Tag Archive for 'psicologi'

ISSP-R Practitioner and Established Supervisor applications now open!

Given the mission of International Society of Sport Psychology (ISSP)  and in the spirit of globalization, internationalization, unification, and collaboration, the ISSP Registry Committee is finalizing the process of establishing an internationally recognized consultant/practitioner registry that represents the minimum standard of sport psychology practice. It is envisioned that the ISSP-Registry (ISSP-R) will respond to the high international mobility of both sporting clients and consultants as well as increase the visibility and credibility of the profession internationally. Importantly, it aims to augment the professional standards of the field with a particular focus on supporting those countries in which ASP is at a developing phase.

ISSP is pleased to announce that applications to the ISSP-Registry (ISSP-R) are now open for [i] Established Practitioners, [ii] Emerging Practitioners and [iii] ISSP-R Established Supervisor. Applications will remain open until Friday, December 30, 2022. Below is some of the key information.

There are two routes to being accepted onto the ISSP-Registry – the Established Practitioner route and the Emerging Practitioner route. Presently, we are accepting applications for both Established Practitioner and Emerging Practitioner routes. Secondly, there are two routes to being accepted onto the ISSP-Registry as a Supervisor – the Established Supervisor route and the Emerging Supervisor route. Presently, we are accepting applications for Established Supervisor only. Please visit the ISSP Registryand ISSP-R Supervisors pages for more information.

For Emerging Practitioners: applicants must have successfully completed the ISSP-R modules in Cultural Competence, Mental Health, and Professional Conduct to apply. For prospective ISSP-R Emerging Practitioners, online versions of these ISSP-R modules will be available in the near future. Beginning in Spring 2023, we will process and assess applications on a continuous basis, allowing applicants to submit any time.

Please direct your completed applications or questions to isspr@issponline.org

The importance of studying for a practitioner

Sport psychology has reached a remarkable level of popularity in academia. Thousands of articles are published each year, spanning all areas of this discipline.

The most important publishing houses very frequently publish manuals rather than books devoted to a single psychological topic or sport discipline.

Finally, there are the popular books and not least in relevance the biographies of athletes in which they often tell how they faced, suffered or solved their mental challenges.

We have at our disposal a wealth of information in which it is also easy to get lost. Over the course of a person’s career beginning in the 1980s, the availability of news has changed dramatically. Human Kinetics had just been born, and there were two international journals. The first English-language handbook I read was in 1984, “Psychological foundations of sport” by John Silva III and Robert Weinberg, and I regarded it as a kind of missal to be consulted weekly on whatever issues came to mind.

Coming to today, I have the impression that psychologists who want to deal with sports read very little and their readings are very much oriented toward popular and not very complex books. They follow athletes a lot, either on instagram or by reading their biographies, and even these are sources of information that do not remain within the scope of an individual’s experience but also become an orientation on which to direct their work. In-depth study of a textbook is not routinely considered a major option. I understand that it may be less compelling than the life narrated by, for example, Agassi in his book “Open,” but it should be unavoidable, and then narrow one’s interest to more specific scientific articles according to one’s interests.

I hope I am wrong and have the wrong perception with respect to this issue of knowledge.

Too much sedentary life for young

Since young Italian people, children and adolescents, no longer have the opportunity to play and do sports spontaneously in the oratory, in the street or in the gardens of the city and spend only two hours a week in school doing physical activity, the only way not to create sedentary people or people who are for too many hours of the day sitting at a desk or on the couch at home is necessary that municipal organizations, sports, schools, federations and parents build a network to overcome this very serious problem, which limits the development of young Italians.

Interview with Dino Zoff

How have young people changed?

“We used to go out of the house and play until dark. There was a sense of freedom that is unthinkable today. They have to be brought in to play sports and they have an hour. And they pay. And when you pay, everything changes. Just as parents have changed, covering for them when they make mistakes, defending them. A self-defensive behavior: they do it only to cover and defend their own limits as parents. Their own mistakes. Then you see things at 12, 13 that you can’t explain. Yes, the kids have changed and with them, inevitably, the sport has changed. And maybe this is the thing that pains me the most”.

Master Roma: January 26 Open Day

Sport psychologist ISSP-Registry

ISSP is pleased to announce that applications to the ISSP-Registry (ISSP-R) and ISSP-Registry of Approved Supervisors (ISSP-S) will be re-opening. Applications will open on Friday, January 21, 2022. Please refer to the ISSP-R section of the website for full details.

Master in Sport Psychology

European certification of specialists in applied sport psychology.

FEPSAC  has established the European certification of specialists in applied sport psychology.

Preamble

Professional certification is a crucial element to the establishment, legitimization, and reputation of a profession (Portenga, 2014). The FEPSAC Managing Council developed certification guidelines for specialists in applied sport psychology, establishing a certification process to distinguish these professionals from others in the marketplace (e.g., performance enhancement consultant, mental skills trainer, mental coach). The goal of such an initiative is to define the minimum standards that should be met by individuals in order to qualify for independent practice in the field of applied sport psychology.

The certification process focusses on the standards for practitioners in the field of sport psychology who have an initial qualification background in either sport science, psychology, or both. FEPSAC believes that practitioners should meet high standards of training and delivery using and complementing the expertise specific to their initial training.

FEPSAC carefully examined several certification systems across Europe and met and discussed with individuals and international organizations involved in certification, continuous professional development and education and training, and legal aspects of certification in order to guarantee that best practices across Europe were upheld.

Members who are certified may use the acronym SASP-FEPSAC after their name and highest university degree; such an acronym will denote the label “a specialist in applied sport psychology”, also referred in this document as specialist. While SASP-FEPSAC accounts for the minimum standard of education and training in applied sport psychology, it does not designate the individual as a “sport psychologist”; rather, the individual is certified as a specialist in the field of applied sport psychology. Note that requirements for providing psychological services are determined by individual state and territorial licensing boards.

The next submission deadline will be on March 30, 2021.

The psychologist training: the popularity of mindfulness

The issue for me is a different one. I have always thought that a psychologist’s use of a psychological strategy/technique, in this case mindfulness, should correspond to an interest not only in developing a skill, learning a technique. It should, in my opinion, be a way to allow a psychologist to acquire further competence in a field of interest.

It seems to me that this strategy and technique falls within those activities that also concern breathing control, the ability to relax, the ability to remain focused on the present represented by a simple or complex stimulus, external or internal to the individual and the ability to use the imagination to organize the visualization of tasks and situations.

My impression is that, instead, one runs the risk of acquiring skills “because in any case I could use them, they are fashionable and can be acquired easily without direct personal involvement”.

The idea I want to emphasize is, in short, the following: does the acquisition of professional skills correspond to the development of an organized plan or does it happen in a more spontaneous way on the wave of training opportunities and interests of this moment?

The junior sport psychologist job in Italy

To find a job you just have to rely on your own strength, unless you belong to that group that you settle through friends of friends. I have never belonged to this type of group and, therefore, I take the opportunity of giving some suggestions to the young psychologists who write to me and who want to do it with their own strength. Here they are, they are simple, perhaps they may seem trivial but they are actions available to everyone:

  1. know English: very well
  2. want to specialize and, above all, to do so (there are better masters in Europe than there are currently in Italy)
  3. be part of an international social network of young professionals who exchange ideas and opportunities for work and internship: www.enyssp.com
  4. map the people known, predicting how each of them could be useful to increase opportunities and knowledge in sport
  5. do internships abroad (summer or not)
  6. ask to the university professors (or others) to get to know youth experts who have managed to achieve what they wanted and talk to them for information.
  7. read the most updated manual of sport psychology and then for the articles, find the authors’ email on the internet and write to them, they will send them to you
  8. don’t listen to those who say there’s nothing to do, work hard to find your way
  9. establish a fixed time to find work in your city, then you will have to search in a wider geographical area
  10. In Italy at the moment the opportunities for collaboration in sport, for young graduates, are mainly with football schools, they need the psychologist to be classified at the highest level by FIGC (it may be useful to contact the psychologist of your Region in the youth and school section of the FIGC) and in tennis that provides the role of mental trainer to work in the clubs (information on the website of the Italian Tennis Federation)

The challenge for psychologists and coaches

As psychologists and coaches we will teach to develop in our athletes an open attitude towards mistakes if we are willing to accept that we may even fail in this task.

Are we willing to take this risk by getting 100% involved in this challenge?

Or do we just teach sports or psychological techniques convinced that they are enough to become good athletes and save ourselves from the  professional failure?