Debrief: Kristoffer Henriksen

Renowned Danish sports psychologist Kristoffer Henriksen joins to discuss his life’s work on athlete development and changing the narrative around what it means to be competitive.

Debrief: Kristoffer Henriksen Chris DeSantis

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Hello and welcome to the swim brief. I'm Chris DeSantis, and today on the Debrief, we have a long-awaited, long teased podcast. My guest probably has not been listening to the podcast, so he doesn't know all the conversation that's been happening about his upcoming appearance. I am joined by Christopher Henlichson. Christopher is a professor at the Institute for Sports and Biomechanics. He's a researcher. He's at Southern, how would we translate that? University of Southern Denmark. I wanted to call it Southern Denmark University because my my mind was thinking in Danish. And you're also a sports psychology consultant, author of a number of books on mindfulness, talent development. Am I leaving anything out important from your bio? No, I think it sounds sounds about right. I know. You're sounding impressive. How did I land such an impressive guest here on the podcast? I had the chance to see you speak when I was in Denmark at the Danish swim coaches aqua clinic. I got immediately provoked by something that you were saying. And I think it's actually a mark of the work that you're doing that it is a bit provocative, right? You're you're spreading some knowledge, I think, around we're going to get into it down the line that in some ways I think a lot of people can get on board with, but I think it's very challenging, especially when I think about it from a coaching perspective, it can be very challenging to implement some of the stuff that you're trying to put in place. And so I want to give you a chance to expose my audience to some of the, you know, give them a taste, right? And maybe get them interested in reading some of your books and going deeper on some of the work you've been doing over the years. But before we get into that, I always think for any audience you're introducing a speaker like yourself, it's important to just know a little bit about who the person is, right? Who is this person that is coming and and and why should I listen to them in the first place? So let me ask you this question at the outset. What led you into the field of sports psychology in the first place? How did that become, you know, your your life's work, your your passion?

SPEAKER_00 2:31

I mean, I think in life, sometimes life happens to us and we don't make very conscious decisions. I'm not sure it was a big plan of mine to end up in sports psychology. I used to l I I've always loved sports. So when I was young, I would do different kinds of um competitive sports. I was a swimmer, actually. Oh, really? I was young, yeah, I was not not extremely good at it, but very, very keen to develop. So um and uh I think I made a lot of bad decisions as a s as a swimmer. Like there were so many things I didn't understand, and it wasn't just sort of tactical or physical things that were the issues. It was more sort of understanding the nature of the sport and and myself. And if I can give an example, you know, I would uh when we would do a tapering period before a competition, I would feel, you know, vigorized and full of energy, and I'd go out and do low, like a long bike ride or a really heavy gym session. Like because I you know, I and I made so many like stupid where I I knew what I was supposed to do, but I just got caught up by emotions and other things and ended up doing completely the opposite. So already back then I was curious, you know, about sort of the the psychological aspects of succeeding as an athlete. And then I started to do uh psychology. You can't study sport psychology in Denmark, unfortunately. So I studied psychology and I found that um the the profession, this the psychology profession, consider their their practice to be about helping people who've got issues, got problems, were not thriving to come up to a a certain sort of normal functional level, right? And I just realized already then this is not why I'm here. Um I want to look at people who are already good and try and understand how do they become the very, very best they can be. This was my passion and this. And then, you know, this is this is sport, like elite sport is just a prime example of people who are striving to towards the impossible and to do, to become the very best versions of who they can be. And so I just immediately fell in love with applying psychology into that field.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

We have so much in common. I I I I didn't know what you were gonna say in that answer whatsoever. I'm so excited to hear it. Um, one of the things I've talked about a lot on this podcast, so my background is um I have a master's in applied positive psychology, and more or less the inspiration for me to get interested in it was as well, my my time as an athlete, and I had a really I had some really high experiences psychologically, some really low lows. And I finished my college swimming career on a huge low. And swimming is something that I feel passionate about, I love it. I still compete in swimming to this day, but it made me start thinking about like, how is it possible, right, that you can be so passionately engaged in something and yet almost get to the point where you can't wait to get away from it, right? How does that happen with people? Positive psychology appealed to me on the same level that you're speaking to. I felt that a lot of the sort of traditional structures for psychology were about rehabilitation or sort of like if I use like a math analogy, is about taking people that were at a negative five. Let's get them back to zero, let's get them back to okay. And when I looked at sports, it's like that's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to take people from zero to five, and if they're at five, we're trying to get them to ten, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:49

We're always trying to five. We're getting them to 105, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:52

I mean, that's yeah, yeah, we're trying to make something better, right? And so sometimes, sometimes the applications of psychology just don't quite fit in a sporting world because, especially for coaches, I think I've spoken about this as well. Like coaches are not physiotherapists. Physiotherapists have a very distinct role from coaches. Physiotherapists do rehabilitation, sports medicine doctors do rehabilitation. In coaching, we do training, right? We are trying to prepare people for the situations, the environments, the experiences that they are going to come up against. And, you know, if we were to apply a rehabilitative model to that, it wouldn't quite fit. So this makes me even more excited to talk to you than I was when we were starting at this, because you know, like we we have this in common. One thing I noticed about you as well is you're published a lot of research. I mean, you are you are working hard, you're teaching, but you also are keeping a hand in, we were just talking about this and defining exactly what your role is, but you're keeping a hand in like actually working with coaches, actually working with athletes. Why is it important for you to have this kind of broad experience when you're looking at sports psychology?

SPEAKER_00 7:06

I think it's extremely important to be what we could call a scientist practitioner. I think from a research perspective, it's good for several reasons. One of them is that I think it helps me ask the right questions. Right. So sometimes you can you can formulate research questions that might be scientifically sound or theoretically sound, but they no one ever asked them. Like, I mean, you you know, you're you're answering stuff that nobody nobody ever asked, right? So so you need that foot in the in the in the applied world in the elite sport community to understand to understand like what what's triggering people, what are they what are they thinking about, what are they struggling with? What what kinds of questions do we need to help them answer? That's uh and and the other thing is it gives me access also. Um I can do studies of high performance environments and with top level athletes that rarely you know it's it's rare to have that sort of access in uh in science. Very often studies are done with younger athletes, college athletes, like uh and those are still really good studies, but it's we also need to do the studies that are with the top high-end performers, right? In order to understand what's at stake in that at that level. And uh and that and that gives me access because I I know people in the in that community. And when I look at it from the other side, as a practitioner, I would also say you can be a really good practitioner without doing science, but it has helped me along the way to develop the field more. So in Denmark, we have made some major transitions in how we look at psychology sort of throughout the last 10, 10, 20 years. And I've been on the forefront of those major transformations all along the way. And this has been partially because, you know, I meet other researchers in other areas as well or publish with them or a study comes out. So just keeping up to date with what's going on in the field that way is helps you as a practitioner to be not just doing good work, but to develop the field also.

SPEAKER_01 8:59

Yeah, I think you have to think about we've in we've engaged, we've asked the right questions, right? We we've engaged in this new research, we have new information to bring to bear. How are we going to bring it to bear, right? You you have to get out into the field, right, and actually see how can I make this relevant to the actual practical situations that I find myself in. And I think that's something that was evident when you were speaking. I could see that that was a part of what you're doing. And I think it from a coaching perspective, it lends a lot of authenticity to it, right? Because sometimes, you know, when you have a sort of psychology expert or a sports psychology expert, they're completely detached from the practicing side of things. And so you're listening to them talk, and you think, like, okay, great. I love your expertise. What am I supposed to do with that? Right. Um and I think uh maybe that was even one of the things that I was trying to get at when I was talking to you in Denmark. And we'll we'll get to that part down the line. One of the things that comes across when I look at the topics you've engaged in, the areas of where you have put your effort into developing, I just have this sense that you are trying to have a very distinct impact on the sporting world, that you want to like leave your mark. You you want to change things culturally in a way. If you could sort of sum up first off, is that accurate? And then if so, yeah, what what is it? What is that impact that you're trying to affect?

SPEAKER_00 10:31

Yeah, I mean, in research, people will sometimes, you know, conflate um what you can say, impact factor, which is like, you know, how how much of your papers cited and stuff with actual impact. And that's not the same thing, like not at all. So I've never been so preoccupied with the sort of the impact factor version. I've I've always known that if if I'm to be motivated in this, I want to have a real impact. Like I want to change sport into a better place. And I and I've always been driven by this idea that I want to create environments where athletes can reach the absolute peak of what they dream about and at the same time enjoy good mental health, personal development, you know, that we can sort of that we can combine all these elements into a sustainable talent development and elite sport approach and demonstrate to the world that it doesn't have to be two separate things. Like we don't need to either go for high-level performance or thriving or mental health or personal development. It's actually possible to do both. And this has been my driving force for a long time, and I think it it's as it's probably even more necessary now than ever. We have a generation of young people who are struggling sometimes with their mental health, for example. And it seems to me that the only tool that we have is to lower the bar. Like, you know, we could we could we give them less exams or less difficult exams, or could we, you know, lower, lower the expectations or the demands. And but we need an alternative to that. We need to demonstrate that we can have a really high bar and people who enjoy good mental health if we create the right performance environments. And that that has been the sort of my mission the whole way to demonstrate that that's possible.

SPEAKER_01 12:13

Yeah, I mean, gosh, I can't believe I took this long to meet you. We need to talk more because I'm just listening to that and like mentally inside myself, I'm just nodding so hard. It's something that I've returned to time and time again. People who have been listening to this a long time will s will remember. I mean, one of the things that I've talked about many, many times, when you look at the sport of swimming, we've had many, many high-profile athletes that have had to step away from competing because simply what they've cited is that, you know, engaging in the sport they feel has been detrimental to their mental health. And I run into people all the time that are sort of saying, like, yeah, well, that's just how it is on the high performance end. It's bad for your mental health. And I go, that can't be our answer. We we like we've got to be able to do better than that. It just shouldn't be that way, right? I understand that in many instances that's where we end up, but I think to myself, there has to be something else we can do. And I I love what you say about young people as well. I I have had the same observation. You talk about lowering the bar. It's like, yes, of course, we can always take pressure off and we recognize on some level that there are higher expectations in in ways maybe we don't even completely understand for young people coming up. But that can't be the only thing we leverage, right? There has to be some way to build capacity in people. And if we come back to the sort of the coaching analogy and the training, there has to be a way to prepare them for the context and the situations that they find themselves in. If you could, just before we get into some of the specifics of your work, just to put the final cherry on the top of credibility for my audience, just give us kind of an overview of what are some of the sports you've worked with? What are give us the sort of the diversity of places you found yourself engaged in the sporting world.

SPEAKER_00 14:09

Well, I mean, I've been I've been working as a as a sports psychology consultant for I think I finished my education in 2000 and went straight into sort of applied work. So it's been a long time now. You look young. 2000. But um but uh so I've I've I've been working mainly in Olympic sports. Um so for example, the Danish Olympic sailing team, I've been involved with them for for many years. I went uh to the Olympic Games with them three times as an on-site consultant. Uh sailing is a very big, prestigious sport in Denmark with a big lot of history.

SPEAKER_01 14:44

And a lot of Olympic medals, just too triggering for the audience. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 14:48

Yeah, and um and uh so this has been a sport, but I've also worked in like I mean f football or soccer, as you'd say, um in Denmark with individual players, not so much in the clubs, because um such players oftentimes want a um a person outside of the system to help them, for example. I've worked in orienteering, track and field, even in motorsports, um, and um but I've also worked with individual athletes from numerous other sports. And the last five, six years I've expanded a little bit to see where the limits of our thinking really is into um professional music and um business world and um performance environments. Other performance domains, yeah, and to see what if some of the ideas that we um we sort of apply in sport uh are universally sort of applicable or not.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

Yeah, so let's get into some of the specific stuff that you've been working on. Just as I I approached some of your research, your books, et cetera, one of the concepts that came through time and time again was this holistic ecological approach. If you could, for my audience, just sort of give a broad overview of what the holistic ecological approach is and how you came to develop it.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

Yeah, I could do that. If it's okay, I'd like to start with a little story. I we love stories on this podcast, so please. From my own sort of professional development. So when I was uh a young a young practitioner and I was helping individual athletes, you know, trying to work on their mental strength and and and sort of the more classic stuff. I came across a a young uh female soccer player. It was the mom who called me up and she said, you know, this is this girl is, you know, uh completely on a roll. She's been selected for the national team, everything is good, you know. She's now moving into a bigger club, you know, every like everything. It sounded like a complete success story, right? She comes into my office and minutes later she's she finds herself crying in that in that chair, right? And and I sort of feel that there's a mismatch between the story I was told and then the and then what uh and I was expecting I was just going to help her with you know some goal setting perhaps or you know, regulating some emotion or whatever it might be. And I realized that she found herself in a tough spot in an environment that wasn't very good for her. She felt she was almost being torn apart by different expectations from different people. So you'd have a a club coach in one club saying you should stay here for your development, it's better for you and for the line. And then you'd have another coach in another club saying, no, it's time for you to change to get into an environment with better, better places where you can develop more. And then you'd have a national team coach who would say a third thing about what you should do, and then you'd have a German teacher saying you should focus on your finishing your your school before you start digging into sport and all that stuff. And I and I sat there thinking, wow, that doesn't sound so nice, right? And I and I opened up my sport psychology toolbox to find nothing that could help me. It wasn't a question of emotional regulation or goal setting or positive thinking, or it was, you know, it was this was a bad environment. So I said, Well, can I somehow change that environment to the better? And I tried to contact these coaches actually and they felt like, what are you on about? We can't, you know, we can't, this is the system and we can't change that. And and that and that four or five years maybe into my into my applied work, and that's actually what drove me back into academia, because I realized at that point that I wanted to understand not just the psychology of the individual, but why some environments are so much better at producing elite level athletes than others. Why do some some environments just simply just better at providing, you know, the conditions and the environments that help athletes transition into an elite level and others are not? And that's that became my way into writing a PhD where I said, and I want to understand those environments. I want to see what a good and a bad environment looks like and what we can learn from that. And when we call it holistic ecological approach, it's because sort of the ecological psychology takes attention away from the individual and onto the environments in which those individuals have their daily lives, right? So we we think less about the individuals and more about the environments in which they develop. And the holistic part comes from trying to understand the environments holistically. So it's not just what happens in the swimming club or you know, when they're in the water. It's it's the whole environment. It's it's the coordination between sport and school. It's the coordination between the different coaches at the different elements that are involved. It's the it's the values that underpin the whole approach of how you sort of approach your sport and how coaches work. So it's that holistic view of what a what an environment looks like. That's why we call it holistic ecological approach. Yeah. So is that what you're what you're looking for? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

Yeah, no, I mean, I that's exactly what I'm looking for. And it it just, you know, as I'm listening to it, I think there's so many themes in here that are so relevant. My audience is mainly coaches, and like this is so important for them, and I know a lot of them are now listening with rapt attention because I think we look at the lives of young athletes, and most coaches are working with, you know, youth athletes, even some people that maybe consider themselves coaching at the elite level, like more or less um they're working with with youth athletes. And one of the consistent themes is I think the sort of lack of cohesion among the adults, right? In terms of like everybody's in their silo and everybody's pulling in their own direction. We run into this a lot in the United States, particularly like in swimming environments. There's a lot of tension between the high school system and our our club swimming programs, right? Where it becomes like very kind of territorial. And meanwhile, there's a there's a child that's caught in the middle that just feels like no matter what they do, it's the wrong thing and they're they're causing some problems. And so like I'm desperate to hear sort of some of the top line insights that you have in terms of how can you actually get those environments to work together. Because I I really I coach people one-on-one on the psychological side as well. And I would say one of the things that I have found is way more effective, and I I can hear this in your approach as well, is like when I get approached by an athlete, I go, you know, I would love to do this in cooperation with your coach, because if it's just you and me, we can get a certain we can make a certain amount of progress. If it's you, me, and your coach, we can make more progress. If your parents are involved as well, we can make even more progress. The more that we broaden this circle, the greater chance we have to actually help you. But that's really, really challenging. What insights do you have in terms of just even trying to get a diverse group of people to consider the sort of interplay between their interactions with somebody in an athletic environment?

SPEAKER_00 21:44

Yeah, this is a really good question. You know, and it comes back to sort of how do you apply it. And I think maybe I can start by saying that it's it's also a question of philosophy a little bit. So as a coach, you subscribe to some ideas about what talent is, how do how You develop as a person, like you subscribe to some some ideas around those things. And if a if as a coach, if you really believe that talent is like an innate capacity that you just have to discover, right? Basically, so you just have to go out and find the right people, and then they'll they'll they're sure to to end up in a good space somehow, right? Then then what you do is you focus a lot on picking the right people, and you know, that that that's where your mindset is. If if you subscribe to this idea that no one becomes world class without a world class environment, if that's what you believe in, and I do, then you know you you ex you broaden your understanding of what why you're in the world, like what what is your role, even, right? So you start doing things that isn't just about picking the right people or creating some good training sessions with the right intensity and the right all that stuff. But but but you sort of try to take a responsibility for the environment. So you start by thinking, how can I coordinate? How can I make sure that athletes are not met by competing and contradictory demands? And and how can I make sure that they live a life in some sort of harmony between the different elements of what they are? How can I make sure that we create environments where athletes want to stay long enough to develop to become good senior athletes, right? Not just developing really fast and winning an under-11 medal somewhere, right? But that they actually want to stay in those environments until they're 20, 25, hell, even 30, maybe, right? I mean, so this is this is what we want. So and that completely, if once you start going down that idea, it completely changes how you see your tasks as a coach, right? It's not that difficult to get someone who can instruct you in having, you know, high elbows and you know, whatever it is, whatever it is that you you want to work on, right? Head position and what stuff. I'm not trying to take anything away from from technically competent coaches. It's just not their main task. Their main task is to create environments where athletes develop form and enjoy good mental health and want to stay for a long time. That is the main task. If they are there for a long time, they will, you know, and eventually learn how to swim well.

SPEAKER_01 24:07

Yeah. I think, you know, one of the things I was saying this to somebody yesterday that I'm most grateful for in my own coaching experience, one of the first places I coached was at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. That's where I got my master's as well. And when I was coaching there, one of the unique things is even though that's in the top division, division one of U.S. Collegiate Athletics, there's no athletic scholarships involved. So essentially we would recruit athletes, and the the carrot in recruiting was that we would help them with admissions. They would get into the school. But the day after they were admitted, if they decided, I don't really want to swim anymore, there was there was no recourse for us. You know, they could just walk away from the sport. And it was really actually, I think, formative for me as a coach because there was no, there was no stick option. There was only carrot. The only thing I could do in terms of like in terms of trying to be competitive in that environment was I had to develop something that the athletes wanted to come to, that they wanted to show up to. I couldn't say, like, well, you know, if you don't swim fast, I'm pulling back this scholarship. And I'm really grateful for that because I think, particularly like a lot of coaches, you probably run into this as well, they've grown up in an environment where one of the major tools for motivating athletes is a punitive one, right? Do this or else I'm gonna bring this to bear on you. And I think there many of them are finding for better, I think, not not for better or for worse, but for better that those tools don't work anymore. They're not applicable. The athletes hopefully in many environments don't fear them anymore. So they simply just don't work. I wonder if you could drill down and give an example of a place where you've been working, where uh you've been consulting, where you've seen perhaps a coach make a change in the environment along the lines of what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 26:06

Oh, I could mention a hundred different of those.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

And you just give me one good one.

SPEAKER_00 26:11

And in Denmark, it has become part of our DNA. We even refer to it as the Danish model, is that we focus on environments, right? So if you have a coach that comes in and says, I I have this one athlete who's absolutely world-class in a in some sport and I want to do a program for him or her, Team Denmark, which is the National Olympic sort of elite sport institution, would not fund that. They would not chip in, basically, because they don't believe that that's possible. They believe in the model of the environment. So if you come on the other hand and say we're building an environment here with a number of athletes and coaches who can learn from each other, share knowledge, all that, you know, really create an environment where coaches grow, athletes grow, and they can commit to a community and develop together, then there is uh then there can be funding, right? So so in Denmark, we have we have really been developing such environments for a long time. And I and I and I see it, for example, when we sometimes invite foreign coaches. I mean, Denmark is a small country, so we draw on really, really skilled coaches from other countries, and they come in with a different tradition, perhaps, of just focusing on that one top athlete. And that it it never really works, you know. So we uh we always have to go in. I will go in as a consultant and try and help them understand what the Danish model is all about and how does he, she, as a coach, try and build environments that are conducive to development, to, to, to thriving, to performance, like what what is it that the athletes want to get out of being in those environments? And we have all those discussions and the coaches that typically pick up that idea because they like you, they they have experiences from their own lives where where the stick doesn't work or where they where they lost motivation because the environment wasn't there. And it's quite clear that when we ask Danish athletes why did you become so good as you did, right? The top-level athletes, they will point at elements in their environments. They will say, you know, these coaches, these communities, these other athletes, these ways of sharing knowledge, these role models, they won't say I was extremely committed or I I was more motivated than other people, or no, no, no, they're all motivated, they're all committed like it, but but I was in a good environment that helped me develop.

SPEAKER_01 28:26

Yeah, I'm gonna get very specific and ask you a question because I've having coached in in Denmark and in the United States, something really interesting I've noticed, and this is on the swimming side of things, and I would love to get your perspective on it. Um, I when I went over to the coach there, I had a perception that there was, you know, this Danish model, and I was like, I want to be a part of that, right? I think that was something that really appealed to me about coaching in that environment. And I think a lot of what you're saying is true. I have seen it in many cases. One thing that I found completely confusing when it came to Danish swim clubs and totally incongruent with what you're talking about was, you know, all clubs have somewhat of like a a, let's say, like a pyramid talent development structure where they have a lot of athletes at the base level. And then as you go up like within a club structure, in many cases, I think specifically in swimming, I'm struggling to find an example where there's more people at the top, right? At the higher, older, higher level of competition. And in many cases, like when I I coached in Gentofta for a few years, when I was coaching there, we had a 120 competitive swimmers on the team, but there would be like 40 at the bottom level, and the top level would be like 12 athletes at the top. And I contrast this with U.S. swimming clubs, which you would assume I would say the overall attitude and stereotype of U.S. sporting structures is that we are very focused on performance and individuals and you know, getting everything to the top. But yet the last club that I coached with in the U.S., we had like actually 80 athletes at the high school level at the top of our club, out of a club of 300. So in fact, they were the biggest group of people. And I wonder, did do you do you have the same thought when you look at the way some of these Danish swim clubs are structured that they've that they've found a way to be, I don't know, uh for lack of a better term, like too exclusive in the way that they've approached talent development and sort of filtered people out before they even have a chance. When you're talking earlier about like keeping people in the sport to 20, 25, 30, I mean, they've essentially excluded most people from the system by the time they're 15 years old. How does that comport?

SPEAKER_00 30:48

Yeah, well, I mean, I'm trying to be how can I formulate myself in a way here that isn't too uh too tough? I mean, I I don't take inspiration in the Danish swimming community when I try to understand what good talent development looks like, to be honest.

SPEAKER_01 31:02

Oh, I think there's not too many Danish listeners, Christopher, so you're okay, you're safe.

SPEAKER_00 31:06

I'm happy, I'm happy for that. And I I think I mean I'm invited into some of the clubs sometimes, right, where we can discuss these things and they are very well aware of some of these issues. But I have coaches who subscribe to the idea that there is kind of a window of physical sort of skill development that you have to, and if you're not willing to train 10, 12 times a week when you're 11 years old, you know, you're not can't be part of the and so they are over.

SPEAKER_01 31:31

And you don't agree with that. I should say you don't okay no, no, not at all, no, not at all.

SPEAKER_00 31:36

I mean, I've we I I even talked to uh to neuroscientists who say we can't we can't find that place in the brain that should sort of how explain that. I know that when you're 80 it might be difficult, but but the brain is quite plastic, so uh the plasticity is high. So no, no, no, I don't believe in that at all. And I have examples from from Danish swimming where where young athletes, for example, they swim a lot and uh and uh and they really like it and they enjoy their swimming, but it's like it it's starting to be just a little bit too much for a period, for example. You know, they fall asleep in school almost because they have four or five morning training sessions a week, and you know, and they come and they ask if I can skip just maybe the Wednesday one, right? Like very, very like small, small elements of flexibility, you know, to accommodate that life is about more than swimming, right? And if you were thinking, well, this athlete should, you know, is supposed to be good in ten years, I mean it would be a no-brainer. Sure, yeah skip the training session on Wednesday. You're still training 10 times a week. You'll you'll you've got plenty of time. But if you think they're gonna stop tomorrow or the day after tomorrow anyway, so I'm just gonna push them, right? So that I sort of make sure we get some results out of them before they leave. Then then, you know, you just you say, well, well, what they've said is basically, sure, you can skip a training. You don't have to be part of our elite team, right? So you know, you can swim with the old lady Saturday morning if you wish. That's not very accommodating. And I mean, luckily we also see good examples, examples of where, you know, it's uh swim clubs understand that athletes are more than athletes and they try to accommodate life beyond. But but there is that uh sense of of being rushed sometimes, where they they want to push the athletes to develop really, really fast. And and uh I don't believe that's the that's the right uh way to go about it. I don't I I think when we look at the research also in a broader light, um we have nothing to suggest that you have to uh perform when you're 15 in order to win when you're 25. We have nothing to suggest that current performance levels among youth athletes is a very good predictor of senior performance. No, we don't have that. Right? There's many other predictors that are way better. And so I just completely disagree with this idea that we should rush talent development. No. In the good environments that we have found, one of the key features was sort of a long-term focus, you know, trying to understand that it's about creating athletes who in five, ten years still perform at the highest level and can develop to that level, and that the only absolutely indisputable precondition for that is that the athletes are actually still there when they're 25, right? Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 34:14

They can't perform if they've washed out of the sport.

SPEAKER_00 34:17

Exactly, exactly. And so um so I think that that kind of changes your your perception of your role as a coach when you when you understand that.

SPEAKER_01 34:25

Yeah, and it becomes, I mean, it strikes me strikes me as you're saying it, like it becomes self-sustaining on the other side. If your perception is that, you know, as you say, like the athlete may stop soon, that the shelf life of their career is very short, the way in which you behave almost it becomes self-reinforcing because you the the way that you are training them makes them more likely to stop sooner. And therefore you get reinforced that, oh gosh, I have to keep this short-term approach because they're going to stop sooner. And it just feeds itself. It must be very frustrating for you, coming from your perspective, to see those environments where the the snake is sort of just eating the tail of some of this development.

SPEAKER_00 35:08

Yeah, and I ha I have good colleagues who's done some really, really solid research that has been published in science that looks at sport and Nobel laureates and and musicians and other and across these different performance domains, we actually see that that we can almost say that the top-level youth performers across domains, like the ones who win when they are 15, 16, or whatever, is a distinct group from the ones who actually end up winning when they are seniors. So very often they're not the same individuals, and this is because and this sort of tells us that we have a choice to make. We can either promote uh youth performance at the expense of senior performance, or we can promote senior performance at the expense of junior performance, but you can't have both because people burn out or they lose interest or it just becomes too much, or they get injured, or whatever it might be. So um I think you know that it's such an important concept to wrap your head around. Like, what do you want to achieve as a coach? And that's that research is extremely solid.

SPEAKER_01 36:11

Yeah. So this is one of these things where I think we reach the point where the application gets harder. And I I think from this, I'm gonna probably push you out of your comfort zone a little bit more because I'm taking it into the US environment, right? If I think about the typical US coach that is listening to this, they can see the finish line. They will not, in all likelihood, coach an athlete past the age of 17, 18 because we have a collegiate system, then that is the natural progression that, especially if you have an athlete at a certain level, that they are going to continue on in that system. And they feel immense pressure. I mean, I I think there's a similar pressure, it's not exactly the same in a Danish environment as well, but they feel like that pressure to achieve some level of performance. And when you look at the way things have uh gone with college recruiting too, it's really kind of moved back to like more like 16 years old, 15, 16 years old, right? In terms of like getting them to the right place to where they can be recruited. And so I think some of them are probably l likely to listen to your advice and they go, Yeah, that's great, sounds awesome. I would love to ensure that, you know, I would love to sacrifice. I believe in the values of what Christopher's saying, and I I would love to sacrifice youth performance for later, but it is completely impractical in the environment that I'm working in. I mean, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna lose out competitively. I'm going to be downgraded in relation to my peers. People are not going to want to be on my team because they're going to be perceived as less successful. How would you how would you approach a conversation with a coach that's in that situation? Let's say they go, they hire you and they say, like, I want you to come, give us some advice and and help us set this up. How would you address that? Because I think we risk to a certain extent, right, not being empathetic to the the context or the environment that the coach finds himself in.

SPEAKER_00 38:07

I am very sympathetic to that, and I completely understand why it's so difficult. And while I said before that part of this is about the philosophy of the individual coach, like trying to understand what their role is beyond just pushing kids to perform, I think we also need to look at the structures. So what we see now in Denmark, for example, is that if you're a youth coach and you wish to have more of a full-time position, for example, or career in sport, then the only way you can demonstrate that you're better than the others is if your kids are winning, right? And you can win a Danish championship actually already in a very early age. Yeah. In my view, that should be.

SPEAKER_01 38:44

It's something we agree that you should not be able to do.

SPEAKER_00 38:46

You should not be able to do that. They can compete internationally in a young age. Something I I don't think they should be able to do. And so I think we need to change some of the competition structures and and I mean also if someone wins sort of Coach of the Year award, it will also offer in talent development, it will also often be justified by results with youth athletes, right? And uh, I think we need to change that whole narrative around. And when we look at like a kind of a summary around what the good environments look like, one of the things we'll typically say is that they are aligned. And alignment can take different shapes, right? So one is what we talked about before, sort of a almost like a horizontal alignment between the different environments that an athlete is a part of. So there's a good dialogue and communication between school and this and the club and maybe the college and the national team or whatever environments that they are a part of. And the other the other part of the alignment is that they are sort of vertically aligned, which means that what you learn as an eight-year-old is what you need as a 10-year-old. And what you learn as a 10-year-old is what you need as a 12-year-old, and so forth, not what you need to win as a 10-year-old. And those are two completely different things. And I think we see it a lot. And in Danish, well, actually in European football, voices have also explained this that, you know, that top-level clubs, the best coaches, they demand athletes who make decisions, who change tactics, who think out of the box. And but all the all the athletes in the talent development pathways, they train the same stuff every day. You know, they're put into tactical systems that are pretty strict and all that stuff. So they don't learn what is needed of them after the tr they transition up. Um and why? Well, because that's how you win an under-16 game. You know, adult decides strict structure, you know, make sure that they're physically fit, do what you're told, you know, then that that's that's how you win an under-16, under-18 match. But it's just not the so there is a we have a dilemma here, you know. We can either go for winning those uh under-18 matches, or we can develop the players that can win for Real Madrid's first team. And though but the recipe is not the same.

SPEAKER_01 40:59

Yeah, it strikes me one of the things that I have I've never come up with a satisfactory answer. I'm just bringing up all my questions, and I'm I'm relying on you to have all the answers to it, but nobody knows everything. But I I think part of what you're speaking to is is it possible to develop an evaluation model for coaches that does better than shorthanding from results, right? Like I'm and have you seen examples of that?

SPEAKER_00 41:25

Absolutely. So uh Okay, please tell me about it.

SPEAKER_01 41:28

I'm so excited to hear about this.

SPEAKER_00 41:29

I think we try to do that in Denmark. Like, for example, I'll say that uh actually the last couple of times when we've had talent developer of the year awards, it has never been based on results only. So there's a qualitative, more narrative sort of evaluation of who that coach is, what they're struggling with, what they're fighting for, how the athletes perceive them and so forth. That's definitely one thing. We also evaluate environments. So we we have different sorts of like small surveys or tests or interview methods where whereby we don't where we actually try and talk to the athletes about how they perceive the environments that they're in, like how motivating are they, or what do they learn? And we have we know from the research what's important. So we ask about those things. How do you work with role models? How do you work with long-term focus in in an everyday environment? How do you make sure there is that dialogue and communication and alignment across the different microsystems and all those different questions? And and that helps us inform what coaches to bring forward and what coaches to award and so forth. So I think we're trying to do that all the time, like make those sort of qualitative better decisions. But I'm not saying at all that it is that it is easy. I completely understand that this is a very tricky, tricky thing to change.

SPEAKER_01 42:45

Yeah, it's a big shift culturally. One of the things that strikes me though, that I I hear in what you're saying, and I would contrast this with what I see in a lot of US contexts. I'm trying to pull out, especially if the audience is mostly from the US, I'm trying to pull out some of the aspects of what you call the Danish model, and something that I've spoken to a number of times on here is I have I don't have a more artful way to put this, so I'm just gonna put it this way. I think Danish culture in general looks at young people more as like fully human. Like I think that there is an aspect of the US system where they go, yeah, these are young people, and we don't need to like treat them and their opinions and their thoughts with the same respect because they're kids. And I uh what I hear in what you're saying in some of the stuff that you're using to evaluate coaches is like, no, they're people. They're their thoughts, their feelings, their perceptions of their environment actually really matter. I always explain this to people on the other end that um one of the things I really respect being a dual citizen of of Denmark, and I'd say it's one of the things I just really respect about uh Danish societies is how much less important hierarchy is. You know, when I was coaching on a team there, it took me some time. To get used to. But the fact that everybody, 10-year-olds up to, you know, all the part-time assistant coaches that I worked with felt fully empowered to sort of walk up to me and go, I disagree with what you're doing. I don't think it's smart that you're doing that, right? Like it's it's it's very foreign. I think in a lot of U.S. sports systems, we have very hierarchical systems. We have very top-down. You don't question the head coach. He's the boss. What he says goes. You should do what he says. You know, as you say, sometimes that that that leads to environments where, yes, perhaps we have very sort of well-disciplined stuff up to a certain point, but we haven't prepared those systems for um long-term development. One thing I want to ask you about.

SPEAKER_00 44:45

Can I just say though, please? I think this is also maybe the beauty of being a small country, is that we know we can't afford that good athletes stop because they feel not listened to, not taken seriously, not welcome in their in their environments, right? We can't afford that. We don't have a hundred thousand other athletes to pick from. We only have like the athletes that we have. So we need to make sure that they really thrive in their environments. And uh and so and that that changes the setting a little bit. But I also it just reminds me that I think this idea of just treating them as kids without a voice, basically. We shouldn't listen to them, as you say. It's um it's maybe a cultural thing, but that's that there's also a generational aspect here that's very important. I think that's old-fashioned and it's not gonna fly very soon. Because the kids, at least in Denmark, but I think also it's a it's a broader cultural trend, is that they are more and more getting used to being listened to in in all other contexts, like at home, you know, they are part of making those decisions about what car do we have and what's gonna happen. And so they they're used to being in the school system, at least in Denmark, you know, very independent, very autonomous, at least. They need to, you know, make their own decisions and be involved and and you know, decide what they want to write about in their assignments. And like they're often asked to make those decisions. And if they then come into a sport where it's just my way or the highway, they're pretty quickly gonna think, oh damn, I don't want to be a part of that.

SPEAKER_01 46:13

That's yeah, this isn't the environment for me.

SPEAKER_00 46:16

Who's that old geezer who's trying to tell me what to do? I mean, I mean, you know, so so I I really think also from a generational perspective, we need to change that whole thing around like real quick if we want to have elite sport in the future. Because I mean, when I was a kid, if someone told me go that way and you'll win a medal, I was just gonna go that way straight away. Now they're asking, but why is that meaningful? It's just a medal. I mean, why is that? I I want my sporting life to be about way more than just you know turning flesh into gold kind of one. I want I want my sporting life to be about, you know, passing stuff on and demonstrating what you can achieve or whatever it might be that tickles your fancy, but it's definitely um it's more than just results.

SPEAKER_01 47:01

Yeah. One of the things you hinted at earlier that I want to just uh this is sort of like my final question, but I want to get you to expand. You you you talked about you don't look to Danish swimming in general as for inspiration on the talent development. How about some examples of environments perhaps that you've come across in Denmark? I think, you know, you talked about sailing. There's there's a number of sports that you just look at the Olympic level that Denmark as a tiny country consistently performs really well in. And I think it's by virtue of by virtue of some of what you're discussing, that they have athletes that stay in the sport for a long time. They really develop to their full potential. And that means that, you know, Tiny Denmark can be competitive, for instance. Like Badminton is is an example of like what are the two top badminton countries in the world, China and Denmark. Well, one of those countries is about um, gosh, I don't know, like uh 200 times the size of the other one, right? So who has a better talent development model? I feel pretty confident saying that that Denmark has a better talent development model when it comes to badminton. But I guess I'm trying to cue up maybe maybe that is one of the examples. But what are some examples of of stuff? And I think in particular, what I'm interested in, we we talked about this when I saw you in Denmark. There is some to create these environments, there needs to be some downward pressure from sporting organizations, from governing bodies at the administrative level to alleviate some of that pressure to people on the ground level, right? And to get them organized around some bigger project than, you know, having the best 15, 16-year-olds in their local place. So, what are some examples you've seen of that?

SPEAKER_00 48:46

Well, I think I might actually emphasize the the Baverenston-Dinmark environment. We just recently, like it's I think it it's not even quite out yet, but we just did a study on their high performance sport environment. So not the talent development pathway, but the very, very high performance sport environment, which is also part of the talent development pathway, though, because it's so integrated. So they do many things right. But I think one of them is that, for example, there there's no my athletes, I'm the coach, it's my athlete. So when so when we have some talent centers, and when one of the coaches is gone for a competition in Malaysia, wherever it might be, and some of the coaches from the talent centers will join the elite center. And there they will help with the training, but they will also learn and you know, and they and they will know and get to know what it's what it's like to train at the elite center. So when they come back to the talent centers, they will take these ideas with them, and you know, and that means that the athletes are better prepared once they enter. But you also need a certain volume. So when many athletes are gone for a competition, then again, you know, some of the next level athletes, the talent athletes, will come into the elite center, be allowed to be there for a week or two and train with the top, top-level athletes. And so there's this idea of very sort of proximal role models. You meet them, you discuss with them, you try and beat them in the training, and coaches who develop together, like they can substitute each other and they exchange knowledge, and they do all these things very well from a systems perspective. And this is all sanctioned or led by the by the sporting director who who tries to build those environments that is more than just what happens on the court, but it's it's the whole sort of the way that that Denmark is is integrated, you you can almost say, as an environment, right? And um and when they talk about what what they do, they'll they'll say things like, you know, we constantly very aware of the balance between using the other athletes as competitors to drive an intensity that you almost cannot achieve on your own. But then also making sure that it's not too much. Not every session is competition. Some of the some of the sessions are not competitive, right? They're just about learning from each other and really managing that. Every day having your finger sort of, you know, feel for what is um for what is is is needed by the athletes at this. So they'll they'll spend a lot of time sort of trying, trying to do that. They will have a a lot of athlete voice. So there'll be bi-weekly meetings where a representative from for each category, like the men's singles or the women's singles and the doubles, and they will meet up with the head of director and the main coach and discuss what our environment looks like these days. You know, are we doing well? You know, is it motivating to be here? Can we improve stuff, right? And and then there'll be other meetings where all the players from one category will have like category-specific discussions and other discussions and so forth. There'll be coach meetings where all the different coaches come together and look at structures and cultures and you know, values. So I think it's extremely coherent, the whole uh environment. And one of the things I find when I come in as an outsider to watch is another level of alignment, so to speak, which is the alignment between espoused values and enacted values. So it's a culture thing. Like what we say we do is also what I see when I come in. So when we say we want to create an environment where we strive for excellence every day, but never, never um at the cost of mental health, then I can see that in the way that coaches make decisions and let someone go early or say that someone doesn't need to come in for one morning training because there was a difficult match the other day and they know that they're making a new loan in the bank or whatever, and that you know, they're not really, you know, trying to understand them as best. So I I really, I really feel that this is one of the things that inspires me when I come into a badminton environment like that, is this ability to act as they say they they wish to act.

SPEAKER_01 52:42

You're you're inspiring me to get I need to come over to Denmark and see some of these things because I think one of my missions, we've been talking a lot about missions over the course of this, would love, especially in the US context, and I know this is almost an impossible feat, but I would love to shift the shift the definition of what it means to be competitive. Because I think in so many US contexts, competitiveness means for a lot of people, win at all costs, you know, if if if I need to whack my competitor in the knee to borrow a Winter Olympic example, Tanya Harding style, you know, to get ahead, that's what I have to do. I have to look out for myself. It's this very like rugged, individualistic model. And I just think, and I feel like it aligns with everything that you've been saying. What I hear in that example is, in fact, it's quite the opposite. If we're actually trying to be as competitive as possible, the most important thing is that we cooperate and work together because on the ultimate level, that's going to create the highest level of performance. Not everybody in their silo, you know, looking out for themselves.

SPEAKER_00 53:54

I agree. And allow me to just bring one more example. In the Danish sailing environment, we have many sailors in each boat class that are world class. We'll we'll sometimes experience having number one, three, and seven in the world, right? And there is one place at the Olympics, and they fight for it. Like they there's there's competitions that they but they also agree that if we don't cooperate and share knowledge all the time, none of these boats is gonna end up winning in the end. So they do that right up until the very end. Every single day they'll sit down after training on the wall, they'll train together, they'll sit down, they'll discuss what they learned, how they understood what happened with the wind, what tactical decisions they made, all that stuff is communicated and shared. And then they agree that like two days before the world championship or whatever is the event that we have decided where we where we compete for the spot at the Olympics, then we say, okay, for the next ten days, we don't have to share. But even then, they often do. But right up until that end, right up until that starts, it's all about sharing. And you even see that when one boat then isn't selected for the Olympics, doesn't, didn't, didn't uh win the win the selection trials, then they'll still say, well, you know, we still want to train with you, we still want to help you win a medal at the Olympics, even though we are your competitors and just lost to you in the in the trial selection, right? And this has taken years to build that culture. No doubt about that. That didn't come overnight, but it has come through role models, narratives, speaking about it again and again and again that we have less money than all the countries that we compete with, but we have a special ability to share knowledge, to help each other, and that this is this is how we can win on a world scale. And there is that understanding, and everybody buys into it, and every athlete who reaches the elite level learned from the best when they were young, and they are now willing to pass on their knowledge to the next generation. So yeah, I think that's also extremely inspirational.

SPEAKER_01 55:56

Yeah, you're talking about something that another topic that I've covered here many times, institutional knowledge. You know, that that stuff that it that takes a long time to build up, but of what an asset it is when it is present. I mean, it's something uh you can't even really quantify. Christopher, it's been amazing. You've been so forthcoming, and I've learned a lot from listening to this. I think my audience is gonna get so much. I think some of them are gonna be inspired to go out and read your books. Um, so I'm gonna try to give them a comprehensive list of books that are available in English that you have co-authored. Mindfulness and acceptance in sports, how to help athletes perform and thrive under pressure. Everything you need to know, or sorry, all you need to know about talent development in sports, mental health and elite sports, applied perspectives from across the globe. Am I leaving anything out from your English Ultra?

SPEAKER_00 56:46

Uh, you might be. I don't I can't hardly remember. I write we mainly write scientific articles in English and then books in Danish, but I have published some of them. But I think that the all you need to know about talent development in sport is a book that I'm particularly proud of because it's really written on a very, very solid scientific basis, but in a language that's written for coaches. Like it's you you won't see a lot of references, you'll see stories and examples, and and you know, we really decided to have the courage to um to give advice and to be specific and give examples of what you can do and how you can approach many of all these different things that are because it is it is tricky waters like talent development. You know, there's many dilemmas there, the things you know, too little, too much. So we've been really trying to do that. So if I if if you're only getting one of them, I'd I'd say get get that one.

SPEAKER_01 57:33

Yeah, and I can see one of the co-authors I'm familiar with as well. I had a chance to see him when I was coaching in Denmark, this uh Carson Vil Larsen, which is another person I highly recommend. I'm guessing you endorse him as well, considering how much work you guys have done together.

SPEAKER_00 57:49

The reason that Carson are Mike, part of this and crime. Yeah, we share we share a mission together. That's it's nice to have a team.

SPEAKER_01 57:56

And I'm sending this podcast to the director of USA Swimming, and I'm I'm gonna twist his arm as hard as I possibly can to get him to listen to this. No, because I think he's working on this very project. I really believe that people can go back and listen to the podcast that I had with him earlier this year. Very much, it's very clear to me that he is trying to get this vast, unruly American swimming system to cooperate and to sort of work together on a project because we have been have been dominant across the world for a long time without really doing that, with like a lot of individualism, a lot of people kind of going their own way, and it's had some advantages to it, but I think we are at an inflection point in U.S. swimming where that strategy is is not going to carry us forward to the next sort of generation of success. So I think this would be I think he would get a lot of inspiration from listening to this. Thank you so much for joining me. It was yes, thank you to everybody for listening. Sorry, I have one last thing. Uh, do you want to send people any other place? Do you have like a social media presence?

SPEAKER_00 59:07

I'm not I'm not very good with uh social media.

SPEAKER_01 59:10

Good. We always compliment people for not being on social media. People who want to share real knowledge are not on social media.

SPEAKER_00 59:17

Well, I think I I probably should do it a little bit more, but I it's important for us to share knowledge. But I believe in a podcast way more than I believe in an Instagram post.

SPEAKER_01 59:25

Me too. I can't like the things we've discussed today, could we build them into five short slides? I don't I just don't think so. I don't know. It maybe I'm not skilled enough to do it, but uh but I I love the nuance of having we've had an hour plus long conversation. We've we really been able to like give a little bit more context and depth to some of the things that uh you're talking about. Again, thank you. Thank you to everybody for listening. I will be back with you guys again in a week. Oh, sorry, if you want to get in contact with me, Crdesantis at gmail.com, Christycoach.com, and you can go to Instagram, Christy underscore coach, Christy underscore coach. And if you want to donate to the podcast, you can go to Christycoach.com. There's a button there. I provide this podcast to everybody free of charge year-round. It's like a rotating coaching clinic. I mean, you none of you got to go to the Aqua Clinic, except maybe one of one the my one friend that I brought from the U.S. I just brought Christoffer to you, you know, and I'm doing that to you free of charge. So if you want to support some of the overhead that I have in producing this podcast, you can feel free to donate, make one-time donations to me there. Anyway, thank you to everybody, and I'll be back with you again in a week.