with bias. We’re more likely to form an opinion on something based on the first thing we hear about it. We’re more likely to remember the last thing we hear. We’re more likely to believe something to be true if it’s aligned with our current world view. We’re more likely to attribute other people’s actions to their personality or purposeful choices, while we often judge our own behavior based on external factors that influence our decisions.

Magnification — making something out to be bigger than it really is

Catastrophizing — making something out to be worse than it really is

Generalizing — “If it happened before, it’ll happen again” or assuming an individual’s action represents a larger group

Magical Thinking — beliefs with no basis in facts. Typically indicated with words like “have to” or “supposed to”

Personalization — thinking something is about you when in reality it’s not (ex: other people’s behavior)

Disqualifying the positive — Putting more weight on negative information, minimizing or not acknowledging positives. (ex: believing practice was poor because of a few good plays, while not holding space to appreciate the well executed plays)

These are just a few. When you’re having a bad moment or a bad day — challenge yourself. Is this thought true? Is it helpful? Is there anything in your control?

Holistic Athlete Services

If you haven’t done so already, sign up for the 11 module Coaches Education Course! Contact me for a discount code

Also if you haven’t already, please sign up for a Zoom call for you and your staff to discuss the specific needs of your team, to asses what services may benefit you, to review content from the course, and to discuss any challenges with athlete’s you’re experiencing.