Sport Psychology

Business coaches would be smart to borrow from sports to create high-performance teams.

In a previous article, I talked about Positive Psychology — in which a therapist tries to lift someone up from a zero-base level into the positive. If you take the positive even further upwards, you enter the realm of high performance.

One of the fields interested in high performance is of course sports. Where sports used to focus entirely on the physical prowess of athletes, it nowadays takes the psychology behind sports achievements very seriously.

Even though the first careful sport psychology was already conducted in the 1920s, in the last few decades it has really taken flight. Sport psychology focuses — amongst other aspects — on motivation, dealing with stress and anxiety, and finding the right state of mind for optimal performance. Techniques that sport psychologists and coaches use include goal setting, visualization, and self-talk. Coaches in business environments would be smart to borrow some of these same techniques and ideas to lift their teams into the realms of high performance.

Take for instance goal setting. A lot has to do with applying the right metrics. If you set measurable goals, you can work towards achieving them, which gives you a good feeling if you reach them, and…