Lecture 10 - Termination Flashcards
How can retirement bring multiple stressors?
Not clear cut what will happen
- fear of the unkown
- dont know if you will be okay
How can retirement cause interpersonal and relationship issues?
- Team mates are no longer there
- May lose friends as they were fake
- Family may not cope if you stopped - they dont like it and dont financially have enough
Define Pt 1
Expected and planned retirement
- grieving process likely
- its a process you build up to
Define PT 2
Career ends unexpectingly
- injury, dropped of team
- Potential for PTSD/ trauma
- cannot plan for this form
Define career termination
Previous definition for retirement
- seen as just an end point, final game, final championship etc
- When they stop participating in their chosen sport
Define career transition
More beneficial to define retirement as a transition phase, not an end point
- helps them plan, and you can support them through it easier
- The process of moving from participation in competitive sport to a post-athletic career as a consequence of athletic career termination
What are some of the issues that retirement can bring about?
- Loneliness
- Depression
- Alcohol and drug abuse
- Financial adjustment
- Occupational Adjustment
- Losing friends - social networks change, need to adjust. Team mates and coaches carry on but you dont
- No qualifications to fall back on
Outline the critical period of retirement
After London 2012, 16% of Uk athletes retired
- 60/300 retired
- 20/30 more were considering it
- build up to olympics, an SP needs to be planning for lots of athletes retiring. But they are so focused on the olympics, so not a lot of stuff you can do in the build up
- they cant work on future plans as too busy with olympic training
Outline Social Gerontology as a theoretical perspective on retiring
- Gerontology is about ageing
- Take this perspective and try and fit it onto athletic retirement, but doesnt really work like that
- Shows how people normally retire around 65
- and then stop working immediately
- looks at social components
Why cant social gerontology apply to sport?
Athletes retire so much younger, at like 30
- they often carry on working and change roles
- dont always need to make huge life adjustments, especially if not that succesful.
Outline Thanatology as a theoretical perspective on retiring
- The study of death
- The processes of death, and thinking about death are quite applicable to sport retirement
Outline Kubler-Ross (1969)
Interviewed terminal cancer patients and plotted the typical progression of coming to terms with it all
- Denial and Isolation (im not going to die)
- Anger
- Bargaining - if religious, pray to God, if i do this, please dont let me die
- Depressive symptoms
- Hopefully then comes: Acceptance
How can Thanatology apply to sport contexts?
- if it’s termination 1, then lots of the language athletes use is metaphors surrounding death - i will mourn the end of my career
- Start with denial (i can still play, ill come back from this)
- Anger
- Bargaining, if i started early with gymnasticis i can play football for longer?
- Depressive symptoms - after internalising it
- Acceptance hopefully
Outline Schlossberg’s (1981) Model of Human Adaptation to Transition as a theoretical perspective
3 elements for the SP to focus on when helping a transition period
Provides 3 elements for the SP to focus on when helping a transition period
- Perceptions of the transition (levels of stress) - as it is a future event, it is stressful as athletes dont think they have the resources to cope with it
- Characteristics of the individual (e.g. age) - Are they old to be retiring? Are they resilient? are they fragile?
- Characteristics of the pre- and post- transitional Environment (e.g. levels of support) - do they have social support, educational workshops etc
- Once this stuff is in place, they are prepared to succesfully transition
Outline the succesful adjustment model
Argues 3 things are required for sucessful transition
- Coping strategies
- Reasons for retirement
- Athletic Identity
Outline Athletic identity as a requirement for succesful transition
Most of your identity is surrounding being an athlete, so when you retire, a large whole of your identity is missing. Having a much more varied identity is important for a succesful transition
Outline Lally (2007) study into athletic identity, What problems did they have? Fearful of retiring, how?
Interviewed gymnasts who were approaching retirement, identified them as having these problems:
- Anticipation of crisis and diminished identity
- stressed about the uncertain upcoming events
- They did a natural coping strategy - tried to diminish their athletic identity - trying to find components of their identity outside of athletics
When they actually went through retirement, they didn’t have a crisis. Shows its normal to anticipate a crisis, and no disrupted identity
Define Coping resources in succesful transition
- Cognitive and behavioural efforts to manage external or internal demands/ conflicts, that you see as exceeding your resources
- Stuff you do to cope with stressful things you see you cannot cope with
- There are millions of coping strategies to cope with retirement
What was Lazarus & Folkman, 1984 definition of Coping resources in succesful transition
A process of constantly changing cognitive and behavioural efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands or conflicts as appraised as taxing or exceeding one’s resources
Give exampls of some coping strategies
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- Diminishing athletic identity - Finding other things to focus on - but hard if they are full time competing. Have to get them to refocus/ add things to their identity
- Achieve all sport related goals, so you can retire happy
- Having previous experience with transitions, like moving to an elite training camp
- Get a new role in your sport - media/ coaching
- Possession and awareness of transferable skills - e.g. leadership, communication etc. Can use this in other occupations. Make them aware/ teach them new ones
Give more examples of coping strategies
- New focus after termination - e.g. strictly come dancing
- Pre-transition planning - SP can help them prepare, this is how to get jobs, this is what its going to be like. E.g Gary linekar. Coaching training whilst performing
- Social support - most effective informal strategy - do you have a network available to you? or will you be lonely? Will you lose them after retiring?
- Lots more transition support available now over past few years - cant just wave them off and say good luck
Give examples of transition support we have in the UK
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- Support Zone
- Discovery Zone
- Employer zone
- Workshops
- build CV, learn job application skills, meet employers etc etc
Outline reasons for terminating your career
4 things
- how psychologically demanding is it
- Forced retirement - dropped from team, loss of funding
- quite psychologically challenging - Age
- either have won everything, or just lost fitness/ energy, just too old - Injury
- one major one that rules you out for ever
- or a niggling one that never gets better for long
- Very psychologically challenging, especially if it keeps niggling and never really gets better. It gets better then worse - Voluntary
- Plan to retire - least psychologically challenging
- just dont want to do it anymore, plan to retire after olympics
- could be a relief
Outline Kristina Vogel
Double olympic champion, 9 time world champion
- paralysed in a crash
- Extreme adjustment and extreme form of termination
- Social and occupational adjusment
- as well as coming to terms with being disabled
- big psychological issues for her and those around her
Outline Heil (1993)'s circle of injury the 3 D's
Cyclical process with injury
- Denial - i will be fine again (can be advantageous)
- Distress
- Determined coping
- these 3 interact. Denial is part of the coping process, which could flip to distress. Which then goes to determined coping then back to denial etc etc etc
What can we do to treat performance termination 1
- Emotional support
- Behavioural
- Cognitive
- MAC
- Career planning
GRIEVING PROCESS
- emotional support (empathy/ counselling treatments)
- Behavioural activation and therapy - focus on what you like to do and do it all the time
- Cognitive restructuring of thoughts/ schemas - which are likely based off false beliefs like “im only good at athletics”
- Acceptance and commitment - refocus back onto your life goals, lets commit to them and forget these emotionally driven behaviours
- Career planning (simple) workshops and fairs etc
What can we do to treat performance termination 2
- trauma, self-awareness
STRESS PROCESS
- all of the same stuff for Performance Termination 1
- emotional support, behavioural activation, cognitive restructuring, career planning, acceptance and commitment
Add:
- self-awareness promotion - view themselves holisticly and widely - especially if termination is sudden
- and assessment of trauma symptoms (e.g. sudden injury) - dealing with the clinical stuff like PTSD and trauma
