Not your normal sports performance book.
The language is much jokier and friendlier than you’d usually expect from a professor (in public anyway) and there is a lot more swearing than I have spotted in any of the other sport psych book, or most books really! It is written by a world champion triathlete (Paterson) and her husband; a coach and psychologist (Marshall).
If you have tried to read Steve Peter’s the Chimp Paradox and struggled at all (I loved the theory – would have preferred it to be slimmed down to a chapter) then in The Brave Athlete, Marshall and Paterson sum it up really nicely (giving a clear hat tip to Peters for coming up with the concept) and succinctly explain how three parts of our brain (chimp, computer and professor) interact to sometimes help us but more often sabotage us. He pulls apart how each area works for us; chimp (emotional and prone to acting up and having tantrums), professor (deals with facts, truth and logic) and computer (habits and routines) and for each dilemma and frustration that endurance athletes come up against (feeling like a fraud, low confidence, not fulfilling our goals, comparing ourselves, injury, being too fearful to try, quitting, lack of mental toughness, poor concentration and handling pressure) they explain how Peter’s Chimp theory explains what is going on, and give us a ton of strategies to use to overcome the issue. They spend a huge amount of space offering solutions so you don’t finish the book going ‘but how’ like so many other books.
On top of the issues listed above that many of us suffer from I love that they have been brave enough (I guess they had to with their title) to include a couple of issues which most sport psychologists would firmly place in the clinical psychologists’ basket: eating disorders and exercise addiction. The more these are discussed in endurance sport the easier I feel it will become to help the athletes dealing with them.
A real highlight for me is around the way the authors highlight the importance of knowing your self-identity, or identities and understanding if ours is based around our sport. This can have a big impact on how you behave in your sport, the importance you give to it and how you cope when you can’t do your sport (perhaps through injury). Our unique individual characteristics and how we all bring something different to our sport is something that continually shines out from all the athletes I work with and yet many sport psych books lump all athletes together. Marshall and Paterson don’t do this. They regularly remind us that our differences mean the same tactics won’t work for everyone and we need to find what works for us and our own identities. It is really refreshing to see.
I found this to be a great book that should help athletes become more aware of their barriers to success and find some strategies to deal with them.
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