Raising the Bar               

With the Flora London Marathon only a week past, the physical strength of its runners is still very fresh in our minds, but how much time have we spent thinking about their mental strength?  Although perhaps not the first thing we think of when considering sports people, such as endurance runners, the mental strength of a sports person is key not only to their spirit, but to their ability to maintain personal strength in order to become top of their field.

Here we look at a case study in which Thinking Styles was used to improve the performance of a professional high jumper.

Thinking Styles is an occupational psychometric tool measuring cognitive preferences for twenty-six types of thinking. These are sub-divided into Sensory, People and Task Focus.

Julie Crane, a potential Olympic high jumper for the 2008 Olympics and her coach, Alex Caan wanted to explore how Julie's Thinking Styles preferences affected her performance, to find out if changing her thinking could lead to performance improvements.  When used in performance coaching, Thinking Styles is used to understand how the way an individual thinks could hinder or enhance their performance.

They also wanted to explore how Alex's Thinking Styles preferences affected the way he coached Julie and if changing this could impact on her performance.  Both Alex and Julie received feedback on their individual Thinking Styles reports.  it became apparent that Alex had been using the "wrong" language to influence and encourage Julie, using words which suited his cognitive preferences rather than hers.

The process that Julie then went through to "translate" his language into hers lead to misunderstandings.  Once Alex understood this and began using the language which Julie preferred to hear, he could coach her more effectively.

The result of this change was that Julie not only jumped a personal best, but she achieved it under the stress of competition conditions.

If you are interested in finding out more about Thinking Styles and its uses, please do contact us.

You can also find out more about Thinking Styles by clicking here.