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    • Using improv comedy to teach psychological skills to athletes: Dr. Jason von Stietz leads webinar for sport psychology professionals

    By 
    News Sport Psychology
    Posted: July 17, 2023

     

    Yes, and! CBT SoCal’s Dr. Jason von Stietz recently led a webinar for Virtual Sport Psych (VSP), an international online organization for sport psychology professionals. VSP has hosted an annual online summit or sport psychology conference referred to as Virtual Applied Sport Psychology Summit (VASP) since 2019. The purpose of the annual VASPs are to help sport psychology professionals to improve their skillset, improve awareness of sport psychology and mental health, and to decrease the stigma surrounding sport psychology and mental health. Aside from the VASPs, VSP also hosts monthly sport psychology webinars for VSP members.

    Dr. von Stietz recently led a monthly webinar titled, “Don’t over think!: Improv exercises as a means of teaching psychological skills.” In this webinar, he demonstrated how improvisational comedy (improv) exercises can be used as a vehicle for athletes to learn distress tolerance and sport-related psychological skills. Webinar attendees participated in improv exercises and discussed their own experience using psychological skills during the exercises. For example, the psychological skill of focus is key to successfully participate in improv, as someone cannot successfully improvise if they are not focused on what is going on in the here and now. Practicing one’s focusing skills during improv exercises can help prepare one to focus in their sport or arena of performance. Additionally, attendees learned to lead improv exercises and use improv concepts in their work as sport psychology professionals.

    If you would like to see a short clip of the webinar, click here. If you would like to see the webinar in its entirety, join the VSP community. To learn more about the online community and membership benefits, click here.

    If you are an athlete, coach, or parent of an athlete, and you would like to learn if CBT informed by sport psychology can help you, contact us for a free phone consultation.