Sports Coaching is defined as a psychological intervention strategy for behavior modification (produces sustained changes in cognition, emotion, and behavior), as well as for the improvement of psychological and social skills (interpersonal relationships) of individuals or teams (García-Naveira, 2011).
The psychologist-coach accompanies the client during a process of personal/professional development, performance improvement, and objective achievement. Sports Coaching consists of a series of conversations, in which the psychologist-coach uses a methodology based on questions that help the client explore and inquire (self-discovery) into their current situation, desired future, and develop an action plan to achieve their goals. If you are considering taking a sports coaching course, this article will help you recognize the figure of the sports coach.
We know what a coach does, in this case a sports coach, but sometimes as professionals, we forget what skills we need to develop to carry out this role. That is why we will now name and describe the most important communication skills, specially adapted to coaching and sports, that the sports coach uses in conversations with their clients (athletes and coaches) and that allow them to advance within the process towards achieving their client’s objectives. To acquire them, it is important to have adequate training, such as ISEP’s Master’s in Sports Coaching:
Establishing the Coaching Alliance, understood as being able to negotiate, agree upon, and maintain an optimal working environment in which the person feels secure and confident to progress and advance. This environment will require confidentiality, commitment, openness to new points of view, accepting mistakes to learn from them, defining the purpose of coaching, establishing the logistics of the process (frequency-location-price of sessions), and other aspects that both the person and the client wish to agree upon and that constitute the ideal working framework (Cascallo, 2016).
Generating Rapport, which implies a communicative harmony necessary to create a very high level of trust between the person and their coach. This requires mastering both verbal and non-verbal language and developing a fine ability to calibrate the interlocutor. Rapport is also known in coaching as the ability to “dance with the client” (Cascallo, 2016).
Deep Listening (active and focused listening), which involves a way of attending and listening to the person that goes beyond well-known attentive listening. Here, it’s about being able to capture not only the information the person transmits and/or wants to transmit, but also what they don’t transmit verbally and the emotional states that accompany the information and reveal the person’s intrinsic values and motivational drivers (Cascallo, 2016).
Asking Powerful Questions. These are open-ended questions (those whose answer cannot be a YES or NO) that invite reflection, allow for the clarification of ideas, generate new points of view, enable the review or dismantling of false limiting beliefs, help build new empowering ideas, etc. Examples of these questions: What does this mean to you? How will you feel when you achieve it? What will you do now to take this step? What do you need to do it? (Cascallo, 2016)
Guiding Visualization, that is, the ability to get the person to mentally “visualize” scenes in which they appear as a protagonist or as a spectator, and to be able to retrieve the sensory aspects related to the vision (images, sounds, emotions, impressions, etc.). Visualization is especially useful in sports coaching, applicable both to consolidating motivation and to learning and mental preparation (mental warm-up) (Cascallo, 2016).
Achieving Commitment. The sports coach must be able to ensure that all reflections, new ideas, motivations, plans, and other elements that arise during coaching conversations and subsequent reflections crystallize into concrete client commitments that allow them to advance towards their objectives. Commitment is a basic coaching tool, necessary for Action, understood as the execution of agreed-upon decisions. Each coaching session should conclude with some commitment, whether for action or reflection (Cascallo, 2016).
Providing Effective Feedback. The coach must induce the client to continuously evaluate actions and the level of commitment execution, so that the client can extract learnings. The feedback given can be for recognition, a request for change, or simply encouragement; in any case, it is essential to keep the client motivated and focused on their objectives. In the sports environment, we must be aware that individuals often have a high level of self-demand, and therefore it is critical to know how to provide truly useful feedback. In this regard, the positive feedback sandwich has proven to be one of the most effective tools (Cascallo, 2016).
Training in sports coaching is essential to acquire all these skills and complete your professional profile to work in the sports field.