Module 2: Counseling and communication skills

Fostering counselling and communication skills

Module 2 focuses on fostering counselling and communication skills related to prevention training sessions, providing key techniques of a toolkit to the modern soccer exercise expert (coach, trainer and athletic trainer). The core mission of this module is to build quality in terms of communication between the exercise expert and the athletes into daily training sessions for prevention strength and conditioning exercise protocols considering that athletes and exercise experts operate with interplay of thoughts, feelings, physiology, and actions. This interaction is crucial for performance and well-being and becomes more valuable especially as soccer is by definition a sport characterised by adversity.

In that module it is taken into consideration the fact that athletes (players) must learn to view adversity as a natural part of their sport (soccer) and manage to cope with dedication and commitment. Therefore, it is strongly suggested that a. communication skills should be considered by the exercise experts while guiding their athletes following the rule that achieving good results is accomplished through a focus on the process, not only on the outcome and b. the development of mental skills should be integrated into daily training sessions of healthy athletes for injury prevention

  Why counselling and communication are crucial for success?

The influence of the coaching staff is crucial for the performance of a team and its individuals, particularly with regard to the technical, tactical, physical and psychological aspects of performance. As with all sports, the impact of mental preparation and the well-being of athletes and team performance has gained increased focus in recent years, as it has now been recognized how much psychology matters (Nesti, 2010).

Especially in young athletes, one of the three fundamental factors related to peak performance is defined as the individual psychological components for peak performance and well-being (Willis, 2017). The same author refers to elite players as not simple or one-dimensional beings. “They are versatile and function within a highly complex social and organizational environments, which exerts major influences on them and their performance”. It is proved helpful to incorporate all psychological topics and variables into a unifying model of psychological preparation to peak performance (Hardy et al, 1996). In this context, communication skills are also considered as a key definer of the culture of excellence, the other fundamental factor for peak performance in soccer (Willis, 2017). It directly affects the athletes’ ability to be productive, their sense of accomplishment, and even their quality of life. Working daily at being excellent has an impact on how athletes interact with each other and how they handle success and failure (Nesti, 2010). When positive, the values, mindsets and behaviours that constitute an environment foster success, and can influence the confidence of individual players, their teammates, their coaches and the team as a whole.

As such, the exercise expert’s profession working with soccer teams becomes more and more complicated. Besides an outstanding knowledge of the gameplay, it is necessary to fully master counselling and communication skills and apply them through motivation and continuous information to help players learn better and faster. An effective coach not only delivers technical instructions, but he/she must also know how to provide learning for the people they work with. The information that does not reach players adequately is useless information.

 Giving feedback and providing Information as basic communication skills of the exercise expert to the athletes

 Feedback, for the purposes of our project, informs the athletes about what they have to do in order to execute correctly a specific task, pointing them out the achieved goal, rhythm, technique etc of this specific task. What the exercise expert wants to accomplish first, is that the player associates the proposed behaviour to its consequence. Second, it is about reinforcing the action chosen by a player to solve the “situation” in which they have been successful. “If the coach has told me what I have done is right because I have achieved what he wanted, I will repeat it”, the athlete seems to think.

In specific, coaches use verbal instruction to focus an athlete’s attention on pertinent aspects of a skill. Depending on the context, this focus of attention can be either internal or external (Benz et al, 2016). An internal instruction directs focus to body movements, joint angles, or the action itself, whereas an external instruction pertains to the desired outcome, an implement (golf club, ball, etc.) or the environment (Benz et al, 2016; Wulf et al, 1998). Choosing words carefully is critical as proper instructions can “load the working memory,” priming the mind for processing and attention appropriate for that skill (Furley et al, 2016). This study demonstrates that attentional focus instructions significantly influence several CMJ jump variables (including jump height). The finding that instructions can alter efficiency and performance of a skill indicate that they need to be designed and applied to suit the context.

A recent research (Januário et al, 2016) has analysed how the players retain the feedback provided by the coaches. The study followed the behavior of 12 coaches (8 men and 4 women, all of them with more than 5 years of experience) and 342 players (246 men and 96 women) aged between 10 and 18 during 18 training sessions. The footballers were classified into 4 groups considering the category in which they competed: local, regional, national, or international level. In total, 1728 feedbacks issued by the coaches during the training sessions were analyzed. The results revealed several conclusions of great practical relevance:

• In 65.5% of the feedbacks, the players had difficulties to reproduce completely the coaches’ instructions. That is to say, only 34.5% of the feedbacks were completely retained;
• The more the coach provided different instructions, the lower the feedback retention. The average of instructions provided by the coaches was 3.96, with a total of 28.91 words.
• The higher the level of the players, the higher the feedback retention.

The practical applications of this study indicated that coaches should very much take into consideration some specific points at the time of providing information or feedback to the players:

1. It is very dangerous to provide too many messages (feedbacks) to the athletes during the tasks. Attention is limited and providing much information usually produces that a good part of the instructions received is forgotten.
2. The design of the sessions should include a few objectives to reach. The lower the age or level of the athletes, it is recommendable to include only 1 or 2 objectives in each session; when the level is higher, some more can be added. (examples from the videos)
3. Coaches should have previously prepared the feedbacks they are going to provide to reinforce the achievement of the objectives planned in the session, e.g technical correctness.
4. Short, concise messages with an understandable language usually reach players more effectively.