Unleashing Your Full Potential with Performance Coaching
Sports psychologist Fabian Broich on how to prevent burnout and the power of performance coaching.
Imagine working14 hours a day, six days a week. You don’t get vacation days. Your only time off is when you failed to qualify for the world championship. That’s the reality of most professional esports players and the reason many of them quit. One of them is Annie Roberts, a professional Valorant player who recently announced the end of her career at just 25 years old. In her statement she openly speaks about the long working hours and the resulting mental pressure. Additionally, professional players are not expected to just compete anymore. They are also supposed to create a brand and accumulate a social following, which led to her decision to retire.
How a Lack of Coaching Impacts Performance
A new study by a research group from the University of Waterloo looked into the main challenges professional League of Legends players face. They identified the lack of standardized training as the main reason players struggle with their mental health. Many teams have very few supporting staff, only few of them trained professionals such as sports psychologists.
One of the many few professionals is Fabian Broich. He is a professional sports psychologist who works with a variety of esports organizations and recently founded his own performance coaching company Achieveminds. For this week’s iteration, we talked with him about his background, the tasks of a performance coach in esports and how to prevent burnout.
Interview with Fabian Broich
Can you please introduce yourself to our readers who don’t know who you are?
Hello together, I am Fabian Broich, my educational background is being a sports psychologist. Previously to my education and while my degrees I have played sports on a very competitive level in football. For the past 4 1/2 years I have worked with esports rganizations across Europe with many different coaches, players and esports titles.
When and why did your path lead to gaming?
In 2016, I finished my Bachelor’s degree in psychology in the US and came back to Germany. Shortly after, I started an internship at Schalke 04 Esports under my friend Tim Reichert. We realize that sports psychology is something that can help boost the performance of professional players so in 2016 I took the possibility to start my Master’s in Sports Psychology and after my last exam in March 2018 I started back at Schalke 04 Esports full time.
Without the personal contact to Tim I would not have thought about working in esports. Seeing the structure, obstacles and issues, it was quite clear that I could in fact have a much bigger impact with players and coaches than anticipated and that resulted in big motivation to become the most hardworking possible sports psychologist there is.
What does a typical day in your life look like? Can you break down the different tasks you have as a performance coach?
There is no such thing as a typical day in esports. Obviously there is structure and patterns, but those structures tend to bend a bit depending on the results of the team, also depending on what title and how many teams you are simultaneously working with, remote and onsite it differs. Additionally, you can say there are often some as I call them x factor moments or situations where small things can impact heavily the operations but also other factors of behavior, discipline that in a not very good environment can tip over in a heartbeat. Overall you can say that there is the offseason, preseason and during season.
In the offseason, you work closely together with the management and coaches of the teams in order to reflect on the past season and understand the strengths and weaknesses.
According to those learnings, you create a profile of the roster you want to work on and what skill level and personalities fit. When you have this somewhat clear you plan the preseason and season. During the preseason you want to make sure that the players understand the values and route coaches and organizations want to take but you also listen to feedback. Usually those times are used for goal setting, team activities and tests in order to understand each other better, understand how we all will work together in the best way possible and in the end see what values and measurements are the baseline for the players. During the preseason and offseason you have a lot of impact on creating habits outside of the game, that does impact, sleep, sports, food and the psychological side. Those two parts of the season are essential to focus on those areas since creating habits takes away energy and creates stress, even though these behaviors and actions are in the long term positive and beneficial, change will always create stress in the beginning.
Those aspects of their lifestyle are essential but in the end, during the season there is not that much time and such a high efficiency to change those, since the primary focus is on the game and executing it perfectly. Consequently, the foundation and mindset has to be set in order to start the season and during the season there will be according to the development of the habits from offseason and preseason integrated meetings, sports sessions to benefit the team performance and well being. Besides that during seasons things that come up will be tackled and the main goal is to manage the stress to stay on a specific level.
What do you consider your biggest success?
When you are a sports psychologist you focus on solving problems or getting humans even better, athletes or coaches have to take the next step themselves. It's not really my success, it's working together and finding a way to improve or overcome obstacles. The most energetic experiences are when players and coaches reach things they haven't thought about themselves and overcome hurdles that seemed impossible.
How do you prevent burnout in a world of constant stress and focus?
Understanding stress is essential and creating an awareness of what's internal, within my control, and external, out of my control. This already will make it more apparent what is able to be changed and what do I have no or little impact on. Also its important to understand that not all stress is bad and that you need a certain threshold of stress in order to be in the optimal zone. Tackling the human needs of a sleep schedule, healthy food, 30 mins movement a day, having personal time daily, breaks, activities outside of esports throughout the months. Simply focusing on quality over just quantity. Having efficient practice and preparation but when you feel nothing gets into your head anymore to be able to accept that it's fine to rest and have a break. The repeated structure of those patterns will have a massive positive impact on your mood and performance.
What do you think are the biggest obstacles you need to overcome?
With every competition and very ambitious performer there is certain egos and confidence, both are very important but to a certain level. I think the acceptance of understanding the work I am going to do has a positive impact on their health and performance, and therefore not always having to work through a big resistance would be preferred. You usually don't go to a math tutor when you need to get better in math, then the tutor explains the rules of the topic and then you would question that. I think it would save a lot of time when both sides respect their specific skill and work together, rather than feeling like waiting and see and over time realize okay, yes that would be good. Overall it is important to understand there doesn't have to be at all something wrong with you to work with a sports psychologist. A sports psychologist is mainly there to elevate and optimize performance, rather than just focusing on issues.
If there is one thing you could change about the video games industry with immediate effect, what would it be?
I would make it mandatory to have a sports scientist and coaching license for each team and organization. There is simply a lot on stake in esports and a lot of stress, sports scientists and especially sports psychologists can really upgrade the potential of the team.
Those people understand performance, where as the coaches understand the game, so thats a great fit, unlike traditional sports and leadership jobs, there are not really degrees or certifications for coaches to take classes in order to learn about leadership, management, psychology, team dynamics, scheduling and other things. I am not saying that some esports managements don't understand performance factors and coaches don't know about the soft skills and leadership, but simply having additional education never hurts especially when it is about human performance, to understand others and yourself better.