Personality Profiling of the Athletes (and Coaches)?

Screening athletes for movement faults has been all the rage recently. Predictive of injury or not, it is very helpful in clustering your athletes into groups of similar needs, and making individualization of training less hard.

My recent obsession is Jordan B. Peterson (although I have been following him and his work for some time now) and I have just finished his Maps of Meaning (2017) lectures, but I am still reading the book. I cannot recommend Jordan highly enough (if you are interested in psychology, myth, philosophy and generally making some meaning out of this complex thing called life).

I am about to start Jordan’s Personality and its Transformations lectures as well, and I have just finished The Big Five testing (completely free) from Personality Project website. The Big Five is a model based on common language descriptors of personality. The five factors have been defined as openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (WIKI).

Personality Project is a fantastic resource not only for people interested in experimental psychology and psychometrics, but it is also great introduction to R statistical language (the author created the famous psych package) and statistics (i.e. factor analysis).

This brings me to the topic of this blog post – screening athletes for movement faults, and generally profiling athletes should not stop at movement only, but should also include their personalities. Individualizing training should also be based on personality types of the athletes and we have been putting this to the back burner. In my opinion, the most important aspect of high performance cultures, besides culture itself, is having a management, leadership and 2 communication aligned with different personalities in the team. Knowing who you are dealing with helps you adjust your management style(s) and maybe help the athletes (and coaches) become the best they can be (both in sport, but in life as well).

The simplest thing you can do now is watch Jordan’s Personality and its Transformationslectures and let the athletes fill the completely free The Big Five test.