The following post is an excerpt from Frank’s newest book, The Soft Science of Tennis.
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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.
Universal Truths
- Gaining an understanding of this soft science takes time. Be patient as you learn to apply this newfound skill. I encourage you to apply personality profiling as a means to understand how students tick versus stereotyping or grouping athletes by mere age or general ability.
- Coaches can’t change an athlete’s primary brain design, but they can nurture both the individual’s weaker, opposing profile and strengthen their dominant profile.
- Interestingly, on rare occasions, a student’s on-court persona opposes their off-court persona.
- Everyone exhibits both dominant and auxiliary traits. For example, introverts can be quite sociable for short stints of time.
- There isn’t a right, wrong, superior, or inferior type, but rather preferred approaches to the game and life. Although there are only 16 unique brain design categories, everyone is unique. For example, there is a broad spectrum of each preference ranging from moderate to extreme.
- All brain designs need to devote time and energy to nurturing their non-dominant functions.
- It is not unlikely for athletes young and old to inaccurately self-profile their brain design to fit into a more popular, cool version of themselves.
- Pay attention to other’s brain designs because this is why opposite types make you crazy and similar types make you comfortable.
- An athlete will benefit significantly from understanding the advantages and disadvantages of their unique design.
- Customized development through personality profiling increases self-esteem and breeds confidence, which is seen in the athlete’s peaceful performance.
- Profiling your athlete’s personalities won’t provide you with the final answers, but it will assist in organizing their unique developmental pathways, which will maximize enjoyment, as well as help them to reach their potential at a quicker rate.
- It’s our job as educators and parents to de-code each athlete, so we are better equipped to assist them in maximizing their potential.
- Due to the combination of nature and nurture, exceptions shadow every rule in the soft science of personality profiling.
In chapters 8-11, challenges and dominant solutions are presented to help understand the specific cerebral designs. It is important to note that many of the given solutions may also be used with other cognitive types.
The following chapters uncover the valuable benefits that result from revealing the mental typographies of our athletes.
