Mindful of a New Role: An ACT Based Sport Psychology Course for Coaches

This chapter introduces the coach education course called Mental Coaching, and hopefully inspire other sport psychology practitioners around the world to teach Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and mindfulness methods to sport coaches. It describes how the coaches have worked in their home contexts after the course and how some have even developed their favourite exercises and models to fit their specific context. Coaches asked for a course in which sport psychology was given more space, and which focused on the application of sport psychology methods and tools by coaches. The coaches described the values work as a very relevant and directly applicable part of the course. The content of the course focused on three key aspects of ACT: values; mindfulness/focus; and committed action. These themes were approached through various working methods, including short introductions, discussions among the participants, practical exercises, mindfulness sessions and home assignments.