Performance Profiling

Performance profiling is an athlete-centered assessment procedure in which the athletes themselves, rather than the coach or sport psychologist, define the qualities that matter for their performance and then rate where they currently stand against where they would ideally be. Richard Butler and Lew Hardy introduced it in 1992 in The Sport Psychologist, grounding it explicitly in George Kelly's Personal Construct Theory: because people act on their own constructions of the world, the qualities used to assess an athlete should be elicited from the athlete. The procedure produces a visual profile of constructs, each scored for current and ideal level, with the gap between them — the self-ideal discrepancy — pointing to where intervention is most needed. Gareth Jones's 1993 work showed how these importance-weighted discrepancies structure cognitive-behavioral interventions and how the profile, repeated over time, tracks change.