How important is psychology in sport? where does it rank compared to natural ability and the time people spend practicing?
That’s a great question. I will use a phrase that symbolizes how I work. As an athlete or coach, you may not be interested in psychology, but psychology is interested in you. psychology is integral to learning, training and performance. Those are the three big buckets I deal with. A lot of sports psychologists only deal with the performance cube, but I think it’s very important to know all three, because people will get into trouble or have difficulties or challenges in all of them. these areas.
You are reading: Sports psychology books for young athletes
“You may not be interested in psychology, but psychology is interested in you.”
virtually zero people come to me for training as beginners in their sport. I get very, very few who are intermediate in their sport. Basically, my type of work (sports psychology done by a professional) isn’t exactly just for the advanced, but it usually is.
Now if I were a coach I would use psychology from day one with beginners. I think good coaches do that all the time. I taught at the university for 15 years, and one of the classes I taught was the psychology of training, training techniques of different sports. A good teacher has a variety of psychological methods to teach his students. they may not call it “psychology”, but psychology is being used.
To summarize: it is there all the time, whether we know it or not. I think it’s important as a coach or consultant to consciously use psychology to good effect. And of course that’s why we’re having this talk about these five books, which I think are seminal in the field of sport psychology, or at least representative of different angles and audiences in the field.
Is there a personality type that is best suited to achievement in sports? Or can someone put sports psychology into practice and become that “type” of successful athlete?
I’ll answer the second part of your question first. These techniques, approaches, or methodologies, whatever you want to call them, we’ll talk about all of them today, can be used by anyone in any sport, at any age, of any gender, at any level.
In terms of personality, well, personality has been very well studied in the sports psychology literature, and I think they’ve determined that there is no such thing as an “ideal” athlete personality. but I think it has also been well established that there are certainly desirable attributes of personalities that contribute to success in sport. Going further, there are certain sports that certain types of personalities are attracted to. For example: long distance running. I don’t think we’ll see many extroverts in that sport, because the training is basically lonely. you are running alone or with a couple of competitors and you don’t talk to them. sports like that tend to appeal to introverts.
“there is no such thing as an ‘ideal’ athletic personality”
And if we use introversion versus extroversion, quieter people versus louder people, certain positions in sports would also appeal to them. therefore, there is no single universal athletic personality, and all of these approaches we are talking about today can be used by essentially anyone.
That’s promising! Well, let’s talk about the first book you’ve chosen to recommend: The Inner Game of Tennis by W Timothy Gallwey. it’s a classic billie jean king called this his “tennis bible”. why is it so good?
well, i would totally agree with billie jean. you know, this was a very controversial book in its day and it still is today, even though it has now sold over a million copies. Gallwey also has a group of books based on his ‘inner game’ methodology: Inner Tennis: Playing the Game, The Inner Game of Music, The Inner Game of Stress, The Inner Game of Work, The Inner Game of Golf and indoor skiing. . The other person who has probably sold the most books in the history of sports psychology is probably Bob Rotella, but we’ll get to him in a minute.
This was written in the early 1970s. Sports psychology was used by top coaches and athletes back then, but it had a real stigma. if you told people you went to a sports psychologist, they considered you mentally weak. however, Eastern Europeans and Russians used psychology to gobble up all sorts of medals at the Olympics and other competitions. they saw the value immediately. When Gallwey wrote his book, he was something of an outcast in the world of tennis teaching because the inner game of tennis was grossly misunderstood. I’ll come back to that.
gallwey was the first author to detail practical sports psychology techniques in the trenches. he wasn’t really a theory guy or a data guy or a research guy, but practical techniques: his books are full of that. he was the first person to do that, period. when he did it in the 1970s, he was awesome; he was impressive until that moment, it was considered that all sports instruction used what is called the command method: “I am the coach and I tell you what you have to do”. gallwey was just the opposite. he used the question method: ‘tell me how that feels’. when you hit the last setback, were you early, late or on time?’ he used a series of very clever questions to engage the student in his own experience, thereby increasing his self-awareness.
i have used the inside since the 1970s. i use it daily it is one of my strongest focuses, increasing learner awareness and setting the proper goal. this is what we want the ball to do: a certain width, a certain height, whatever, that combination produces the performance. no command needed; there’s ‘don’t do this, don’t do that’. not ‘you’re screwing this up’. it’s about asking questions and raising awareness.
here is the trick. Gallwey said: “Perfect tennis is inside you, waiting to come out.” this is where he was misunderstood. he might have helped his cause if he had said a bit more about it. people were like, ‘oh, so we all have perfect tennis, huh? all you have to do is kick back and go, huh?’ people in sports equate the value of a book with the status of the famous people who endorse it. Unfortunately, Gallwey did not have any high-level backing at the time. then, of course, he went golfing, skiing, and music. he became more and more respected. I don’t know when he got this nickname, it could have been in the 1990s, but today he is considered one of the fathers of modern training.
so gallwey has been monumental in the field in multiple ways. number one is like the practical and innovative type. in the 1970s he wrote the first book and kept superimposing books like crazy. he is known for giving technique after technique after technique in his books, a veritable taxonomy of techniques. and then he switched to business/life coaching and was credited with that field. but very controversial, very misunderstood. I think it’s much more appreciated now than when it was in its prime.
He’s in his late 80s or so now, but still pretty active. Out of all the books we are talking about today, I would definitely rate Gallwey as the number one most important in this field.
That’s great to know. I was also intrigued by what you said about how sports psychology was initially a taboo subject. what do you think now? what might lead a client to meet with a sports psychologist? Does it keep showing up after, say, a high-profile flop?
that’s the main reason. they just failed a performance, or they’ve had a series of failures and now someone tells them they have a problem, and they better go see someone. they are in a depression. ‘hey, if you don’t improve your game, you’re going to be demoted to the bench,’ or ‘we’re going to drop you one level on the team,’ or ‘you’re off the team.’ ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but you seem mentally weak’, the athlete is hearing all of these things, whether it’s from a parent or a coach or themselves or whatever, and that’s the trigger event that’s most common.
Transitions are another big reason people call me. they just moved up a weight category, an age group; now they are becoming national, international. they went from high school to college, and maybe there’s nothing particularly wrong with their performance, but they don’t feel normal. they don’t feel punished.
You mentioned Bob Rotella earlier. Let’s talk about golf not being a perfect game. what can a reader expect from this book?
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bob rotella is probably the most famous sports psychologist of the moment, still active. he works primarily in the world of golf with a large number of famous golf professionals. Bob’s books, he has a number of them, they are very easy to read, very practical. he uses a narrative style and tells a lot of stories unlike gallwey who tells a few stories but has tons of techniques to try. I mean literally dozens and dozens.
I think bob is not known as a technique type. He is more: ‘Let me tell you a story about Padraig Harrington, who I coached at the British Open, and the struggles he had and the advice I gave him, and maybe that will help you.’ that’s the bob style. I think it’s a great style. Like I said, it’s very easy to read and it rings true because he’s in the trenches every day and he has a great deal of credibility.
in a minute, we’ll talk about the other golf book, zen putting, by dr. joseph parent. And if you compare Putt Zen to Gallwey’s Inner Game of Golf, the latter has very few stories, but many techniques. the parenting book has a good number of stories and a lot of techniques. And then Bob Rotella’s books have fewer techniques and drills, but it’s a compendium of stories, very well told, each with little nuggets of psychological truth that golfers can use.
rotella says he focuses on finding the right attitude or mindset in his golfers. could you say a bit more about that, the idea of the holistic approach?
correct. Bob makes a distinction between the “training” mindset and the “trust” mindset. he has a lot of clients, and I have the same type of group, who train like crazy. i have people on the usa team. uu, i have people on the gb team in different sports. These people usually have a lot of drive and a great work ethic and leave nothing to chance.
but the problem is that if they have a challenge, they train too consciously before the event. they are thinking their way through their training. they are telling themselves what to do; they are reminding themselves what not to do. they’re still in the mode of telling themselves what to do, and that’s the opposite of the confident mindset.
“when you approach an event, you have to get out of the conscious mindset, that’s a training mindset, and you have to get into a confident mindset”
For example, if you have a tennis ball there and I say, ‘Pick up the ball please and start playing catch,’ I’m sure you could flip it over and catch it back and forth. I do that with clients all the time. so I say, ‘let’s pause for a minute’. now, did you tell yourself how to do that or did you just do it?’ and of course they say, ‘I just did it.’ the same way we brush our teeth or eat with a fork. all that is natural. That’s the trust mindset Bob is talking about.
This is how you operationalize it. both mindsets, or mindsets, whatever you want to call it, are good. he calls them training versus confidence. I divide them into three, I have apprenticeship, I have training, I have performance. but theirs are training and confidence. when you approach an event, you have to get out of the conscious mindset, that’s a training mindset, and you have to get into a confident mindset.
then, for example, two weeks before the championship, instead of continuing to play their game, or remember what the coach said, or what they saw on a youtube video, or what is on their checklist , or in their notes, they let all that go. They say, ‘Okay, for better or for worse, I’m going to play today’s round like I’m in a tournament. I’m going to trust what I have.” now they are allowed to modify it a bit, but not on a conscious level. there is a distinction between the rotella training mindset and the confidence mindset.
Achieving that mindset of trust sounds beautiful, a bit like creative “flow” states. it sounds instinctive, even transcendent. maybe that brings us to our third book. this is the putting zen of joseph parent. I don’t know what I expected from a selection of sports psychology books, but this title immediately surprised me. Are there many athletes you work with who are philosophically or spiritually inclined?
I’ve been doing this since the early 1970s; I was the first person in the world to earn a degree in sports psychology and have had my practice ever since. In the 1970s, my former tennis coach, Bob Mack, and I started something called the Zen Tennis Clinic. so we were into zen since the 1970s. but to answer your question, never in my life has anyone come up to me and said, “i want you to teach me about zen sports.”
I really don’t expect them to either. but here in northern california, which is a hotbed of mind-body disciplines and alternative ways of seeing the world, many buddhists have come to me for help in their sport, and i have many, probably a few times. a month, expert meditators, in any discipline, come to me for the same reason. they are unable to use their Buddhism (or meditation, mindfulness or whatever they call it) to help them in their sport.
And I found that’s because, as good as those disciplines are, they’re there as a generic form of mind control. what is missing is the direct application to your specific sport, what we call “attention control cues.” like: what do you look at when you’re on the tennis court? What do you think about when you are on the golf course? what should you watch when you are on the balance beam, as a gymnast? all that is missing in generic meditation and Buddhism.
I think the unique quality of the zen approach is its wisdom about life itself, applied to sports, and this is why I put this here. I guess you could argue that the inner game is zen, but in all of gallwey’s books i don’t think he ever used the word ‘zen’. even though that was what prompted him to write the books. between 20 and 20 years old, he graduated from harvard and played on the team (he was a very good junior tennis player), he was looking for philosophical answers in his life. he moved to india and lived in an ashram for a period of time, which he did, and then wrote his book. so basically gallwey’s base material came out of the indian ethic of that ashram, although he never referenced that language. and he never made any reference to Zen. on the other hand, joseph parent is very interested in zen. so if you want to compare gallwey and the zen approach is that the zen approach has even more wisdom about life.
here is an example. a father talks about people having trouble dealing with pressure on the golf course. His advice is: Don’t try to escape the anxiety of pressing shots, because that rush of escape can hurt your focus. instead, and here’s the money quote, “be still in the midst of anxiety and enjoy it.” To me, that’s a beautiful quote, and it goes back to mindfulness. don’t fight what’s on your mind. the mind is like a monkey, it likes to jump around. so when you’re under pressure, enjoy it.
when they tell me that the pressure is affecting them, let’s say they were in a tournament, in the final, and there was a lot of pressure, I say: ‘it’s over now, but look at it like this: when you were in the final and you felt that pressure , wasn’t that a privilege?’
this is billie jean king’s angle, to go back to her. She wrote a book called Pressure is a Privilege, and the thesis is that when you’re in a “pressure moment,” it really is a privilege. before the match starts, you were good enough to make it to that final. it’s really a great honor that you were good enough to get there. now, to see what you do with it, but enjoy it. that’s also the idea of dr’s parents: enjoy the pressure, don’t fight it.
my point of view is this: if you are in the final of a tournament and you feel pressured, you are doing well compared to the other people in the tournament who are out, at home with their feet on the ground. sofa, without stress, without feeling pressure. where would you rather be? now, for a lot of people, that’s a revelation. ‘Hey, I’ll take the pressure any day because that means I’m doing something really cool. that’s how i see it. this particular book, zen putting, is a continuation of his earlier zen golf.
Would you recommend this one over the previous one?
they are almost the same, but the reason I chose zen putting is that I think it has even more techniques than the previous book.
great. let’s move on to hand-to-hand baseball: play one pitch at a time.
dr. ken ravizza is the one with whom i did my first masters in cal state, fullerton. he would perhaps be considered the father of baseball psychology. this is a very accessible book. it is very readable, very practical, with many good tips. it is easy to understand at all levels and valuable for all levels.
ken has some really good insights. I think one of his best is: In order to have some degree of control over your outer world, you first have to get your inner world under control. Now that sounds very simple, but it’s not easy to do. that statement guides all the work I do, that’s for sure. but i think ken put it very, very well.
ken also talks about the fact that trust is overrated, which I think is a great idea. when people hear that, they’re like, ‘wait a minute, I thought sport psychology was all about trust.’ Isn’t that why people come to you?’ and it is, we help them with confidence. But what if you’re out there one day and things aren’t going your way? you’re playing against a superior opponent, you’re having bad luck, you’re sick, you’re tired, you’re injured, whatever. “Well, you’re not going to be at your best. so this concept of needing supreme trust doesn’t exactly work.
“confidence is not required to win. you can win without it.”
here is the new concept. you can still be successful. I tell people: ‘Think of a time when you were in a game and you weren’t playing well.’ you may have even been nervous, sick, tired, or whatever. however, you still figured out a way to win.’ and they think for a moment they start to nod their heads: ‘I’ve had a lot of those.’ that’s a perfect example of winning without supreme confidence. And there’s another author, tennis guy Brad Gilbert has a book called Winning Ugly. I use that phrase all the time to sum up the idea that you don’t need confidence to play well. trust is not necessary to win. you can win without it. It’s good to have? yes, we’d all like to have it, but we’ve also all had plenty of times where, no, we didn’t have it that day and it turned out just fine.
definitely. I heard this book is often given out to high school baseball teams. And given what you just said, I can see how sport could become a more general character-building activity for teens, to help build calm and resilience.
yes. I think that’s the case as I said I think some books in the field of sport psychology would not go into that. they are full of research, they are full of theory and maybe they have technique and they don’t talk much about life. however, ken’s book talks about it. also the zen golf series definitely talks about life which i think is a really nice angle.
ken talks about other important things: being present, focused, avoiding going through the motions. has a number of techniques that help people to be calm, present and focused. you have to be in control of yourself before you can control your performance. and it has a really clever but simple concept: the traffic light idea. then: green, go ahead; amber or yellow, you are wary or cautious, you might even be ready to stop; if the traffic light is red, you definitely do not go through the intersection.
that can be applied to all sports. let’s say a football player has a free throw, or a basketball player has a free throw. before he runs, that athlete needs to achieve a green light within himself, which is that he is physically ready, mentally ready, emotionally ready. everyone’s on lockdown, everything’s ready to rock and roll. then they know when they have the green light and shoot. but let’s use a golfer. they’re on the ball, but something doesn’t feel right. well, okay, they’re not going to swing, they’re going to back up, they’re going to start their whole routine or ritual from the beginning. hopefully the next time they get the green light and then leave.
let’s move on to your final choice, which is the mind of the champion: how great athletes think, train and thrive. This book is about the psychology of sports performance in general. is that so?
yes. This is another one of those books for everyone. high level people can get some things out of it, and very low level people can get a lot out of it as well. this too is written in a very practical and accessible style. does not use fancy language; does not use theory; he does not cite the research. And, just to mention this, in all the years I’ve been doing this as a consultant, I can barely remember anyone asking me about research while we’re in session. it just doesn’t come up because people just don’t care. if you can give them what they need, and these books give people what they need, that’s all people really care about.
Your approach speaks to a few different things. talks about greatness and how to learn it from other people: look around your sports world, the coaches and athletes at all levels, Olympic, professional, national, local, and notice what you like or admire in those people. he says, if you can notice some of these elements, that must mean that you have some of those elements in yourself, that you could develop. that’s a great message he sends.
“champions have a short memory for bad things and a long memory for good things”
says champions aren’t made in gyms; they are made of something deep inside of them, a desire, a dream and a vision. let’s call that positive psychology. then, on the other hand, it says: identify precisely what you do that harms your own cause. that is also very valuable advice. to put it another way: how do you self-sabotage? how do you defeat yourself? how do you hit yourself before the game starts? now, other authors would call that ‘self-limiting beliefs’. I use all that language. a lot of people, when they come to compete, they think: ‘oh, I could never beat someone that good’. Well, then, why are you going to the event? you have to believe in your mind that it is possible to succeed. that’s the minimum starting point.
let’s see. It also talks about how you can hate losing, but you shouldn’t be afraid of losing. I go a little further and say: turn the fear of losing into hatred of losing. if you hate losing enough, you’ll do something about it and train, and then when you compete, you’ll lose a lot less. another is: to perform at the level of a champion, you must cultivate long-term memories for your successes and short-term memories for your failures. this is the language I use all the time. champions have a short memory for bad things and a long memory for good things.
“avoid the dangers of perfectionism and paralysis by analysis syndrome, where you think too much, which is really the absolute number one obstacle for people who don’t perform”
He says: avoid the dangers of perfectionism and paralysis by analysis syndrome, where you think too much, which, by the way, is really the absolute number one hurdle, mental block, if you will, for people who don’t they perform. whether learning, you can perform when you learn, although you are learning and when you act, people think too much.
closing the circle: we start talking about trust. Why can’t people trust themselves? maybe they don’t have a history of winning much, so they’re thinking too much or think they can’t win. maybe they are not sure about their training, so they think too much. perhaps no one ever told them: ‘don’t think, just trust’. just do it’. maybe no one told them that. and finally, many people will think too much because they want to earn too much. this falls under the fear of losing.
I will end the discussion of this book by saying the following: Great champions win consistently, not every time, but always, because they have discovered all these psychological lessons and techniques as they progress in their sport. . sport is a series of challenges. obstacles, if you want to call them that. lessons I like to call them lessons to be learned. How do I play against that kind of opponent? How do I play in these conditions? How do I handle it if I’m jet-lagged and injured?
All of these things need to be discovered, whether the trainers tell them, or the person reads about them, or just learns them on their own. once these things are discovered, lesson number 278 goes to the logbook and goes to lesson 279. keep rinsing and repeating. Eventually, champions have thousands of these lessons recorded in their DNA. when they find themselves in similar situations again, and they will happen again and again as they go through their career, we call it experience. champions call that confidence. So it all boils down to this: If you know what you’re doing, what’s the problem? reply, no problem. because I know what I’m doing. Because I know what I’m doing, I can trust my training.
You got me nodding. an important lesson in sports psychology, but also an important lesson during the challenges of life in general. To close our discussion, I wanted to ask you a bit about your work beyond sports psychology. I know you have applied this experience more broadly. could you say something about how what you teach under the title of sport psychology can be made more universal?
universal, exact. and I think it can be. my offices are here in palo alto, california, about four or five miles from stanford university, so i’m kind of a sports psychologist on call there. I work with a lot of athletes there.
But over the years, as I’ve been working with someone on their golf or tennis game, they may ask me, “I’m the VP of sales, can you help my sales team?” absolutely. this is how my program the mind game of selling was developed. then that continued, and a similar request led to the mind game of speaking. so depending on who I’m talking to, I call myself different things.
I am the founder and president of the international association of mind game coaches. trains and certifies people to become mind game coaches, or to have more experience in that field if they are already professional coaches. this is a wide range of people. For example, later today, I’m talking to someone who is a doctor of Chinese herbal medicine. I have had people who are chiropractors, therapists, trainers, trainers, parents. so this applies to everyone.
I do a lot of interview training. that came about because I’ve done a lot of media interviews. I’m pretty comfortable doing it, but I had to figure out how to be effective at it and I’ve found that a lot of people get really scared when they go into an interview. rightly so but it’s all in the training.
We come back to the same idea, whether it’s sales, presentation, interview training, whatever: if you know what you’re doing, that gives you a sense of self-confidence. and then you can turn your performance into confidence. we do not use this expression, but your unconscious. if you are an athlete, you turn your body around. some people turn it into many different things. the universe, if you want to go further than that. Basically, confidence is what it’s all about, consistently excellent performance. good training, constant training, acknowledging your training is great. then I tell people: just remember you’ve had a great workout and let all that natural goodness flow out of you.
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