Radical Openness in Athletics

Being coachable is one of the most important skills in athletics. This means listening and reflecting on the coach’s feedback, pin pointing what is not going well and being able to implement necessary changes that will improve your overall performance. Many talented athletes get stuck in their heads about performance or stop making small changes that will help them improve. Sometimes they even think they are right and the coach is wrong about what they should do (i.e become hard-headed). In order to become the best athlete you can be, listening to coaches fully, assessing if those changes are beneficial to you, and making those changes when they are constructive to growing as a player is essential. So how do you this psychologically well? This is where

Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy (RO DBT) can help.  Assessing and then implementing coaching feedback is a key to Radically Open living and a skill taught in RO DBT.

RO and Assessing Feedback

In order to take feedback, you have actually realize it’s occurring. Many athletes don’t stop to recognize feedback is happening, which can occur in positive or negative forms (i.e. great job at swinging all the way through or your hips aren’t rotating enough, respectively). Feedback can also be true, partially true or not true at all. Sorting through athletic feedback means be able to pinpoint what our coaches are asking you to do, then cheerlead yourself into doing the new behavior when relevant. My role as a therapist working with athletes is to help clients identify and implement the skills, including listening and critical assessment, that can both make a difference on the playing field, and in the hours after leaving the field. So many times the implementation of the feedback is the hard part of going from good to great.

How Overcontrol Can Be An Athletic Advantage

RO DBT works to help people who are overcontrolled (OC) use their mastery of inhibitory control, to their advantage. Inhibition can mean anything from staying longer at the field to practice rather than going to a party, or making a sacrifice to watch old tapes of yourself and non-judgmentally evaluate your performance rather than binge watching your favorite show for 45^th time.

OC individuals are also blessed (and sometimes cursed) with high detail focused processing. In other words, they often see the single tree, instead of the forest in front of them. In addition to working on specific feedback, you have to think about your overall goal as an athlete to become great in a sport. I aim to use the RO framework to help them achieve small, maybe even imperceptible gains to give them the edge they are looking for in a wildly competitive market, while considering how they will fit in within their team or organization. Using the RO program I have seen athletes grow from competitive in high school to moving to playing for some of the top programs in college athletics, and it takes openness and flexibility.

My Connection to Athletics

In what feels like another lifetime I was a pretty good athlete… playing baseball through college. My wife would often joke that I wasn’t even athletic at all, merely that I had an athletic right arm (baseball pitcher). So then how did I end up not just surviving, but thriving playing college athletics? Coachability and openness to feedback were my superpower. I was willing to make any change necessary to get .5% better or have some sort of edge over my competition and opposition. Let me know if you want help to harness your OC advantages and contact me for help.