What is REBT and its uses in sports performance?

As some of you may know, having read my last post you will know that this question links in with my dissertation study very closely. Hence the reason why i am writing this post, so hopefully at the end of this piece you will have a small inclination as to why i find this aspect of sport psychology so fascinating.

REBT stands for Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, and although it contains therapy in its name. I would consider REBT to be more of an effective counselling technique which is different to other counselling techniques such as client centred where the athlete or patient leads the conversation and solves the issue by themselves, REBT attempts to understand the patients perception of the world and how this influences their thoughts and beliefs, also within an REBT session the sport psychologist will lead the session in an attempt to challenge the athlete's views.

Albert Ellis defined REBT as... "The idea that it is a dire necessity for an adult human being to be loved or approved by everyone for everything they do". REBT is very much centred on the fact that in sports terms athletes have two types of beliefs which dictate how they respond to situations, the first belief is irrational beliefs which has 4 levels:

Demands- "I must succeed or else" type of approach

Awfulising- "It’s terrible if I fail" belief

Low frustration tolerance (LFT) - "I can’t stand it" attitude

Depreciation- I am loser"

The second type of belief is rational and is a little different to irrational but all together has 4 levels:

Preferences- I want to succeed"

Anti-awfulising- "it’s not that terrible to fail"

High frustration tolerance- I can survive"

Acceptance- I am not a loser"

As you can see, these statements are clearly more rational than the first ones.

The idea of REBT is to change these beliefs from irrational to rational through a recognised framework, known as the ABCDE model. A stands for Adversity or activating event and this basically means the competition the athlete is in, B stands for Belief which will more than likely be an irrational one if the athlete has come to a sport psychologist to implement REBT, this leads onto C which is consequence, as a sports psychologist it's their job to show the athlete the consequences of their irrational belief and the impact it could have on their performance. D stands for dispute, this part of the ABCDE model is very important and involves getting the athlete to dispute their irrational belief in an attempt to change this irrational belief to a more rational one. E involves the athlete creating more effective rational alternatives, one example of this could be getting the athlete to write their own self statements and then getting them to change the statements to make them more rational. This process allows athletes understand that their irrational beliefs aren’t real and most importantly unhelpful.

REBT is becoming a more recognised intervention within sport, with one main factor being that most elite professionals have quite a lot of irrational beliefs, one reason could because of the amount of pressure that these people are under. 'A win at all cost' belief coupled with the demanding situations could leave even the top players in their professions unable to cope with the situations, for example being dropped, long term injury and failure. This is why REBT has grown steadily over the years as mentioned REBT if used correctly can give these athletes coping strategies to deal with the pressures of elite sport, but most importantly can change the way they percieve situations so that instead of being irrational about the situation and adopting a 'i must succeed and if not thats terrible', they can adopt a more rational way of thinking 'i want to succeed, but if i dont it's not the end of the world'. This is a more helpful approach, not only in sport but also in life.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

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Many thanks