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Personality Based Training
“Personality profiling assists coaches, athletes, and parents in understanding how individuals gather information and make decisions. It’s how we are wired. It’s what makes us tick.”
Frank Giampaolo
Personality Based Training (PBT) is a training method that focuses the attention on the athlete’s unique brain design as opposed to the educator. When applying PBT, tennis pros and parents welcome and respect the athlete’s unique preferred styles of learning, behaving and playing the game. The athletes feel empowered because their views and needs are recognized. And once understood, students are more motivated and inspired to learn and improve. An inspired student is more likely to take the leadership role in achieving their goals.
“Athletes would benefit from understanding the advantages and disadvantages of their unique brain design. It’s why they are naturally good at some things and uncomfortable with others.”
It’s important to note that while I’ve studied sports psychology for the past 30 years, I am a veteran, “In the Trenches” practical application tennis coach, not an “Academia” psychologist. But neither were Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers, authors of the famous Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI- A psychological questionnaire used to understand individuals mental preferences.) published in the United States in 1943. Together Myers-Briggs noticed that individuals have different temperaments and unique ways of seeing the world.
While some scientists say the MBTI doesn’t stand up to scientific reliability, I can say with all honesty that it has helped me coach over 100 National Champions and several Pro tour athletes. More importantly, personality profiling benefits my athletes and their entourage of parents, coaches, and trainers at a much deeper level. A study conducted by Psychology Today, reports that approximately 80% of Fortune 500 companies use various personality tests to hire future employees, to assess progress, and to maximize efficiency and harmony through team building events.
The time has come to broaden the role of personality profiling into the athletic realm, as I have outlined in The Soft Science of Tennis.
Getting to know the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
The MBTI is the most popular psychometric questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. It’s my intention to bring to light the usefulness of brain preference identification in the tennis industry. Each student has a preferred way of seeing the world. The basic MBTI theory categorizes preferences into four groups from which individuals identify their dominant cerebral preference.
The Typographies Include:
- Extraversion (“E”)- People/Places
- Introversion (“I”)- Theories/ Information
- Sensing (“S”)- Facts/Reality
- Intuition (“N”) Possibilities/Potential
- Thinking (“T”)- Logic/Truthfulness
- Feeling (“F”)- Harmony/Relationships
- Judgment (“J”)- Orderly/Structured
- Perception (“P”)- Flexible/Adaptable
For each of the above pairings, your athletes typically have a preference for one system above the other. The combination of their four preferences gives them their initial assessment in a four-letter acronym. An example is personality profile: ISTP (Introvert Sensate Thinker Perceiver)
“View your athlete’s brain design (dominant and auxiliary) the same way you would view right-handed versus left-handed body type functions. Each athlete has an inborn preferred system.”
In my experience, personality profiling is a soft science, meaning other factors such as nurturing and environments skew the data. With that said, I believe that athletes have specific preferences in the way they experience the world and these choices affect their actions, values, and motivational needs on and off the tennis court.
Universal Truths
- Gaining an understanding of this soft science takes time. Be patient as you learn to apply this new found skill. I encourage you to apply personality profiling as a means to understand how students tick versus stereotyping or grouping athletes by mere age or general ability.
- Coaches can’t change an athlete’s primary brain design, but they can nurture both the individual’s weaker, opposing profile and strengthen their dominant profile.
- Interestingly, on rare occasions, a student’s on-court persona opposes their off-court persona.
- Everyone exhibits both dominant and auxiliary traits. For example, introverts can be quite sociable for short stints of time.
- There isn’t a right, wrong, superior, or inferior type, but rather preferred approaches to the game and life. Although there are only 16 unique brain design categories, everyone is unique. For example, there is a broad spectrum of each preference ranging from moderate to extreme.
- All brain designs need to devote time and energy to nurturing their non-dominant functions.
- It is not unlikely for athletes young and old to inaccurately self-profile their brain design to fit into a more popular, cool version of themselves.
- Pay attention to other’s brain design because this is why opposite types make you crazy and similar types make you comfortable.
- An athlete will benefit significantly from understanding the advantages and disadvantages of their unique design.
- Customized development through personality profiling increases self-esteem and breeds confidence, which is seen in the athlete’s peaceful performance.
- Profiling your athlete’s personalities won’t provide you with the final answers, but it will assist in organizing their unique developmental pathways, which will maximize enjoyment, as well as help them to reach their potential at a quicker rate.
- It’s our job as educators and parents to de-code each athlete, so we are better equipped to assist them in maximizing their potential.
- Due to the combination of nature and nurture, exceptions shadow every rule in the soft science of personality profiling.
In chapters 8-11, challenges and dominant solutions are presented to help understand the specific cerebral designs. It is important to note that many of the given solutions may also be used with other cognitive types.
The following chapters uncover the valuable benefits that result from revealing the mental typographies of our athletes.
