The Condor Performance Philosophy
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We pass mental skills onto others so that they can build their own mental toughness or help others to build theirs. Our aim is to make ourselves redundant / obsolete when it comes to your performance. Our greatest achievements are when our clients no longer need us because they have become their own mental coaches.
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We prefer to prevent mental difficulties rather than fix them after they occur - despite being able to do both.
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We believe that applied sport psychologists should stick to applying it and that researchers and academics of sport psychology (without whom we’d have nothing to base our mental skills) should focus on the research. We are applied sport and performance psychologists.
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For team sports we prefer to help the Head Coach to become a better mental coach rather than that simply work with one or two of the athletes with “mental issues” - despite being able to do both.
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We concentrate on the mental aspects of performance (confidence, playing under pressure, motivation, concentration, decision making, nervous energy, team cohesion to name the most common) preferring to leave any welfare / mental health issues to others who specialise in this area (clinical psychologists for example). Using the physical side of performance as an analogy we are like strength and conditioning coaches for the mind. We help the mentally tough become even tougher.
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When it comes to any form of coaching (mental, technical or physical) we believe that experience mixed with the right qualifications is better than either of these alone.
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We prefer not to travel with our clients in the view that this can produce dependence and therefore make them mentally weaker not stronger. In other words we believe – like all types of training that if done right – we’ll not required to be there on game day. This is made possible by the fact that the mental skills we use are easy to understand, practice and implement. Despite all being grounded in complex psychological theory and research our mental skills are so simple that we use the same ones with our youngest clients (eight year olds) as we do with the adults.
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We are confident that the best return on investment comes when athletes work on areas of their performance in accordance with their ability levels. Due to the leveling out of the technical and physical elements of performance at the highest level, working directly on the players’ minds stands to produce the most amount of benefit with elite athletes. Athletes and teams who are ‘better on the day’ are often the toughest mentally.
Newspaper and magazine articles we’ve contributed to recently: