International Corner: International Practice Across Borders and Cultures: Learn, Reflect, Accept and Re-learn

Stiliani “Ani” Chroni, PhD, CMPC, Inland Norway School of Sport Sciences, Elverum, Norway

I grew up in Greece where I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in Physical Education and Sports Sciences before moving to the US to pursue my Master’s and Doctoral studies in Sport Psychology. Subsequently, I moved back to Greece, completed a post-doc, worked and lived in my home country for 16 years before migrating to Norway, where I have been residing for the past four years. My personal sport experience started at the age of four and took me through gymnastics, swimming, tennis, and basketball until I found happiness and a sense of belonging in alpine skiing--yes in Greece there are mountains, winters, snow, and ski sports!

I chose sport psychology because of my interest in the mental game of performing in sport, stemming from my own struggles as a racer and working with different coaches - one in particular stands out as he taught me how to think, prepare, and tune in before a race, aside from skiing technique and racing line.

I was educated in sport psychology in the U.S., a western culture that left collectivism long ago and fostered individualization with a lot of emphasis on high achievement via the empowerment of the individual. Autonomy, self-efficacy, self-worth, self-confidence were prominent notions throughout my education, while I was coming from a collectivist culture that, to a larger extent still operated under the conceptual values of country, religion, and family.

It felt great: For six years I was free to be myself, a high achiever; care for myself, with no guilt trips from my family and people for being insensitive and selfish - not very acceptable attributes for a ‘good’ person and daughter. I learned and absorbed as much as I could and developed myself into a person with whom I was happy living. In the last year of my doctoral studies, I started working with professional players and I was doing a good job. I missed home while studying in the U.S. (in particular the beach, the sun, and the sea), and since at that time there were only four people in Greece working as applied practitioners, I decided to move back and establish a practice there. It took me less than six months to start up my practice and around the same time, I got an invitation to visit one of the sports sciences academic departments, which marked the beginning of my academic life.

It was then that reality hit me! I knew sport psychology in English, not in Greek language and mere translations were not helping. For a long time, I was feeling guilty towards my Greek clients, as they were not getting the best of me in comparison to what English-speaking athletes were getting. However, I was in more trouble than just language skills. Let me explain. On the one hand, I was good at working with players; consulting with them, educating them, assisting them to put things in perspective, showing them ways to deal with problems, pressures, adversity and moving forward to perform, capitalize, and achieve excellence. During my supervised hours and then solo work in the U.S., rational thinking prevailed in the work I did. I could help athletes see through, think through, and modify behaviors that did not help them, most times via meaningful reasoning. Emotions, while highly important for their performance and well-being, were not the only thing that drove them in sport and life. On the other hand, in Greece, emotions are the main drive in living life, paving the way of being and doing to the highest extent, as people are groomed into emotions, emotional decisions, and emotional responses from birth. That was a major challenge. I had learned and appreciated the use of rational thinking and reasoning for myself and my work -aka, the logical positivism of sport psychology. However, it was next to impossible to deliver this to my Greek clients, who most often were full of cultural preconceptions (and the so-called guilt-trips) stemming from religion, family, school, and coaches. It took me a lot of observing, questioning, reading, reflecting, accepting, and adjusting to develop ways to break through Greek athletes’ ways of being and doing that had no logic (to me), but yet were stubbornly ingrained and even hurt their performances.

The work of Ryba and Wright (2005) on cultural praxis came as music to my ears almost ten years after the onset of my first struggles. Many of the athletes with whom I was working were not exactly representing the western culture. While Greece is considered a western civilization country, its culture holds a lot in common with middle-east cultures. To me, this was a reality I left behind as a person during my years of living in the U.S. and I had to bring it back if I wanted to succeed and to fit in as a professional. I would have been crazy to use a psychological intervention the way it was taught in the U.S. or presented in English textbooks. I became good at evaluating the facts of each client, considering not only the sport, level, aspirations, performance issues, etc., but above all the culture of the person. I learned well that cultural, historical, political, and economic effects highly influence how athletes are built (Ryba, 2009). Most importantly, I learned to respect and work with the culture of the person in order to make a difference in his or her life.

When I relocated to Greece, working with a sport psychologist was still taboo for most of my clients. If they were men, the macho-male culture would signal that they had a problem. Several male athletes did not want to do regular work, only circumstantially, so they would not be associated with a sport psychologist. Not that it was very different when I started working in polo in the U.S., which has typically been dominated by Argentine male players. Big egos and sports appear to go hand-in-hand and hegemonic masculinities still run the show in sports to this day. Women were more open to it, and were often perceived as the ‘weaker’ gender. I learned to work with big and small egos, as I met different egos in Greece, in the U.S., in Norway, in the UK, in polo, rowing, skiing, canoeing, cycling, athletics, etc.

Working with Muslim women in the middle-east required a different approach. Family values and traditions, as well as religion were key factors. A first-timer challenge was the soft voices of these women, making it next to impossible to hear them speak. Based on this culture, a ‘proper’ Muslim woman, among other things, typically does not make herself noticeable by speaking loudly. Similarly, I could not go in with raw western values and expectations for achieving excellence in sport when consulting with a boastful man of Iranian background and upbringing. Adaptations to mainstream sport psychology theories and practices were equally required when working with Argentine male players, homosexual women, and Greek women. Their narratives were not (and are still not) included in sport psychology textbooks. In many ways, I had to re-learn sport psychology by questioning its status quo; I had to seek alternative perspectives; I had to do my research within every practice context in which I found myself working; I had to develop meaningful communication with the athletes, coaches, staff, and parents; and I had to finally engage in what Ryba (2009) proposed as cultural praxis. While growing up, I learned to speak Greek, English, and French. On the ski courses, I also learned to speak ski-German and on the polo fields, I learned polo-Spanish. I learned to speak the ski jargon, the rowing one, the road cycling one, the gymnastics one, and the language of each sport with which I worked. I learned to speak parent language before I had a kid of my own. I learned to communicate with coaches, club and federation officials. I learned these languages mainly by listening and asking questions to those who already knew (also took some lessons on some occasions). I looked outside sport psychology and learned about courage from theology, because it was a meaningful concept in the Greek culture. I learned to improvise and to trust my intuitive and creative ways of coping with ambiguous situations in my practice. I learned that all the mainstream theories and practices I was taught should be kept in the back of my mind, while the front of my mind had to remain open for improvising considering the facts and the context of each case.

Hence, I re-learned sport psychology multiple times. I was happy with this re-learning and I improved; a 2 in1 deal. Today, once again, I am learning sport psychology, research methods, and alpine skiing in Norwegian. I am also learning the Norwegian culture where people are happy to help, but typically when you ask for help; they are not as expressive with their emotions like Greeks or Argentinians; ‘you are welcome’ is hardly translated and not used and the Law of Jante (Sandemose, 1933) is still present in daily life. It says, ‘you are not to think you’re anyone special or that you’re better than us.’ Norway has a long history of social democratic values like equality and universal rights, which in many ways contrast the elitist values of high-performance sport (Skille & Chroni, 2017). Of course, there are always exceptions to the rules and high-performance sport is one of them; help is offered, emotions are expressed, and it is okay to think that you are better, ‘as long as you do not share it with the media and make the people of Norway feel uncomfortable’. My first experience with applied practice in Norway was with 12 ski coaches, seven months after I relocated. When I was first speaking to these men and they showed no facial expression, I questioned myself and seriously doubted what I was delivering to them. However, we had an amazing next day on the slopes, working closely together, communicating perfectly in the language of ski racing (they also offered to teach me some Norwegian), even joking and laughing while questioning and discussing how to integrate in their work what I delivered the night before.

Practicing sport psychology internationally is fun! As long as you love the mental game of performing in sports, and you enjoy planting the seeds for enhancing personal development and well-being with people around the globe, no sociocultural effect is challenging enough. We all have commonalities but we are also unique, which makes us special and beautiful. All we need to do is to learn, reflect, observe, ask, accept, and re-learn, while considering Ryba’s five strategies (2009) in this process:

• Learn sport psychology
• Reflect on what you have learned and how it contributes to the norms in sport psychology practice
• Reflect and question your own life experiences, cultural norms, and how you view applied practice challenges
• Revise your view and language; choose to see and talk about uniqueness instead of differences
• Observe and ask questions to learn about and to understand unique people, unique cultures, unique ways of being and doing

There is no one way in this world. Accept the many unique ways of being and doing, and know that taken-for-granted normative practices of applied sport psychology may become oppressive mechanisms of power that can hurt and hinder instead of helping. Re-examine sport psychology theories and practices with each unique person or team in mind; shift the focus from problem-solving to problem-setting and learn to see beyond the problem because if you focus on the problem, you will miss the solution(s).

References

Ryba, T. V. (2009). Understanding your role in cultural sport psychology. In R. Schinke and S. Hanrahan (Eds.), Cultural sport psychology, (pp. 35-44). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.

Ryba, T. V., & Wright, H. K. (2005). From mental game to cultural praxis: A cultural studies model’s implications for the future of sport psychology. Quest, 57(2), 192-212.

Sandemose, A. (1933). En flyktning krysser sitt spor [A fugitive crosses his tracks]. Oslo: Aschehoug.

Skille, E. Å, & Chroni, S. (in press). Norwegian sports federations’ organizational culture and national team success. International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics. doi: 10.1080/19406940.2018.1425733