Kristoffer Henriksen - Mindfulness and Acceptance in Sport: How to Help Athletes Perform and Thrive under Pressure

I wish someone had taught me mindfulness and acceptance when I was a young sailor fighting to qualify for the Olympic Games. I realize how much energy I wasted trying to control my mind. I sometimes wonder what a difference it would have made if I had simply stopped trying to fight my mind and used all that energy on doing what I had been practicing for. There is so much more freedom in this new approach. Today, as a sailing coach, I work closely with a sport psychologist on helping athletes to direct their focus to what makes a difference in the moment. I always tell my own story to young athletes. All athletes really deserve to make peace with their minds and just engage fully in the sport they love.

Peter Hansen, Danish National Team Coach,
Olympic Sailing

Throughout my career, I have learned how important it is to know who I am and who I want to be. Finding my core values as an athlete but also as a human and later in my career as a husband and a father have been key elements on my path to excel, not only once or twice but continuously. I have had tough defeats and moments with pressure, stress and doubt. Learning to accept difficult feelings in difficult situations but still make brave decisions, move forward and stay true to myself have been vital on this bumpy but challenging and meaningful road.

Mark O. Madsen, Olympic silver medalist and three-time
World Championship silver medalist in wrestling.
Now committed to a path to lead him to the
top as a mixed martial arts fighter

Mindfulness- and acceptance-based approaches such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Mindfulness Acceptance Commitment (MAC) are gaining momentum with sport psychology practitioners who work to support elite athletes. These acceptance-based, or third wave, cognitive behavioral approaches in sport psychology highlight that thought suppression and control techniques can trigger a metacognitive scanning process, and that excessive cognitive activity and task-irrelevant focus (self-focused attention such as trying to change thoughts) disrupt performance.

Using this perspective, the aim of sport psychology interventions is not to help the athletes engage in the futile task of managing and controlling internal life. Rather, it suggests that sport psychology practitioners should work to increase athletes willingness to accept negative thoughts and emotions in pursuit of valued ends. Key aspects of such interventions include: teaching athletes to open up and accept, teaching athletes to mindfully engage in the present moment, and helping athletes formulate the values and engage in committed actions towards these values.

The goal of Mindfulness and Acceptance in Sport: How to Help Athletes Perform and Thrive under Pressure then is to provide students, researchers, practitioners, and coaches of sport psychology with practical guidance for implementing mindfulness and acceptance approaches in their work with athletes. This book brings together highly experienced practitioners and shares their working methods, exercises, and cases to inspire the sport psychology profession.

Kristoffer Henriksen is an associate professor at the Institute of Sport Science and Clinical Biomechanics at the University of Southern Denmark, and a sport psychology practitioner in Team Denmark.

Jakob Hansen is a full-time private performance consultant in sport, business, and other performance domains. From 2008 to 2018 he was a sport psychology practitioner in Team Denmark.

Carsten Hvid Larsen is an associate teaching professor at the Institute of Sport Science and Clinical Biomechanics at the University of Southern Denmark, and a sport psychology practitioner in Team Denmark.

Edited by Kristoffer Henriksen, Jakob Hansen and Carsten Hvid Larsen

First published 2020

by Routledge

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and by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2020 Taylor & Francis

The right of Kristoffer Henriksen, Jakob Hansen, and Carsten Hvid Larsen to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-138-62399-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-62400-9 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-43523-2 (ebk)

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by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To all you athletes who fight, sweat and struggle every day in the pursuit of what truly matters to you. You all have hopes and dreams, and doubts that you will ever reach them. So very human. So very right.

To all the athletes we have worked with. Thank you. Thank you for inviting us along on your journeys. Thank you for allowing us to experiment. Thank you for walking many miles by our sides. Without your ambitions and struggles, we can truly say that the ideas in this book would have never come to us.

To our lovely families. Thank you for being who you are.