The Mindful Coach: Love, Compassion, and Neuroscience on the Playing Field

Coaching lecture series "Coaching - Research and Practice"

Mark B. Andersen

Mark B. Andersen, former professor of Sports Psychology at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia, currently visiting professor at Halmstad Högskolan (University), Sweden.

Mindfulness is all the rage in clinical psychology, medicine, and education. Mindfulness has also shown up in the executive- and life-coaching fields. In the sport psychology area, mindfulness appears mostly as an intervention for performance enhancement, but recently there have been suggestions that sport psychologists train in mindful practices to help them better connect and form therapeutic relationships with the athletes in their care. In this presentation, I will talk about the potential benefits of coaches having mindful practices and how such practices can help them form positive working alliances with their athletes. To examine the fine, and not so fine, qualities of coach-athlete relationships, and what happens when a coach’s brain and an athlete’s brain interact over a relatively long period of time, I will traverse the fields of Freudian psychology (e.g., transference, countertransference), attachment theory (e.g., secure and insecure attachments), neuroscience (e.g., interpersonal neurobiology), and Buddhist psychology (e.g., right mindfulness, compassion for self and others).

Venue Store Auditorium, Institut for Idræt og Ernæring, Nørre Allé 53, 2200 København N

Sign up Participation is free of charge, but we kindly ask you to sign up here (danish).

Further information Reinhard Stelter Coaching Psychology Unit, University of Copenhagen

The lecture is part of a series of lectures titled "Coaching - research and practice", which is sponsored by the EMCC. The lecture series aims to build a bridge between research and praxis in coaching and at the same time embed coaching practices in the research discourse. The intention is to hear from researchers, who explore coaching from a business, health or sports related angle. The Coaching Psychology Unit at the University of Copenhagen was established in order to launch and coordinate interdisciplinary research, education and dissemination in coaching.