The following post is an excerpt from The Soft Science of Tennis SOON to be released!
Personality Based Training
“Personality profiling assists coaches, athletes, and parents in understanding how individuals gather information and make decisions. It’s how we are wired. It’s what makes us tick.”
Personality Based Training (PBT) is a training method that focuses the attention on the athlete’s unique brain design as opposed to the educator. When applying PBT, tennis pros and parents welcome and respect the athlete’s unique preferred styles of learning, behaving and playing the game. The athletes feel empowered because their views and needs are recognized. And once understood, students are more motivated and inspired to learn and improve. An inspired student is more likely to take the leadership role in achieving their goals.
“Athletes would benefit from understanding the advantages and disadvantages of their unique brain design. It’s why they are naturally good at some things and uncomfortable with others.”
It’s important to note that while I’ve studied sports psychology for the past 30 years, I am a veteran, “In the Trenches” practical application tennis coach, not an “Academia” psychologist. But neither were Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers, authors of the famous Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI- A psychological questionnaire used to understand individuals mental preferences.) published in the United States in 1943. Together Myers-Briggs noticed that individuals have different temperaments and unique ways of seeing the world.
While some scientists say the MBTI doesn’t stand up to scientific reliability, I can say with all honesty that it has helped me coach over 100 National Champions and several Pro tour athletes. More importantly, personality profiling benefits my athletes and their entourage of parents, coaches, and trainers at a much deeper level. A study conducted by Psychology Today, reports that approximately 80% of Fortune 500 companies use various personality tests to hire future employees, to assess progress, and to maximize efficiency and harmony through team building events. The time has come to broaden the role of personality profiling into the athletic realm, as I have outlined in The Soft Science of Tennis.
Getting to know the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
The MBTI is the most popular psychometric questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. It is my intention to bring to light the usefulness of brain preference identification in the tennis industry. Each student has a preferred way of seeing the world. The basic MBTI theory categorizes preferences into four groups from which individuals identify their dominant cerebral preference.
The Typographies Include:
- Extraversion (“E”)- People/Places
- Introversion (“I”)- Theories/ Information
- Sensing (“S”)- Facts/Reality
- Intuition (“N”) Possibilities/Potential
- Thinking (“T”)- Logic/Truthfulness
- Feeling (“F”)- Harmony/Relationships
- Judgment (“J”)- Orderly/Structured
- Perception (“P”)- Flexible/Adaptable
For each of the above pairings, your athletes typically have a preference for one system above the other. The combination of their four preferences gives them their initial assessment in a four-letter acronym. An example is personality profile: ISTP (Introvert Sensate Thinker Perceiver)
“View your athlete’s brain design (dominant and auxiliary) the same way you would view right handed versus left handed body type functions. Each athlete has an inborn preferred system.”
In my experience, personality profiling is a soft science, meaning other factors such as nurturing and environments skew the data. With that said, I believe that athletes have specific preferences in the way they experience the world and these choices affect their actions, values, and motivational needs on and off the tennis court.
