Facilitating practitioner well-being, performance, and service provision effectiveness: Contemporary insights into the impact of reflective practice in applied sport psychology.

Theoretical and Applied Background: Within Applied Sport Psychology (ASP), reflective practice has become established as an aspect of education, professional training and development, and applied service delivery globally (cf. Adams & Pope-Rhodius, 2023). This has resulted in an emerging, context-specific evidence base that has attempted to make sense of the application and utility of reflective practice as a mechanism to facilitate personal and professional growth through experiential learning, and subsequently develop the knowledge required to navigate the complexities of applied service provision (e.g., Picknell et al., 2023). However, in the culture of applied practice that can often be dictated by a “hurry-up mentality”, the value placed on opportunities for meaningful, critically reflective thought is often diminished.

Objectives: In this presentation we will discuss: (a) the concept of critical reflective practice and its place within ASP; (c) the links between critical reflective practice, well-being, performance, and wider beneficial practitioner outcomes; and (d) the applied issues that may thwart or facilitate effective reflective practices.

Design: Drawing on the contemporary empirical and anecdotal evidence, which includes our own original research, we use an integrative review approach to make the case that reflective practice lies at the heart of ASP service provision and detail best practice for facilitating critical reflection.

Results and Discussion: Researchers have extended their empirical insights to evidence how reflective practice might be adopted by ASP practitioners to manage their own well-being and performance within their roles, as well as how reflective practice can be used to underpin effective interventions with clients across a range of contexts (e.g., Cropley et al., 2023; Hägglund et al., 2021). Thus, we draw on a growing evidence-base that explicates how reflective practice works to demonstrate why ASP practitioners should commit to reflective practice within their service delivery.