title photo by US ARMY Tim Hipps under WikiCommons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

Dr. Thomas Patrick is a sports psychologist by trade. He worked with the New Zealand All Blacks and several other elite organisations from MLS to Olympic Teams. He served as the High Performance Director for ASPETAR in Qatar, where we initially met, and currently is the High Performance Director at the South Australian Sports Institute. I met with him in Adelaide this time to discuss the role of sports psychology in the High Performance training process.

We covered : 

• the difference between clinical psychology and sports psychology


• Optimising the environment vs. individual consultations as main priority of sports psychologist 


• Application of mindfulness and meditation in high performance sport


• the winning culture of the New Zealand All Blacks Rugby Team


• Creating a winning culture

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May the flow be with you!

FULL TRANSCRIPT :

The Order & Kaos of Human Potential – the podcast about the science and the art, the known and the unknown territories of human performance and health.

<<00:22 >>

Gerrit Keferstein:    Welcome back to The Order & Kaos of Human Potential. I’m going to Gerrit Keferstein and today I’m greeting you out of the beautiful city of Adelaide in South Australia where I met with longtime friend and currently a high-performance director at the Southern Australian Sports Institute, Dr. Thomas Patrick. He’s a sports psychologist by trade and he’s originally from Canada but he worked in so many countries with so many different diverse groups of athletes and teams, we probably couldn’t count the number of medals that he was involved with on all four or maybe five hands we probably need for that. He’s worked in Canada. He had a short stint in Australia as a high-performance director. He worked in Argentina. He worked in Florida for Major League Soccer. He worked in New Zealand for the All Blacks for several years. And who worked in Qatar at the Aspetar Sports Medical Clinic.  And now he’s back in Australia.  For the last two and a half years he’s the high performance director at the Southern Australian Sports Institute, overseeing many different Olympic sports, working towards Tokyo 2020. And this morning we went to the Superdome which is the indoor cycling facility of Cycling Australia and the Southern Australian Sports Institute. And on the way back, that’s maybe a 40-minute ride by car, to the institute, we took the time to record a podcast for you on sports psychology, on Tom’s ideas, principles and methodologies in sports psychology, how sports psychology ties in with the rest of the high-performance environment and also what to look for in a good sports psychologist because it’s a very diverse field and he has a specific take on what it takes to be a good psychologist in the high performance environment.

<<02:22 >>

                            So, enjoy.

<<02:36 >>

                            Tom, you taught about that high performance stuff a lot. You talked about it the last couple days many times. Your original background is in sports psychology and you’ve been around the globe a lot you.  You’ve worked in New Zealand, you’ve worked in Florida, you’ve worked in Argentina, we’ve met in Qatar and now you’re in Australia. You’re currently a high-performance director overseeing many different sports but you started in sports psychology. What do you see the role of Sports Psychology in high performance?

<<03:09 >>

Dr. Tom Patrick:     I think sports psychologist and the sport psychology are of equal importance to the other areas. I think it needs to work closely with the coaches, the other sports scientists to support medical practitioners as an integrated team member and they need to be responsible obviously for the psychological preparation and development of the athletes but more importantly maybe to encrypt the coaches with the capability to be able to really drive the psychological development of the athletes and of performance because no matter what, the coaches are with the athletes every day. So, the contact time, the opportunity is always with the coaches but I think another important role that I feel maybe gets lost a bit when the field presents too many clinical psychologists is understanding the psychological dynamics and the psychological effects that are taking place, be it in the environment or as part of a major games opportunity. And I think sports psychologists need to make sure that they have the experience and expertise to actually have value in these in these areas.

<<04:23 >>

Gerrit Keferstein:    When you say clinical psychologist is for coaches to understand, what’s the clinical psychologist when you think where it doesn’t fit into a sports environment?

<<04:32 >>

Dr. Tom Patrick:     I think a lot of times just as in the medical model, psychology was really there to fix problems and that was challenge a few years ago when you had the positive psychology paradigm shift which was quite interesting with Seligman who was a psychologist himself and he switched and then when he was the president of the American Psychological Association, basically, I think threw a bit of a spanner so to speak in the works and challenged the entire, I think, delivery of psychology to think about being more about creating resilient people.

<<05:10 >>

Gerrit Keferstein:    So, it’s not about fixing problems.

<<05:11 >>

Dr. Tom Patrick:     Exactly, that’s right. Because human existence have problems. As they say, Buddhism says life is suffering …

<<05:20 >>

Gerrit Keferstein:    Life is suffering unless you do something about it.

<<05:22 >>

Dr. Tom Patrick:     Exactly. So, we shouldn’t try to avoid the suffering. We should be working towards accepting and being able to have solutions around dealing capably with the setbacks, with suffering, with the performance challenges etc. So, I think sports psychologists have the opportunity, historically they were more trained as physical educators. And so, they actually came at psychology a bit differently.  And then you had this challenge between clinical psychologists and the sports psychologists about who’s qualified. Well, to be a sports psychologist you should be a registered clinical psychologist and what we’ve seen is in fact they have tremendous limitations in their ability to work in high performance environments. They think very structured, they think about number of sessions. Of course, I’m painting a general picture but I think a high-performance sports psychologist needs to practice differently. They need to be thinking about themselves as maybe a coach but their specialty is on the psychological component, right? And so, you need to be immersed in the environment.  You need to be a part of the coaching staff.  You need to be at training.  You need to see the athletes under stress.  You need to help debrief that performance opportunity and maybe it’s just 10 minutes versus having that athlete drive to see you in your office.

<<06:50 >>

Gerrit Keferstein:    And not a Tuesday or Thursday at 6 o’clock session for one hour. It’s more of an immersing process. Yesterday you said something interesting where you said in sports psychology it’s much about shaping the environment…

<<07:03 >>

Dr. Tom Patrick:     That’s right.

<<07:04 >>

Gerrit Keferstein:    … in a positive way, in a productive way, in a high performance way.  It’s not so much about the actual counseling.

<<07:10 >>

Dr. Tom Patrick:     That’s right.  A few of the real special opportunities I’ve had in my career, it’s where you’re immersed in a world-class environment and then you learn about what the high-performance behaviors are that are the norm, that’s the culture.  My work with New Zealand Rugby, the whole culture is about world class and it’s about being the best in the world and simple things, simple gestures like showing up in the environment and making sure that you connect with every single person you see every day which is a handshake with eye contact and it’s basically a way of saying to each other “I’m here. I’m here. I’m ready.”

<<07:53 >>

Gerrit Keferstein:    And making sure the other one’s hear as well.