Getting your head right

DW: Mr. Kirchner, you coach not just athletes, but also managers and employees. This is a large range. How do you adjust to the person you are training?

Steffen Kirchner: It doesn't actually matter much whether I'm working in professional sports or just in business. It has to do with perception. A good coach is someone who doesn't talk that much, but rather knows to let the other person do the talking. The profession which I have is one that until today was done by the physiotherapists and masseurs. The athletes are massaged and due to the physicality of it all, forged up a level of trust. But often you need to have someone who does more than just listens. You need someone, who leads you through the process, has the know-how and is familiar with techniques and strategies to solve the problems. There are bigger issues in life which you have to work on, and just talking about it sometimes isn't enough. That's why there is this need for mental coaches.

What are the topics that you address? Are they more than just sports-related?

With a gymnast, I'll speak very little about gymnastics. I can't do gymnastics myself. I cannot even skate, but I still mentor Bundesliga ice hockey players. It's usually about really personal things: motivation issues, relationship problems with the coach or someone from the team, the manager, the fans or their partners, self-confidence and fear of failure. They are real life issues. Professional athletes are good in their element and they have incredible strengths, but they often have glaring weaknesses in other areas.

So the athletes have to accept themselves as a person first, in order to improve in sport?

Yes, that's right. The point is that the person must understand who he or she is. They have to understand why certain processes are running in their head. This is called 'Psycho-Education'. So if you understand why you feel how you feel, and why certain people or circumstances make you react, you can learn to control and improve the situation. And it helps you deal with things better that are outside of your control, too.

Sounds pretty simple. Let's take a concrete example: a golf player that you worked with, was having problems with hitting a ball. Suddenly, it didn't work any more. What do you give him for advice?

I told him, "You think that you're actually four or five meters away from your goal, and that's a long distance. But in reality, you're just a millimeter away from getting it right." If you are hitting a ball, the difference between keeping the face of the club at 90 degrees or 91 degrees, is going to make a big difference of three or four meters as to where the ball goes. And that took the pressure off him. Because he understood: "I'm not that far away from my goal, I basically have got it right. It's just a small thing." It is often the case that people do not need to change their whole life, they just need to switch the way they are thinking, the need a different way of appreciating it, a different perspective.

How do you become accepted by the athletes, especially in a team sport such as ice hockey where there are certainly prejudices?

If you are honest and authentic, and you don't try to change people, then people are interested. Even the tough ice hockey players, who are the sort of people that you wouldn't think would be interested in mental coaching, start to trust you. Even there, people cry, that is completely normal. In a squad with 20 players though it can happen that I don't speak with three or four of them at all, over a season. But I may speak a lot with some of them, each player is different.

If you have a large audience - which your podium appearances in companies would seem to confirm - then do you have a formula that works with everyone?

No way, that would be terrible, because it would mean that we are all machines. But there are certain common denominators. For example there are certain basic needs, which are the same for every person. Every person wants to feel like they have a purpose, they don't want to be forgotten. People want to feel part of a team, and they want to have fun and enthusiasm in their lives. Those are emotional basic needs, that really do apply for every person. I can talk about that with people and inspire them to have the clarity to attend to these needs in their lives. The way that they then do this, is related to their individual personality which is based on their circumstances and their job. Everyone needs their own strategy on this.

Steffen Kirchner, himself a top tennis player, worked as a mental coach for the German gymnastics team at the London 2012 Olympics. He's also coached professional ice hockey and basketball players, as well as athletes in a number of other sports.