Gareth J. Mole, Sports Psychologist

Performance Mindfulness

Sport Psychology draws from many models but recently Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) is gaining some serious momentum.

What Is Performance Mindfulness?

Under the banner of “psychotherapy”, there are hundreds of different approaches. Sometimes called models or philosophies, some work together, while others are opposites. For some mindfulness (or performance mindfulness) is everything, for others it’s nonexistent.

At Condor Performance, we are open to our psychologists using whichever therapeutic models they believe are best. One of our core values is ‘always do what’s in the best interest of the client’. This eliminates the need to force our performance and sport psychologists to use the same ‘tool kit’.

However, we would be negligent if we didn’t point them in the right direction of several methods that we know tend to be effective repeatedly.

CBT and ACT

I have used two major models in my applied work with sporting clients. My go-to philosophies include Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

I should mention that I am not thrilled that both end in the word ‘therapy’. The word therapy, to most, suggests a more clinical or counselling framework. Although my colleagues and I are quite capable of assisting our clients with mental health issues, our bread-and-butter is far more performance-orientated.

Like many psychology students from the 1990s, I was mainly exposed to CBT models during my undergraduate years. In fact, so dominant was CBT in the early part of my training that I assumed it was ‘the only way’ to help clients!

Despite this, I was always uncomfortable about the idea of helping people to think too differently. Quite frankly, it just felt too hard and without any real benefit. Something was missing from CBT’s toolkit. Luckily, due to the psychologist’s CPD requirements, I was constantly being exposed to new ideas.

Russ Harris in 2013

I attended one of Russ Harris’ Intro courses to ACT in 2013. Across only two days, many of my questions were answered. Helping clients become better at accepting thoughts and feelings instead of struggling with them seemed far more sensible from a performance psychology point of view.

Taking part in at least one of Russ’s workshops is now virtually compulsory for new team Condor Performance members. Here is a picture of Darren Godwin with the Great Man in 2023.

The Wild Beast Analogy

Steven C. Hayes first developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in the 1980s. His starting point was that the cognitions of human beings are very much like wild animals. You can try taming them, but ultimately, they will do what they will.

So, instead of trying to change our thoughts directly, we are far better off accepting them most of the time.

Imagine trying to get a tennis player always to have the same thoughts before they serve. Or to always think positively. Now imagine that that tennis player is in a challenging situation. Maybe she is slightly injured, or perhaps she’s double-match point down. Now, she is in a bind, and we expect her to think a certain way, too!

Before 2013 (Discovering ACT)

Sport Psychologist: What do you think before each serve?

Tennis Player: Not quite sure.

Sport Psychologist: I want you to be sure. Let’s devise something you can say to yourself before every single serve.

Tennis Player: Ok, you mean like “stay calm”.

Sport Psychologist: Yes, that’s work.

After 2013 (Discovering ACT)

Sport Psychologist: What do you think before each serve?

Tennis Player: Not quite sure.

Sport Psychologist: Great, it’s your actions that count. Think whatever you want, even if it’s negative; just stick to your pre-point routine.

The Misuse of The Word Mindfulness

Mindfulness has and continues to be confused with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Mindfulness is an increased awareness of the present moment with decreased judgment. It’s just one part of ACT, a very important part, but not the entire model.

When I use ACT to inform the one-on-one mental training I do with my sporting and non-sporting clients, I do so in the following way.

First, I explain that uncomfortable thoughts and feelings are a part of human existence. The wild animal analogy can help here.

Next, I explain how thoughts are separate from actions. You can try this now.

Start rubbing the top of your head while thinking how silly it is to rub one’s head. Even better, say to yourself, “I am not rubbing my head right now”. But continue to do the action.

Mental Separation

All too often in the human experience, thoughts, feelings, and actions are regarded as inseparable. The favoured term in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is fused. Therefore, separating thoughts from actions is logically called diffusion, a key part of ACT.

So, we have to get better at accepting our thoughts. You can try this alone to start with, but it is challenging. We have created a 16-minute audio guide for anyone who needs a helping hand (yes, it’s free).

Really Simple Mindfulness

This brings us to the final part of ACT, the commitment part. By commitment, what we are saying is committed actions. More so than almost any other human endeavour, sports are facts full of actions. There is a virtually unlimited number of tasks that can be performed.

So, performance mindfulness is just regular mindfulness in a performance setting. And it’s in these settings that fusing (getting caught up) with your thoughts can be so damaging.

Mindfulness and Acceptance Approaches in Sport Performance Download

If you are curious about discovering more about our work at Condor Performance, a great place to start is to listen to some of the recorded answers to the most frequent questions we get by clicking here. Or get in touch via one of these methods. 👉 Please email us at [email protected] or fill in our Contact Us form. 👉 Completing one of our Mental Toughness Questionnaires is also a great way to reach out to our team of sport and performance psychologists.

Off-Season Mindset

‘The off season is one of the best times for elite athletes to be working on their mindset’ says International Sport Psychologist Gareth J. Mole

Early morning training session — The best athletes in the world are almost always the ones with the best Off-Season Mindset.

What Is Your Off-Season Mindset?

The “Off Season” is an odd sporting term. It typically implies that athletes and coaches from around the globe only have two gears. “On” during pre-season and the competitive months where they give everything. And then “Off” for the rest of the year when everything stops.

This Black and White / Either Or / Binary way of conceptualising the sporting year is counterproductive. Certainly from a mental standpoint. Almost without a doubt, the origin of the term Off Season comes from a bygone era when training was regarded as almost entirely physical. So these athletes would’ve overdone it physically for eight months and hence required complete rest and recovery for four months.

However, this whole idea falls apart pretty quickly when you look at modern-day high-performance preparation whereby a lot of improvement requires little or no physical movement whatsoever.

The Five Pillars

Anyone who has completed our online Mental Toughness program – Metuf – will know that “preparation” can be broken down into 5 pillars: Physical Capability (PC), Mental Toughness (MT), Tactical Wisdom (TW), Technical Consistency (TC) and LifeStyle Choices (LC).

If we assume these 5 pillars are of equal importance then really only Physical Capability (PC) requires more body than mind. The other 4 pillars are “above the neck” processes, needing little or no physical exertion.

So for highly demanding physical sports (for example CrossFit, rugby union, rugby league, American Football, AFL and endurance sports – to name the first few to come to mind) then it’s only Physical Training that might want to be reduced during the gaps between the end of the competitive season and the start of the next preseason.

But even this is questionable. If the physical demands are adequately managed during the season then the necessity of an off-season of little or no physical effort is reduced.

A Season Is A Long Time

Part of the work that we do as one of the biggest independent groups of sport psychologists and performance psychologists in the world is to pass on invaluable “mind hacks” to our monthly clients. One of these is to tweak the way we think about time.

We encourage our 1-on-1 clients to use months and weeks rather than seasons or years. In summary, use weeks to plan and review efforts. Use months to monitor progress (KPIs etc). And if you must only use periods longer than this to set goals.

Start with a week-by-week approach. Think about a week as a block of 168 hours. Add your ideal sleep-in first. Not just amounts but bedtime and wake-up time too. Then add the stuff you have little or no influence over. For example, school or medical appointments. Finally, fill in the gaps with a healthy mix of process blocks across the 5 pillars.

This typically results in 52 weeks of “the right amount” of effort instead of 40 weeks of overdoing it followed by 12 weeks of undergoing it (oh, how very common this is).

The Biggest Clue

One of the biggest clues is how you feel mentally and physically at the end of the competitive season. If you are desperate for the break then there is a good chance you’ve been overextending yourself. Many individuals involved in elite sports believe that the primary purpose of an off-season is to recover from burnout. But the sports science is clear now. Burnout harms performance consistency, so we should be designing our preseason and the season to prevent burnout. Sometimes, less is more.

The concept of best-kept secrets is a bit of a cliche in sport. But having said that some things genuinely seem to separate the best from the rest. One of these is not so much the amount of time spent on training but the way it is designed and implemented. Not all 60-minute training sessions are equal. Some will be outstanding, whilst others can be damaging (it would have been better if they had not taken place at all).

Need A Hand?

If you feel like you might benefit from a professional helping hand in developing a smarter way of going about your preparation then why not get in touch? Regardless of how you contact us, we will attempt to get back to you within a couple of working days and talk you through the unique way in which Condor Performance goes about our sport psychology consulting.

Metacognition Explained

Metacognition is ‘the human brain’s ability to think about thoughts’. Our Founding Sport Psychologist Gareth explains more.

Is this surgeon just doing it, or is she doing and thinking?

Metacognition: What Is It?

As a general rule at Condor Performance, we try to avoid too much psychobabble. Psychobabble describes the countless psychological terms that most people would never have heard of. Classic examples of sport psychology psychobabble might include terms such as diffusion, reframing, and contraindication!

Unfortunately, with the term metacognition, we can use no other word instead. Overthinking may come close, but it’s not quite the same.

Metacognition is ‘the human brain’s ability to think about thoughts’.

This is quite unusual and unique across the Animal Kingdom. Thinking about thinking requires knowledge of the cognitions that exist in the first place. Don’t get me wrong. Most primates, such as chimpanzees, also possess complicated thought processes. But they probably have them, and that’s it. They don’t try to do anything with these thoughts like we do.

Metacognition for humans is primarily functional. Our ability to reflect on our thoughts allows us to be far more creative and patient than most other species. However, from a performance psychology point of view, it can produce issues.

Metacognition: Why Is It An Issue?

The nitty-gritty of why metacognition can be problematic from a mental side of performance boils down to the connection between the thinking and doing parts of our brain. Most readers will agree that once a performer has notched up enough hours of repetition for their particular set of motor skills, then no thought is required anymore.

The experienced surgeon doesn’t need to think “be steady” when holding the scruple close to the incision point. Elite netballers do not have to think of “soft hands” just before the moment in which they receive the ball from a teammate.

This is different from those who are only learning these motor skills. Before muscle memory has been established, it may be helpful to think of all sorts of related things to remember the correct technique. Please note I used the word helpful here, not essential.

Most thoughts, the natural ones in particular, when they occur simultaneously as the elite performer is executing their well-rehearsed skills, will have no bearing on the consistency of these movements. Even irrelevant thoughts such as “I hope my Mum is watching” are acceptable and harmless to well-practised motor skills.

💡 The Struggle Switch 😬

The issues start when we incorrectly believe that our thoughts play a key role in the success of these performance actions. This can play out in several ways. The performers may believe they need to think a certain way to perform a certain way. A Struggle Switch comes with this erroneous (more psychobabble, sorry) belief. Suddenly, negative thoughts (wholly normal and potentially harmless – see below) become the primary focus.

Wellness Tip_Struggle Switch_041322 Download

Neuroscientists are still trying to determine precisely what happens in these instances, but some switch seems to occur. In other words, although the muscle memory of the well-rehearsed actions still exists, it appears to be switched off temporarily whilst the blood flow is diverted from the cerebellum and towards the front lobe.

Of course, this has a massively negative impact on performance consistency, and unfortunately, in many cases, the performer and those supporting him or her blame the negative thoughts. But it was not their fault.

Metacognition: How To Manage It

Suppose we use the concept above of The Struggle Switch in simple terms. In that case, some aspect of the performance practice needs to be unapologetically about getting better at accepting thoughts (yes, all of them) rather than struggling with them.

Some form of mindfulness regularly is likely to be the best way of learning the basics of becoming less susceptible to metacognition in performance situations. It might be better to be guided by a qualified and experienced professional to start mastering this whilst practising.

The current Condor Performance team is a professional group based in Australia and New Zealand that consults across the English-speaking world.

You can view their profile via this link and then reach out to our Intake team via this one.

Excuse-Making Explored

Excuse-Making *and* Mental Toughness – Are They Opposites?

Excuse-Making: An Interesting Concept

The human mind is remarkable and fascinating. It is capable of so much, maybe too much. This short opinion piece will explore the concept of excuse-making. More specifically, it will try to untangle the difference between excuses and genuine reasons as it might relate to the mental side of competitive sport and performance.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines an excuse (noun) as “an explanation that frees one from fault or blame.” So, excuse-making is the act of doing this, and habitual excuse-making is doing this a lot. When I read this definition, I was a little surprised. I was expecting it to be more about facts versus fiction. But apparently not. It appears as if excuses are more like the opposite of “taking responsibility” than about accuracy.

From a sport psychology and performance psychology point of view, it’s essential that we also separate excuse-making into the outward and inner types. By this, I mean saying something just to oneself (e.g., thoughts) designed to free the thinker from fault or blame is not the same as an excuse that is vocalised to another person (or group).

Spoken Words Are Actions, Not Thoughts

Technically speaking, when you open your mouth, and words come out, these are actions. Yes, these words probably started as thoughts. And yes, the time gap between having the thought and then doing the talking can feel so quick that we believe they are the same. But they are not the same. The reason why it’s so important not to confuse them comes down to the vastly different ways we want to handle thoughts, feelings, and actions, as explained in the video below.

Thoughts, Feelings and Actions Are Different

If you take this explanation and put it into the context of inner excuse-making, then really, what we, as sport psychologists, are suggesting is to become more aware of just noticing these cognitions. Ideally, with practices like mindfulness and journaling, we can all become better at lengthening the gaps between the stimulus (the autonomic thought we have little influence over) and response (which action, if any, to take).

Because I am a diehard advocate for Psychological Flexibility as a better approach to sport, performance, life, and everything else, it’s easier to assume that I have no interest in influencing thought processes. This is not true.

Let Me Explain

Consider thoughts as either past, present, or future-oriented. The first two categories are ideally treated with extreme acceptance. Changing a past thought is impossible, and changing a present one is complicated and unnecessary for the critical stuff (actions) anyway, so leave them be.

But future thoughts are different. They have not taken place yet, so there are actions we can take that might lessen the burden on our psychological flexibility later.

Some clients will know I am a big fan of using swimming as an analogy, not just swimming but swimming in the ocean. One way to become a better ocean swimmer is to become more adept at doing your strokes whilst waves are smacking you in the jaw. We can do thousands of things to become stronger ocean swimmers. But at some point, we’d need to accept that looking at future sea conditions – to avoid the most extreme conditions that mother nature can throw at us – is also intelligent. Reduce the probability of extreme burden despite excellent preparation.

How do we reduce the burden on our psychological flexibility? There are many ways to do this, but there is no substitute for monitoring our efforts in the context of learning to make fewer excuses.

Example Please!

Peter has decided he wants to improve his short game in golf. So, instead of smashing balls at the range (which he finds much more enjoyable), he plans to use this time to work on this chipping instead. He decides to get specific and designs some drills that take 40 minutes, and he adds them to his time management plan to do this three times a week.

In simple mathematical terms, he’s aiming for 120 minutes a week of intentional effort. However, the amount of actual effort can range anywhere between 0 minutes and 120 minutes. Of course, it could go above 120 minutes, but this is less likely as Pete is somewhat of a “do what’s necessary kind of guy.”

Peter creates a simple chart to measure how many minutes he does each week. When this number is below 120 minutes, there is a space for him to put why he fell short. Below are three hypothetical entries – can you identify which (if any) are excuses?

Are These Excuses?

~ The practice pitching green was shut for some kids’ lessons on Wednesday evening, so I could not do my standard drills when I arrived. So, I went to the range instead and fell 40 minutes short of my short game practice this week.

~ I just experienced a considerable dip in motivation for my overall Golf, not just my short game. I played poorly on the weekend, so the idea of investing even more time into a pursuit that is so inconsistent seems ridiculous. Maybe a couple of weeks off is what is needed. I got 0 minutes done this week, 120 minutes less than my commitment.

~ Blast, I picked up a slight shoulder niggle whilst playing touch footy with the guys on Monday night. The physiotherapist instructed me to practice at least 20 minutes during every session (half my usual amount). I didn’t quite manage to double the number of sessions to get to the 120 minutes, so I managed 100 minutes this week instead of 120.

Instead of sharing my insights about which of the above contains more legitimacy than others, it might be more attractive to ask our loyal readers. Please add your comments in the space at the bottom of this article, and I will endeavour to reply to every one of them as they come through. Which of the above (if any) do you believe is an excuse and why?

The Mind Is Not So Different From The Body

Both benefit from some very similar rules. One commonality between the parts above and below the neck is that they both require repetition for changes to become permanent.

This simple monitoring process described above is the most effective method I have ever encountered during my 20 years as an applied sport psychologist in assisting future thoughts to become less burdensome. Let me reiterate something fundamental here to prevent the flurry of comments about me contradicting my preference for psychological flexibility while wanting my clients to have more beneficial future thoughts. Because they are future thoughts (yet to happen) and are potentially influenced by present actions, there is no risk of what we call meta-cognition “distracting” the performer during the present moment.

Ideally, weekly reflections on why an athlete or performer fell short build greater awareness of how they can creatively work towards greater consistency of practice in the future. Maybe the very simple little internal dialogue is something like this.

“It’s gonna be hard for me to practice this week due to the weather. What can I do instead of letting these adverse weather conditions reduce our intended practice? Maybe I could do something inside or practice in the rain, knowing my skin is waterproof. Better still, maybe this poor weather practice will help me when I have to compete in similarly adverse climatic conditions.”

Accepting Thoughts, Especially The Crappy Ones, Is Hard.

So, we’re looking to reduce the workload required for methods such as mindfulness. Developing great psychological flexibility is fantastic and will serve you very well in the future. Still, it is not a magic bullet that makes all future endeavours bulletproof against all challenges.

At the beginning of the article, I clarified that dialogue related to why we don’t manage to do what we intended to do is not the same as when we say this to another individual. What does this second version most commonly look like?

In a sporting context, it is probably most common in elite developmental sports programs. Imagine a softball team with athletes aged between 14 and 17. The coach helps the squad design a combination of group-based practice and tasks that the players must do independently.

A simple self-monitoring system allows the Coach to see which athletes are doing the individualised practice. For the players who don’t enter this data or enter numbers far less than what was agreed upon, conversations can occur about why.

Why would an athlete use an excuse verbally when, in their mind, they know it’s far from a legitimate reason? There are potentially many reasons, but the most common is a lack of sound team dynamics, as described in these past articles here and here.

If you are a sporting or non-sporting performer and would like some professional help with making fewer excuses, then contact us now via this Enquiry Form. One of our team will get back to you within a couple of days.

Potential In Performance – Is It A Myth?

For me, potential in performance is one of the most fascinating topics to debate in modern-day sports psychology. This article is my opinion on the subject. If you take the time to read my ramblings below, you’ll see that I lean heavily towards the view that there isn’t really such a thing as potential.

From a performance psychology perspective, I would even say that it can often be detrimental. But this is just my viewpoint. Please add your counterargument below in the comments section for those who read and disagree. Debating these topics healthily and respectfully is crucial to improving our understanding. So don’t be shy.

“You Have Some Much Potential”

The word ‘potential’ is used extensively across sports and other performance domains, such as music, art, performing arts, and academics. It is used so frequently that it will almost always be regarded as ‘real’. The context in which it is most commonly heard is to describe an individual performer. Someone who can and should be much better in the future based on current or past ‘glimpses’. For example:

“Our starting quarterback has so much potential but often falls short on game day.”

In other words, according to the individual who said these words—let’s say the coach—this athlete has done things that suggest they could be much better later on but are not right now.

All too often, this is down to moments of brilliance. Maybe it’s moments of brilliance during a practice session with little or no competitive pressure. Or perhaps it was one or two unforgettable moments in a game that made everybody sit up and take notice.

The issue with these moments of brilliance is that they are only moments. Even the sports that last the least time (e.g. 100 m sprint) are made up of dozens of moments. Some sports, like cricket, comprise tens of thousands per match. So, if only a few of these moments are brilliant, then it suggests the rest were not, which is the definition of inconsistency.

So, if consistency is the most sought-after aspect of performance (as my colleague Chris argued in this brilliant article), then moments of brilliance count for diddly–squat.

Genetics and Potential

Not always, but often, potential in performance is used to describe genetic or inherited advantages. In other words, if you go back to the good old nature versus nurture debate, we often label performers as having ‘huge potential’ when they have all the genetically inherited ideals for that sport—a naturally taller basketball player or a heavily set forward rugby union forward.

In these scenarios, being labelled as naturally talented can often be a significant handicap from a mental toughness point of view.

Think about it. Our effort is one of the few areas of performance over which we genuinely have considerable influence. Therefore, consistency of hard work (in the right areas 😬) would have to be the most significant predictor of future success in sports and performance.

Imagine that from the age of seven, you have been told by all the significant people around you that you have genetic advantages. “Tommy has so much potential and natural talent”. If I were Tommy and I heard this repeatedly, it would be easy to believe that I don’t need to put in the same level of effort as some of my competitors to succeed. When you combine this with humans naturally wanting to take shortcuts (see more here: Principle of Least Effort), Tommy is in trouble. His dreams of making it to the top are pipe dreams.

Inside Knowledge

One of the absolute joys of working as an applied sports psychologist is that many of our loyal clients are already competing and performing at a high level. We had/have the privilege of helping some of them get there. For others, we have joined them and their team while they are already at the pointy end, and we have been brought in to help increase the probability that they stay there.

Irrespective, we have conversations with some of the best athletes and performances in the world virtually every day. As I am only one member of the current Condor Performance team, I can’t speak on behalf of all of our uber-elite clients worldwide, but the ones I have worked with rarely talk about potential.

Most of these exceptional athletes were not told they had potential or natural talent during their developmental years.

Due to this, they developed a rock-solid belief system that consistency of effort was the number one ticket to the top. Hard work was above everything else. This work ethic became a habit, and as the years rolled on, it became a much more critical ingredient to performance consistency and excellence than anything else.

Practical Takeaways

What does this mean regarding practical takeaways for those reading this article? I will leave you with some straightforward and hopefully game-changing advice on this subject of potential in performance.

If you’re a coach, I would cease to use the terms potential and natural talent. Just ban them from your vocabulary. If you are an athlete or non-sporting performer, I would encourage you also to move away from these dangerous labels. When you think you are full of potential, notice those thoughts and return to work. If others tell you it, thank them and get back to work.

Consider this if you have been labelled as someone with huge potential. Does hearing this make me want to work harder or not? If you’re one of the lucky few who views your potential in a motivational way, then make sure you have strategies to continue working hard even when those around you stop describing you in this way.

Amount of Influence

From a mental toughness point of view, one of the most fundamental ideas is how much influence we have on stuff. When we look at this in the context of time, it is elementary.

We can not influence the past at all.
We have a vast amount of influence over the present.
We have some influence over the future (due to the amount of influence we have over the present and the impact the present has on the future).

Potential in performance, as well as in any context, is a future-orientated construct. It is a prediction about the future. So, in the same way that putting a considerable amount of mental energy into the past is detrimental (“things were so much better last season why Coach Bob was around”), so too is focusing too much on the future.

So, we want to spend most of our energy in the present moment. My response to working with an athlete who believes they have enormous potential is the same as when consulting with an individual who believes they have absolutely none. Ask yourself the following:

“What is my plan for this week, this training session, so that afterwards, there is no doubt that I have improved in one or more meaningfulness areas.”

Permission granted to write this on your bathroom mirror.

Pre Shot Routines

Pre Shot Routines might be the most common of the short routines used before closed sporting skills, but they’re not the only type of short routine.

A good pre-shot routine can be half the battle with improving the mental side of target-based sports such as shooting, lawn bowls, golf, etc.

What Are Pre Shot Routines (PSRs)?

Pre Shot Routines are the most common short-performance routines, but they are not the only type. Any closed motor skill required constantly during a sporting context could and should have a routine beforehand. A closed motor skill is an action or series of actions typically ‘performed in a stationary environment, where the performer chooses when to start the skill’.

If we did some brainstorming, we could probably come up with dozens of labels suited to different sports, but in my work as a sport psychologist, these six are the most common:

Pre Shot Routines for Golf, shooting sports, table sports, lawn bowls.
Pre-Point Routines (or you can have Pre-Serve Routines and Pre-Receive Routines) for all racquet sports, such as tennis, squash, table tennis, badminton, and paddleball (pickleball), to name the most common.
For AFL, soccer/football (set shot takers), rugby league, rugby union and American football (kickers), we’d use the term Pre Kick Routine.
The term Pre Start Routines is probably best for most racing sports, from swimming to motorsports to track and field.
Pre-Ball Routine … you guessed it – cricket and baseball.

What Is The Generic Term?

To my knowledge, no agreed term describes all of these mental skills. Probably because Pre-Shot Routines tend to be the most common, they are often used to describe most others. This is reasonable for all of the above examples other than racing sports. Most tennis players will instinctively know what you’re referring to if you use the term pre-shot routine instead of pre-point routine. But I suspect you might not get a great response if you tell a 200-meter sprinter that you’ll be working on their pre-shot routine during the sessions.

Pre Shot Routines Before Closed Motor Skills

For all closed motor skills, the athletes will always have at least a few seconds before attempting the action. Left ‘to wing it on the day,’ these few seconds (or few minutes) can often become fertile grounds for overthinking. This tends to lead to underperforming in high-pressure situations.

There is one main rule for constructing or improving any pre-shot routine. Only include easily repeatable actions. In other words, the only premeditated aspects of the routines are body movements. Thoughts and feelings are left to occur naturally at the time. You have too little influence on them to ensure you can “do them” when it counts.

Intended actions are far more reliable than thoughts and feelings. Indeed, they are so reliable that we can (with a lot of practice) virtually guarantee them. We can never guarantee that we will be able to think a certain way in certain situations. So, trying to do so is fraught with danger from a psychological point of view.

The Classic ‘Pre Shot Routine’

Start with this question. Is one Pre Shot Routine enough, or do I need several? For most sports, one is normally sufficient. Attempting a 3-foot putt versus a long drive in sports like golf might seem too different to justify having two different PSRs ready to go. For racquet sports, starting the point or receiving the ball from the server is very different, so I would encourage at least two.

The start of the Pre Shot Routine benefits from ‘a trigger action’. This helps us switch it on at that moment. For a sport like lawn bowls, maybe this is wiping your hand on your pant leg.

After this initial action, add three to five other steps that naturally lead to the “shot”. Any more than this, and you run the risk of overcomplicating it.

For example, one of these steps in clay target shooting is to shout ‘pull’. A baseball pitcher and a cricket bowler have no choice but to include correctly gripping the ball during their pre-ball routines.

Pre Point Routines

Of course, we have all seen Rafa going through his pre-point rituals. It might seem more like a set of ticks to the untrained eye. But Rafa’s Pre Point Routines are amongst the many aspects of his tennis that make him so good.

Racquet sports are interesting as only the serve is a closed skill because the receiver doesn’t decide when to receive the ball. However, I have always found that having a Pre-Serve Routine and a Pre-Receive Routine is a good plan in my work with tennis players.

The good old face clean with a towel is hard to beat as a starting trigger for both the server and the receiver. The rest of the routine needs to be aligned with what is required in a few seconds. If you’re about to receive the ball, walking to the right spot and taking the right body position might want to be included. If you’re serving, bouncing the ball, pausing, and slowly looking up can be great inclusions.

Ball Bouncing

Ball bouncing (waggling the golf club, same as) is a double-edged sword. Most players do it “until they feel right,” but this assumes you’ll always feel right at some point. I am in favour of picking a range of bounces. For example, 2 or 3 and then sticking to this 100% of the time. Yes, even in practice and when doing it as part of your visualisation.

If decision-making is taken seriously as part of the practice, this will become as automatic as the skills developed around them. In other words, choosing where to serve only becomes cognitively demanding if you have excluded tactical preparation as part of your practice.

Pre-Kick and Throw Routines

Because these actions are part of fast-flowing sports, they are often not considered in the same group of closed skills as the previous examples. In my opinion, this is a huge missed opportunity for the kickers and free throwers of these sports.

In the 1-on-1 work we do with kickers and throwers, I treat them like golfers. But instead of a golf club and ball, they have their leg, feet, arms, hands, and an inflated ball.

First, as with golfers, we agree on the ideal number of routines after going through the pros and cons of one versus several. For example, a rugby union player may need one for set shots and another for kickoffs.

After this, we follow the same rules as before. Only use actions to build the Pre Kick/Throw Routine. If you must include a thought, keep it as simple as possible.

Is It A Good Idea To Visualise As Part Of My Routine?

I have received criticism for my lack of enthusiasm about including imagery in routines 😬. Some of this comes from the famous Jack Nicklaus quote about visualisation. “I never hit a shot, not even in practice, without having a very sharp, in-focus picture of it in my head,” Nicklaus said.

Here is the issue, Jack. We can’t guarantee cognitive processes such as imagining the path of a ball. Even with repetition, it will be very vulnerable under pressure or high levels of distraction.

The solution to this conflict is two-fold. First, practice the visualisation part as part of your PKR in practice 100% of the time so it feels automatic (second nature). Second, don’t stress if it’s hard or impossible come game time. It’s not that you are weak, it’s the thoughts are weak. Your action-based Pre Shot Routines will get the job done regardless of your thoughts or feelings.

If you’d like the assistance of one of our psychologists with your short routines, then complete one of our four Mental Toughness Questionnaires here. A member of our team will be in touch with you to discuss options normally within two or three business days.

Vulnerability And Team Cohesion

This 10 minute read and ‘must share’ feature article by our founding performance psychologist Gareth is on the topic of Vulnerability And Emotional Courage and how these misunderstood concepts relate to team cohesion.

How Important Are Words?

I have often pondered how important it is to use the correct word. Both in professional situations as well as personal ones. Yes, maybe it’s the flight of an overthinker, but the fact is that words matter.

As a sports psychologist, does it go against the Psychological Flexibility framework that underpins all of my consulting to insist that certain words are better than others in specific situations?

Let me use an example before diving into the main dish of vulnerability and team cohesion. Some clients will know I’m not a huge fan of the word ‘mistake’. From time to time, I have suggested that we even consider replacing this loaded term with the far more accurate and potentially beneficial phrase of ‘unfortunate occurrence’.

I will endeavour to write an entire article on this subject in due course, but here is the gist. Too many athletes take too much blame when something unfortunate happens during competition(s).

Imagine a team sport like volleyball where serving is a significant deal. Let’s consider a scenario in which one of the players cannot find any rhythm when starting the points. Are these mistakes? Or are they simply unfortunate occurrences? For me, to use a word like mistake (and the potential shame that comes with it) when the volleyball player – in this example – is trying her best seems wrong. Maybe a mistake is when the error was made on purpose. Very, very rare, but not unheard of, think of a tennis player tanking the rest of a game or set. If you are not stuffing up on purpose, then it’s not a mistake. It’s an unfortunate occurrence.

Back To Vulnerability

But I digress. The word vulnerability wasn’t used much in applied or academic sport psychology until recently.

So, let’s look at the actual word itself. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the word vulnerability means ‘able to be easily hurt, influenced, or attacked’. Hmm, that doesn’t sound that great! The Merriam-Webster free online dictionary isn’t much better with ‘capable of being physically or emotionally wounded’.

The appeal to want to become more vulnerable takes an even bigger blow when you look at the origins of the via Etymonline (below) 😬.

Brené Brown’s Work

Due to the smallness of performance psychology as a profession, more often than not, the research needs to come from a more generic source. And this is certainly the case here where the work by the legendary Brené Brown put vulnerability and related concepts on the map.

Before I stumbled across the work of Brené Brown, I must admit that I was guilty of not seeing the hidden benefits of learning to be vulnerable. Maybe it’s like sport itself. Maybe you need to do it to have an idea of what it’s really like. So this I did.

The Bridge in Kentucky, USA

Partially for personal reasons and partially for professional reasons, earlier this year, I spent two weeks at a facility in Kentucky, USA, called The Bridge. For those who follow the work of Dr Peter Attia, it’s the same Bridge he attended and mentions in his highly recommended book Outlive.

I will not include a full breakdown of my experience in The Woods of Kentucky, mostly because a thorough account of the entire program would be a far more appropriate subject for an entire book, not a 1000-word blog article. However, I’m happy to disclose that one of the most significant inclusions of the process was learning to be vulnerable in a group setting.

And when it’s done properly and professionally (and boy, was it), there is no substitute from a team cohesion and togetherness point of view. In 14 days, we went from a group of complete strangers to people who feel more like family than friends.

Emotional Courage

I know that for some reading this, it’s just semantics, but in 2024, before the world catches up, maybe what I was taught at The Bridge is better described as emotional courage. And I couldn’t help but notice when Googling Brené’s website to link it above the blurb in the search results puts the word courage first: Brené Brown is a researcher and storyteller who’s spent two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy.

The courage to let down the walls and let your real feelings come out. Brené correctly describes doing this type of work properly is messy. And messy it is, but necessarily messy. Unavoidably messy if you want the benefits on the other side.

Team sports athletes – especially the men 😬 – are typically not very emotionally courageous with each other, and maybe this is necessary if the facilitator is not trained and experienced. Like dentistry, if it is not done properly, it can backfire and be disastrous.

But one thing is for sure. We will ensure that our growing team of sport and performance psychologists gets the appropriate skills training in this area. We will be ready to assist when the sporting world fully embraces vulnerability as a mental skill to be taken seriously. If you can’t wait until then, feel free to get in touch via Our Contact form beforehand (like now).

Sport Psychology Into The Future

Sport psychologist Gareth J. Mole muses about where sport psychology is headed and guesses what the field will look like in 2050.

What will sport psychology look like in the year 2050?

Back From The Future

Ok, readers, I borrowed a time machine and just returned from the year 2050. And you will not believe what I saw. Doncaster Rovers F.C. won the English Premier League yet gain. And sport psychology is nothing like it is in 2024. It’s mainstream, normal, and regarded as the most important part of competitive sports.

Forecasting the future is one of the most remarkable aspects of being human. No other species can do it quite like we can. But it’s both a blessing and a curse. The upside is our ability to plan and do things three moves ahead of our opponents. The downside is wasting mental energy, such as “I just know I am going to play poorly tomorrow”.

Sport Psychology In 2050?

During several interviews between UK sport psychologist Dan Abrahams and his guests on the highly recommended The Sport Psych Show, he asked them to imagine using a time machine to go back in time. I thought it might be fun and thought-provoking to use it to go into the future instead!

In this article, I will predict what the sport psychology landscape will look like 25 years from now. Like Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale (creators of the Back To The Future Trilogy), I will make some educated guesses. Feel free to save a copy and then get in touch in 2050. This might be hard as I plan to be fully retired by then.

Let me know how accurate or inaccurate they turn out to be. I will not, in this article, focus on the problematic aspects of future-based thinking. But I will say this. We now know that one of the key aspects of sporting mental toughness is being able to focus at will on the present moment. In other words, there are many occasions in a competitive sporting situation in which we literally want to ‘turn off’ our ability to think about the future. More on this will be discussed in another article (which, when written, I will link here).

3 Majors Changes To Sport Psychology Are Coming

I hypothesise three major changes in the coming decades to dramatically change what sport psychology looks like. My predication is that the following will occur or have happened by the middle of this century.

The phasing out of generic (non-sport specific) sport psychology.
The phasing in of much greater checks about qualifications (or lack thereof).
A spike in sporting coaches working 1-on-1 with sport psychologists/performance psychologists. And the first few head coaches are, in fact, sports psychologists themselves.

I will now go into more detail about each of the above.

Phasing Out of Generic Sport Psychology

By the end of this decade, it will be universally accepted that the ‘interventions’ used to help someone with clinical depression are different from ‘the mental tools’ used to motivate a mentally well athlete whose training enthusiasm has dropped. For those who are reading this who think this has already happened, trust me, it hasn’t. But we are getting there.

This move towards more specificity will continue past 2030. More and more people will accept that snooker and boxing are too different to be aided by the same psychological tools. There are so many sports now, and we can’t pretend they all have the same mental requirements and solutions.

Let’s Consider A Couple Of Key Questions

How much do the general strategies used by most (non-sport) psychologists apply to athletes and coaches who are trying to improve the mental aspects of their performance or coaching abilities?
How ‘transferable’ are various mental skills from one performance area to another? Or even from one specific sport to a different sport?

When trying to answer the first question, we must be careful not to imply that all psychologists use the same models. However, some well-established frameworks are likely to be more prevalent than others. That is for sure. So, how easily do these methods apply to sport and performance? The simple answer, in my opinion, is ‘about one-third’.

For example, if the athlete is functionally well (without a recognised mental illness) then at Condor Performance we would not focus significant attention on a long and detailed history of the client’s mental health and wellbeing. We would most likely measure it via the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale every couple of months to keep an eye on it. However, most sports psychology sessions would be related to the mental aspects of the client’s sport.

This is not to say that some mental methods we often use from the get-go don’t have clinical origins. But the final versions presented to our clients would be largely unrecognisable to our non-performance colleagues.

Examples

A great example of this would be our approach to goal setting. When we help our clients set goals, we often introduce a level of accountability to these targets that some mental health practitioners might find objectionable.

But from our standpoint, this level of accountability is a key ingredient in helping them get to the next level. It can be confronting for the client (‘You committed to 5 hours of practice a week, this didn’t occur, what happened?’), and we will use that to further the discussion by asking lots of ‘why’ questions.

A practitioner with more of a mental health angle might default to just making the client feel better about this type of non-compliance. (‘You committed to 5 hours of practice a week; this didn’t occur, totally understandable given the current challenges’).

Another example might be mindfulness. Mindfulness looks rather different when doing something at home with few outside distractions than the version you might use in the arena. And the version you might use on the golf course is hopefully only partially the same as what a competitive tennis player might adopt.

How Transferable

So, how ‘transferable’ are mental skills from one performance area to another? Or even from one specific sport to another? In answering this question, I often use the rule of thirds. About one-third of the mental ideas are due to generic sport psychology principles. Another third wants to acknowledge that although Olympic Bob-sleighing and Clay Target Shooting are both sports, they are vastly different pursuits. And the final third is further adapting the mental training program to that individual. To that person’s personality and learning styles. Two clay target shooters should never be treated the same.

In other words, the sports psychology services we’d deliver to a competitive pro golfer with a drinking problem and a rugby league coach looking to improve their coaching abilities might only have a 15 to 20% crossover. One of the commonalities between these very different hypothetical clients might be the use of some key aspects of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

For example, educational processes around “we are not our thoughts” might be useful for both. I have found a Behaviour-first approach universally beneficial in my sports psychology work regardless of who I am sitting in front of.

Some Sports Are Mentally Very Similar

Although I predict a phasing out of generic sport psychology, we need to remember that some sports are psychologically very similar. When you put the technical and tactical aspects to one side, the same mental tools should work for certain sports. The best example that comes to mind is the work we do around Short Performance Routines to aid concentration and execution under pressure. In helping a golfer create or improve his or her Pre Shot Routine(s) the principles will be almost identical in working a snooker player on their PSR.

Greater Checks about Qualifications

This is how I think it will work in 2050. If you want to charge a fee for advice on X then you need some approved qualification in X. No exceptions. So, if you want to be a personal trainer who goes to people’s houses and gives fitness advice in exchange for a fee, you’ll need to be genuinely qualified. I gather the whole physical conditioning industry is trying to make this happen.

Psychology for elite sports is years behind our S&C friends, but we will catch up. Over the next 30 years, there will be a gradual phasing out of entities charging a fee for psychological advice (even if they call it something else) who don’t have some kind of approved training in psychology.

This is a very difficult area, and I suspect that more than a few tears will be shed along the way. The hardest part will be to get everyone to agree on what ‘approved training in psychology’ means. And then afterwards, educating the public in such a way as to reduce assumptions that Mindset Coach and a Sport Psychologist are one and the same.

More Coaches Working 1-on-1 With Sport Psychologists

This has already started to happen. In 2005, I worked with no sporting coaches. In 202,4 roughly a third of all my monthly clients are coaches. The premise is very simple. Coaching education programs worldwide lack highly effective mental toughness training elements. We could try and improve all of these coach ed programs or even ask the coaches to do ‘approved training in psychology’, but there is an easier and better way. All sporting coaches, especially at the elite level, will be working behind the scenes with a genuine expert in sporting mental toughness.

This coach-sport psychologist collaboration will eventually result in sport psychologists taking up positions as assistant coaches. Then eventually getting the ‘top job’ themselves. When this happens, and these professionals are successful, and stick with the title of sport psychologist over Head Coach or Manager whilst in the top job, we can then say we’ve made it.

If you are a sporting coach and want to get ahead of the curve, then start by completing this questionnaire. This questionnaire will assess, amongst other factors, your current mental coaching abilities. One of our team will then contact you within a day or two with details about how to work alongside of of our team of sport/performance psychologists.

Psychological Flexibility

You’ve heard of physical flexibility right? But what about Psychological flexibility? In this article two of our performance psychologists Lauren Bischoff and Gareth J. Mole take a closer look at this ‘game changing’ mental skill.

What Is Psychological Flexibility?

Psychological flexibility – heard of it? Don’t worry if you haven’t. Many qualified psychologists would struggle if you asked them what psychological flexibility is. And maybe just as important, what it is not.

Let’s start by looking at the origins of the word flexible from which flexibility derives. The Online Etymology Dictionary Etymonline says:

Flexible (adjective):

early 15c., “capable of being bent; mentally or spiritually pliant,” from Old French flexible or directly from Latin flexibilis “that may be bent, pliant, flexible, yielding;” figuratively “tractable, inconstant,” from flex-, past participle stem of flectere “to bend,”

The two words that jump out from this are yielding and bend. We’ll come back to these.

Of course, the word flexibility is much more commonly associated with physical flexibility from a human point of view. So much so that if you booked in to see an exercise physiologist and asked him or her to help you design a program to boost flexibility, they’re unlikely to ask whether you mean mental or physical.

Flexibility in terms of the human body means that there is a far greater range of possible movements. This is, of course, most beneficial in an injury prevention scenario. Two similar athletes who endure the same brutal rugby league tackle are most likely impacted not by how strong they are but by how flexible they are.

It goes without saying that there are sports in which physical flexibility is arguably the number one priority. Gymnastics and many dancing pursuits emphasise the importance of suppleness. It is the same for psychological flexibility. It’s beneficial for all performance areas but absolutely critical for a few.

Outcomes vs Processes

It’s impossible to overemphasise the usefulness of separating processes from outcomes. Why? To realise how much more influence you have on processes.

So, what do physical and psychological flexibility have in common? Both types of flexibility are outcomes. They are the possible consequences of the things we do. If these processes are sound (sufficiently scientific), then the consequence may result in some improvement.

There is nothing wrong with aiming for outcomes as long as you know they are outcomes. They often make for an invaluable starting point. For example, it’s far more helpful to want to improve your physical flexibility than your overall physical health. In the same way, it is better to want to improve your psychological flexibility than your “mindset.”

Psychological Rigidity

Sometimes, when trying to understand a concept, it can be helpful to know the opposite. For example, when learning about good manners, it can be helpful to know what poor manners look like.

The opposite of psychological flexibility is psychological rigidity. It is interesting how obvious it is that physical rigidity is not desirable. But in some circles, psychological rigidity can be regarded as beneficial. For example, certain aspects of the military might believe this.

I am about a four on a scale of one to ten between rigidity and flexibility, where zero represents maximum rigidity. But I used to be a one, maybe even a zero. Certain traits of psychological rigidity are extreme rule-following and stubbornness. “It’s my way or the highway”. This is fine if you live by yourself on a desert island, but in the real world, it causes issues. Over time, I have moved from a one to a four through the core practices below. Thank you to my colleague Lauren Bischoff on the research put into the below, which she wrote.

1. Cognitive Defusion

Have you ever been distracted by unhelpful thoughts while training or competing? It is more common than you’d imagine and can make focusing on your processes ten times harder. Thoughts such as “I’m not good enough” or “I am too anxious to perform at my best” tend to be automatic thoughts. The issue is we have very little influence on these thoughts.

The good news is that we can learn to make room or unhook from these thoughts with a bit of practice. This process frees up mental space to focus on what is essential: our actions. This concept of ‘making room’ is really important. Basically, the human mind only has the ability to deal with so much at any given time. This process leaves little room for anything else when we argue with our own thoughts. But when we accept and notice them, we can use the rest of the room to focus on skill execution. To get on with the job at hand, so to speak.

Although this might sound easy in theory, it takes practice. Let’s take a basketball player who is fixated on the consequences of missing the next shot. In this situation, they can get unstuck from these thoughts by acknowledging that “I’m having the thought that I might miss the next shot”. Did you notice any difference in the meaning between these two statements? The second thought allows us not to be as controlled by the thought of missing the shot. She makes the next attempt despite the thought.

Next time you get caught up in your thoughts, try noticing that your thoughts are just thoughts.

2. Acceptance

Acceptance plays a big part in learning to open up to and learn from our experiences. This involves acknowledging our thoughts and emotions and letting go of what is getting in the way. We can acknowledge our thoughts and learn to accept them for what they are: just thoughts.

It is natural to want to fight our thoughts or feelings, but this makes us focus on them more. I use the purple elephant example when explaining acceptance.

I want you to stop thinking about a purple elephant!

The harder we try to stop having a thought, the more likely we will experience or focus on it. Therefore, let’s accept that we are having this thought in the first place without fighting it.

Often, we focus on avoiding a feeling or experience that makes us uncomfortable, such as anxiety or pressure. However, you might be surprised that anxiety and pressure are a normal part of the human experience. And especially when those humans are trying to achieve something hard yet meaningful.

I will not detail the fight and flight response here, as other Mental Toughness Digest articles have covered this concept well.

When we accept our life experiences, we can learn from them and move to the decision-making part faster. If you got an opportunity to compete for your country at the Olympics (for example), and the experience came with lots of pressure, would you still want to go? I know that I would still want to take up that opportunity, but at the same time, I accept that pressure and anxiety will likely show up.

3. Committed Action

Committed action involves taking responsibility for our actions and moving towards who we want to be and what we want to do. This is almost always challenging. Our uncomfortable thoughts and feelings often pull us away from what we truly want to achieve.

Committed action refers to sticking to our processes, regardless of our thoughts or feelings. Remember that we have a lot of influence on our actions, much less on our thoughts and even less on our feelings.

Let’s take a gymnast by way of an example. Committed action on the beam would involve completing each skill despite fearing falling. Or a soccer goalkeeper during a penalty shootout. Usually, anyone would be nervous in that situation. However, it is more effective for the goalkeeper to go about their job rather than trying to calm themselves down.

A key aspect of committing to our actions is building competence in the actual skills before we start feeling confident. Imagine trying to build a new habit. It would be nice to see change overnight, but it takes practice. As we know, practice makes permanent. Competencies are well-rehearsed actions that can be relied upon. Confidence is a feeling and is inherently very unreliable.

4. Values

Think about an athlete that you look up to. What values or qualities do you admire about that person? Maybe they are a good team player or have excellent body language under pressure.

As athletes start competing at a higher or more competitive level, they can forget about why they fell in love with the sport in the first place. I highly encourage you to reflect on why you play your sport. No, not just one now, but every month.

It’s important to highlight that our values and goals are different. Goals help us to stay on course with our values. For example, if our goal is to be the best hockey player, we might value stamina and being a good team player. This brilliant video below by Dr Russ Harris explains more on this:

5. Staying In The Moment

It is natural to get distracted by the world around us, which pulls us away from what we are doing. Our mind is designed to keep us safe, and it does this, in part, by predicting the future. Millions of years ago, this was quite adaptive as there were many more sabertooth tigers around and fewer professional golf tournaments 😛!

The workaround is through regular mindfulness and paying attention to the present moment with less judgment. There are many ways to do this. One way is for you to try to notice internal and external stimuli. What can you hear right now if you pause and focus solely on the sounds around you?

If you need a helping hand, the below 12-minute Really Simple Mindfulness guide created by Condor Performance’s first-ever sport psychologist, Gareth J. Mole, is a great tool. Unlike the many guided meditation and mindfulness apps available, the below are free.

6. Self As Context

Lastly, self as context allows us to observe our experiences without getting caught up in them as much. We often refer to this as our “observing self”, meaning we become better at seeing the world in a way that’s less about us.

Being human with higher cognitive abilities than most animals is a very unusual experience. We live on a planet with approximately eight billion people, but we are only aware of the thoughts and feelings of one of these people.

For this reason, it’s essential to see ourselves as separate from our thoughts or emotions and remember that we are not our thoughts. Another video by Dr Harris below uses ‘stageshows’ to explain this in more depth:

Conculsion

The term ‘psychological flexibility’ is used only slightly compared to terms such as mental toughness. However, psychological flexibility and the above six core practices are at the heart of improving mental toughness. It’s worth concluding that working on one of these in isolation from the others can be helpful; the actual “lift-off” occurs when all six practices are prioritised simultaneously. It works in a very similar way to physical flexibility. Stretching at home and regular yoga can be done in isolation, but I guess it’s better if you do both.

Quite understandably, many people would benefit from having a guide or a coach when trying to get started on the strategies covered in this article. If this is you, please don’t hesitate to contact us and ask about our one-on-one psychology services. We constantly endeavour to reply to all genuine enquiries within two or three working days.

Sport Psychology – A Brief History

Sport Psychologist Gareth J. Mole looks at the history of sport psychology and points out a few missed opportunities from the 100 year story so far.

Coleman Griffith (right) put sport psychology on the map. His two classic publications in the 1920s are ‘must reads’ for anyone interested in History of Sport Psychology.

I like my history; I always have. One of the most exciting modules I did during my psychology undergraduate degree at The University of Leeds in the late 90s was ‘The History of Psychotherapy’. From memory, this course didn’t look back at different types of psychology. Instead, it just covered general trends from the past. This led me to research the history of sport psychology as we know it today.

The Pioneers of Sport Psychology

The actual origins of sport psychology had little to do with traditional psychotherapy. In the early days, sport psychology was almost entirely about performance enhancement and building on existing strengths.

The actual start of sport psychology as a specialisation was over a hundred years ago. In 1921, baseballer Babe Ruth was tested at Columbia University to discover what made him so good. Many of the findings proved that his excellence boiled down to mental superiorities more than technical or physical ones. Sport psychology as a field, a specialty was born, when the below article was published.

Why Babe Ruth is Greatest Home-Run Hitter by Hugh S. Fullerton (1921)Download

A few years later, psychologist Walter Miles conducted several studies that focused on optimising American footballers’ performance during training.

The Psychology of Coaching

In 1928 the Psychology of Athletics was published and two years later Griffith wrote The Psychology of Coaching. For good reason he’s regarded as the father of modern sport psychology. I own a first-edition copy of the ‘Psychology of Coaching: a Study of Coaching Methods From the Point of Psychology’. I stumbled across a copy in an antique store about 25 years ago. This book is one of the reasons why I am so passionate about working one-on-one with sporting coaches.

There is still a lot of hesitation amongst sporting coaches about working directly with a psychologist. Yet those who ‘give it a crack’ tend to be richly rewarded. If you are a sporting coach, an excellent way to ‘dip your toes in the water’ is to complete our MTQ-C online.

‘Exercise’ Psychology Wants In

It should be noted that a close look at the History of Sport Psychology shows very little interest in exercise psychology.

Pioneers of sport psychology were mainly focused on performance. From their point of view, their population of interest was already very physically active. Any ‘advice’ about physical training should come from experts in exercise physiology and related fields.

All this changed between 1930 and 1960 when exercise and physical activity were formally added to the definition of sport psychology. Hence, the standard modern description of ‘sport and exercise psychology’.

With the benefit of hindsight, I believe this was the profession’s first collective error. I will explain by way of some examples.

Exercise psychology is essentially (should be) a branch of health psychology. It’s all about using psychological methods to increase physical activity. The typical client of an exercise psychologist might be a sedentary adult. Someone who has failed to become active after seeing an exercise physiologist.

Sport psychology has little to do with this kind of mental challenge. Our clients are already physical very active, they are anything but sedentary.

The Importance of The Right Labels

For a long time, I have argued that performance psychology is the ideal label for the profession. Sport psychology would then become a subdiscipline of performance psychology. Subcategories of sport psychology would then be Sport-Specific Sport Psychology (SSSP). Listen to my conversation with English sport psychologist Dan Abrahams on his Podcast The Sport Psych Show for a more extensive deep dive into this argument.

Remember that “performance” and “performing” semantically extend well beyond elite sport. Unsurprisingly, a healthy chunk of our clients are non sporting performers from sectors such as the performing art, medicine and the military.

Sport and performance psychology/psychologists are terms getting more use nowadays. But for me, this is just repeating. Sport is a type of performance, so the word performance alone should be enough.

One of the most awkward facts about the profession from a historical perspective is that we have never attempted to agree on the correct spelling of the first word. We are trying to do something about this via the below open poll. If you have yet to vote, please do so now.

More Recent History

From 1970 to the early 2000s, the professional enjoyed increasing recognition and growth across most of the developed world. Australia saw an all-time high of four Master Programs in ‘Sport and Exercise Psychology’. Boosted by the Sydney Olympics 2000, Australia was an excellent place to study sport psychology 20 years ago.

The Decline

Nowadays there are only two Sport and Exercise Psychology masters program remaining in Australia. So it begs the question, what happened? More importantly, what can we learn from the decline?

One big ‘dropped ball’ was spreading ourselves too thinly to bring exercise and physical activity into the fold.

In 2006, Medicare introduced a two-tier system for psychologists. The policy implies that clinical psychologists were better a psychology work. The out-of-pocket costs to see a clinical psychologist became significantly less than all other psychologists.

This legislation resulted in an explosion of applicants for clinical psychology masters to the detriment of all the other programs. A shout-out to our colleagues at AAPI who are trying to fix this.

The Recent Wellbeing Movement

In recent years sport psychology has embraced the importance of mental health and wellbeing. I am glad about this, but we must be cautious.

The risk of the recent wellbeing movement is that sport psychology might lose its performance enhancement origins. These include mental skills training and coaching psychology.

In 50 years from now, what will the answers to these questions be? What do sport psychologists do? And what are sport psychologists best known for?

Will the answers be …

They help athletes with mental health and well-being challenges and the odd bit of mental skills training, or will it be
They mainly help sporting and non-sporting performers improve in their chosen sport or performance area and introduce mental health interventions for non-critical issues if required.

This particular sport psychologist hopes it’s the latter.

Is It Possible For Us To Bounce Back?

Will we learn from our mistakes and bounce back? Can we learn from the History of Sport Psychology to improve the future of the profession? I think we can, but only with some major structural changes.