Services
Sport Psychology
Mental performance work for athletes navigating pressure, injury, identity, and the drive to compete, plus the person underneath the athlete.
Before you are an athlete, you are a person
Stuck in a rut with your sport? Is life stress bleeding into your performance? Retired from sport and struggling with who you are without it?
These are all things I can help with. Being an athlete or a high performer gives us the chance to train our minds, push our limits, and have fun. It also asks a great deal of you, and it tends to ask it during the years you are still working out who you are.
In our work together we go after your performance goals and your personal well-being, because the two are not separable. Athletes who are struggling off the field rarely thrive on it for long.
Common reasons athletes come in
What we work on
Practice to competition gap
You can do it in training and it disappears when it counts. Usually an arousal and attention problem, not a skill problem.
Mental blocks and the yips
Skills that used to be automatic become conscious and unreliable. Frustrating, frightening, and very treatable.
Fear of failure
Playing not to lose instead of playing to win, and the exhaustion of carrying other people's expectations into every event.
Injury and rehab
The psychological side of being hurt: identity loss, fear of reinjury, and the isolation of rehabbing while the team trains.
Identity and retirement
Who you are when the sport stops. I went through this one myself, and it is far more common than the silence around it suggests.
Burnout and motivation
When the thing you loved becomes an obligation you resent, and rest feels like something you have to justify.
An important distinction
Mental skills, held by a licensed psychologist
What a mental performance coach does
A good mental performance coach teaches skills: routines, imagery, self-talk, goal setting, focus. Those skills are real, they are trainable, and for many athletes they are enough.
What a coach cannot do is diagnose or treat a clinical condition, because that requires a licence.
What I can do as well
I teach those same skills, and I can also treat what sits underneath them when anxiety, depression, trauma, or an eating disorder is part of the picture.
That means you do not have to sort out which kind of help you need before reaching out, and you will not get handed off the moment the conversation goes somewhere deeper than technique.
The whole athlete
The person does not stop at the sideline
Sport asks for a version of you that performs. The rest of you comes to the session too, and it is usually the part that needs the most attention.
Questions
About sport psychology
A sport psychologist works on the mental side of performance and on the person doing the performing. In practice that means attention and nerves before a start, confidence that survives a bad result, the identity questions that come with injury or retirement, and the ordinary anxiety or low mood that does not politely stay out of sport. I am a licensed psychologist first, which means I can treat the clinical piece rather than referring it elsewhere.
Train the mind like you train everything else
Book a free consultation and tell me what is getting in the way.
Book a free consultation