Who is the best person for me to work with to improve the mental side of my performance?
Like the proverbial “How long is a piece of string?” (exactly double the length of its half), this question doesn’t have a universal, clear, and agreed-upon answer.
Listen to any post-match press conference. You will universally hear about mental preparation, focus, motivation, attitude, dealing with pressure, resilience, and many other things related to mental preparation and the processes involved and required for elite performance in the most demanding competitive environments.
So, if we accept the premise that the mental side of performance is essential and that improving it leads to more consistent and better overall performance, the question then turns to how to do this and who can help us.
Disclaimers And Recognitions
As a fully registered and endorsed sport psychologist with Condor Performance in Australia, I’ll be biased towards sport and performance psychologists over others. I’ve tried hard to be fair to all groups/professions mentioned here.
My mum loves reading Choice product reviews, so in honour of her, I’ve tried to use a similar approach for each group involved, with pros and cons for each.
There is always a range of abilities in every group. There are people in each group who are outstanding at what they do and offer; equally, there are those who are not. The descriptions here are general, with no references to specific individuals.
Many of the observations come from my experiences meeting, working with, and seeing clients, athletes, coaches, parents, etc., who have worked with people from various groups.
While in this article I’ll speak about athletes, this also applies to coaches, teams, performers, or anyone in a high-performance/pressure position, such as CEOS, corporate board members, surgeons, traders, armed forces or anyone else who sees themselves as or wishes to become a high performer.
Who Is Out There?
The number of people and organisations eager to work with athletes is mind-blowing. For easy comparison, I’ve grouped these individuals into these general groups:
- Parents and coaches
- Ex-players
- Mentors
- Mind coaches
- Psychologists with no specialisation in sport and performance
- Sport and Performance psychologists (such as those at Condor Performance) who have undergone specific additional training and higher learning focused solely on sport and performance work.
Parents and Coaches
Parents are the first and foremost influence on athletes developing their skills. The hope is that they are the greatest supporter they’ll ever have, but at the same time, this support can lead to blind spots and/or avoidance of truths that need to be told or addressed. Often, they have few skills in the sport, little training in instruction, communication skills, mental support, and good intentions, which can lead to issues later for the athlete.
There is also the danger of those horror parents for athletes that many of us can name.
Coaches range from the weekend parent who helps out on their kid’s side to local representative coaches with minimum accreditation levels, up to the highest-level coaches of the stars. They typically have excellent knowledge of the sport and a passion for their athletes.
Pros
- High level of contact and passion for the athlete, good skills around the sport, and time available to understand the person.
- Depending on the level, can have brilliant support teams and systems around them and their athlete/s.
- Improving an athlete’s technical skills will often improve their mental skills. Think about the concept of Competence Before Confidence.
Cons
- Significant variation in the levels of skills in and understanding of the mental side of performance
- Variable communication and interpersonal skills
- Highly vested interests in performance can impair judgment and decision-making, leading to decisions that are in the best interest of the coach or parent rather than the athlete.
Personal Comment
Every athlete needs at least one of these involved, and at the elite level, many athletes will laud the coach’s skills as a mentor, teacher, and communicator. In short, the best coaches have the best people management skills and mental awareness. Interestingly, these same coaches also strongly tend to have sports and performance psychologists on their team, or they refer to themselves. Don’t take my word for it, take it from the current champions of English Football:
Ex-players, Mentors, Mind coaches
Ex-players are obvious. Mentors may be high-profile sportspeople from other sports or high-profile people from different areas, such as business, politics, or the armed services, who are now assisting athletes in dealing with the pressure of performance. Mind coaches can have many different names or titles, as there’s no universal term and no restriction to applying any description of themselves, except for the legally protected term of psychologist or sport psychologist.
Pros
- Ex-players and mentors bring lived experience of situations like those the athlete may face.
- Often, they have a narrow focus on which sports and areas they will or can work with, leading to a minimal number of athletes, so there is potential for greater one-on-one time with the athlete.
- There is often an obvious credibility with someone we know who has been there and done it themselves.
Cons
- With no regulatory body or board, they are not accountable to anyone for their actions and have no ethical framework to which they are held. They often have no or little direct, accredited psychological training.
- This group is not regulated like psychologists. There is no insurance requirement, restriction on advertisement, restriction on testimonials, restriction on making guarantees to clients, an ethical framework they must adhere to, and no underlying explicit expectation to put the client’s needs first and do no harm.
- If they have pictures with athletes, or testimonials or endorsements from them on their website, or make grandiose promises like “results in one session”, then you can be confident they are not a psychologist.
Personal Comment
I’ve met, worked with, and listened to many operators from this group who are skilled, knowledgeable, and excellent for their clients. Often, they will talk about their own experiences and highlight their work and what they’ve learned from their work with sports psychologists in their careers. They are now using that knowledge to help others. I have happily worked alongside these previously and still do currently, using a team approach to achieve the best results for the athlete.
In my opinion, the good ones know where their level of knowledge and competence ends and defer to psychologists or other specialists when the client needs more than they can provide.
Those in this group that I would not work with as an athlete tend to follow a couple of similar, consistent actions:
- They tend to have one framework for how things should be dealt with, either through having only one method or system or using a “this is what I did when I…” approach. Then, if the athlete cannot fit within this framework, they often blame the athlete for being unable, unwilling, or not wanting it enough to succeed.
- They tend only to want to take on clients who are already well on the path to elite and seem to bask in the reflective glory of “their” athlete.
- They tend to ignore, avoid, or even shame individuals with personal problems that may impact their sporting performance. In doing so, they treat the person like they should be robots with their sport rather than human beings.
Psychologists with no specialisation in sport and performance
In Australia and New Zealand, where all the current Condor Performance psychologists are based and trained, to become a fully registered psychologist, you must complete a minimum of 6 years of approved, supervised, and quality-ensured education before you speak to your first client independently. We are governed by a regulatory board that holds us accountable for maintaining standards of ethics, work quality, confidentiality and ongoing training to ensure the currency of knowledge.
If they are working with clients rather than in policy or administration roles, they are generally trained to work with mental health issues in what we can call mainstream life circumstances.
Pros
- You know they are trained and competent as a psychologist
- They work under a transparent framework and are accountable for their actions
- Trained in dealing with people, relationships, pressure, grief, and mental health issues
Cons
- Often, there is no or minimal training around performance enhancement techniques or theories.
- They may not understand the sporting environment, the associated pressures, or the motivations of those involved, including the established hierarchies in sports teams, clubs, and competitions.
- Psychologists wanting to ‘dabble’ in sports often underestimate the importance of passion and knowledge of specific sports. They incorrectly assume that the interventions to help a pro golfer perform under pressure (for example) are the same as those for a CEO. They are not!
Personal comment
Like the other groups, I have worked alongside and met many good operators in this grouping. But I’ve also met many athletes who have worked with a general/clinical/health psychologist who tells me that “the psych was fine, but the solutions they offer aren’t relevant or appropriate for their sporting environment”. The athletes have also been frustrated with the psychologist’s inability to understand how their sport works, the language of the sport, or the unique problems of their sport.
Psychologists generally aim to have clients do well in their world and cope effectively, but in sports, just doing well isn’t good enough.
Sport and Performance Psychologists
These professionals have completed the same 6 years of minimum training as other psychologists, but I have specialised in sports and performance work. This is either through specific university coursework, Master’s, and PhD programs that often lead to the legally protected term “sports psychologist,” as many of the Condor Performance team have, or via focused ongoing development after their initial general registration as psychologists and continued work in the field with ongoing supervision by highly experienced current sports and performance psychologists.
Regardless of the pathway, we are subject to the same government regulatory body that ensures ethics, quality, confidentiality, and focused continuing professional development in sports and performance work.
Pros
- All the same pros as psychologists who don’t specialise in sport and performance
- Trained in numerous mental skills/performance enhancement techniques, along with mental health models, that apply to sport and performance, such as visualisation, self-talk, motivations, goal setting, etc – i.e. not one trick ponies and can switch approaches to match a client
- Understand that athletes are different from the “normal”, and being good isn’t enough when you seek to be elite.
- Understand the relationships within, the politics of, the pressure of, the sacrifices required, the dedication required, the expectations of self, teammates, coaches, and fans, and the language of high-performance environments.
Cons
- Confidentiality for clients means they can’t tell you who they’ve worked with, they can’t use testimonials or endorsements from clients, and they can’t make promises to potential clients—all of which can leave potential clients wondering if the sports and performance psychologist has credibility in their sport or situation.
- Not all sports psychologists work in mental skills (performance enhancement) and well-being.
- Given the number of sports out there, they may not be strong in your sport. Condor Performance can overcome this issue more easily than most, with more than ten psychologists with varied strengths and sporting interests.
Personal Comment
Sport and performance psychologists are passionate about sport and performance, which often matches their clients. The environment they work in means that their relationship with clients and maintaining things like ethical boundaries can be a little different from that of a traditional psychologist. Not many conventional psychologists will join a client at their workplace. Still, a sport and performance psychologist will often want to get to the field, track, pool, course, and oval to see how things work for their client and truly understand their environment. Our knowledge for all our clients is expanded and enhanced through each session they do with any one client. I often bring knowledge from another sport or situation to a current client to help them understand and move them forward.
Final Word
Finding the right person to work with can be overwhelming and confusing. But they can make a difference to your overall performance once you see them. My advice would always be to consider what you are after and what you’re trying to improve for your sport.
If it’s primarily technical or tactical issues, my first suggestion would be a coach, mentor or ex-player in your sport. But if it’s mainly, or even somewhat involves, the mental side of your game, such as preparation, routines, performance anxiety, confidence, and performing under pressure. Or suppose it’s personal issues off the field that are filtering onto the field and impacting your performance. In that case, I’d recommend fully trained and regulated experts in the mind who share your passion for improving your performance.
To book a 30-minute Zoom meeting with our new Head of Client Experience, Tara, email her directly at [email protected]. She’ll reply with dates and time options for you to choose from. During the meeting, she’ll find out more about you (or the person you’re enquiring about) as well as give you a quick run-through of how we conduct our 1-on-1 consulting (including explaining our fees and charges).
