No es especialmente CPD, pero puede resultar interesante:
https://twitter.com/DanAbrahams77/status/1589330144787075073
Psicólogo de TundraSports analizando su trabajo a lo largo de 6 meses:
Last week the esports team I work with won an $18,000,000 tournament
The coach, players, and management of @TundraEsports
had worked tirelessly for 6 months with myself on 5 biopsychosocial pillars to give us our best chance to win
The 5 pillars we created were:
- Leadership
- Structure
- Values/Behaviours
- Deliberate Practice
- High Performance Mindsets
The main remit from management for me was to help players be able to high perform under the intense pressure of a global audience of millions
(and 12,000 screaming fans in the arena). All of the above contributed to this (the team had historically under-performed late in tournaments).
I soon realised that for them to win - engagement across the team had to improve, they needed to be better learners, and only then did
they need performance tools
So here’s what we did:
- Leadership: we built clarity around strategy and process.
-What are we trying to do
-How are we going to do it?
-Why are we going to do it in this way?
We emphasised the importance of coach and team captain leading with clear instructions for final decisions - but also with an eye for autonomy-supportive leadership practice (players need certainty but they also need skin in the game)
Leadership isn’t leadership if strategy, tactics, and process aren’t delivered in a clear, concise, and Daniel Abrahams
- Structure: when the team arrived in Singapore for the tournament they needed certainty of daily routine.
They needed time together (social cohesion)
They needed time for rest and recuperation for well-being
Esports players tend to over-practice and under-rest. Daily structure helped reduce the chances of burnout and increased a sense of cohesion (social and task) and horizontal coherence (in all they did) across the team
- Values/behaviours: we set about creating team values and associated behaviours for two reasons:
-Consistency of behaviour, environment, and culture
-Building shared mental models (alongside task and social cohesion)
We knew that we needed a greater sense of consistency of ‘what we do’ and ‘what we say’…and so our shared values and behaviours were designed for a reasonable sense of repetition. That said, we also renounced compliance - promoting a respect for individual differences and raising the importance of contestation (uncomfortable conversation and debate are great bedfellows in any high performing team)
For example, the combination of our values of ‘honesty’ and ‘support’ enabled us to discuss and debate as healthily and as safely as possible.
Our combined values and behaviours may have led to contestation but it also worked in servitude for certainty. Our strategies became clearer as they were debated across the team…leading to a greater sense of having shared mental models (we all strategically know what we’re doing here and we know how we’re going to do it!)
- Deliberate practice: we decided that every practice session (which are called ‘Pubs’ and ‘Scrims’ in this world) required a deliberate execution. This meant effortful attention. It meant specific objectives enveloped in specific feedback.
Borrowing from the work of Anders Ericsson, we decided to practice better than everyone else in this space by making sure that practice was goal-oriented (which it tends not to be in this space), with attention to specific strategies we intended to use in a tournament setting
- High Performance Mindsets: and now our competitive raison d'être. We made it our number one job to compete in our High Performance Mindset (HPM). And to become accomplished at noticing a drop to our Low Performance Mindset (LPM). Individual and team mental frameworks became critical essentials in our search for excellence and subsequently in our capacity to high perform under the most intense pressure
This started by helping each player know their HPM. This revolved around what helped them pay attention (and deal with distractions); what helped them compete at an optimal intensity (and not dropping too low or rising too high); and what help them execute decisions with a positive intent (rather than being and feeling inhibited)
Mental techniques such as attention shifting, self-talk, and embodied solutions were utilised.
And so there we have it. Of course, my work was a small cog in a large wheel, but the fact the team took these seriously, put HPM first in competition, and were willing to incorporate me into their set up and culture speaks volumes for their openness and ambition.
