How I work

Most mental performance work fails in one of two directions. It stays at the level of values and identity and never becomes anything you can use at 3-2 in the ninth. Or it hands you a toolkit of techniques disconnected from what you're actually chasing, so you stop using them by February. The work I do runs between those, big-picture goals on one end, specific in-the-moment skills on the other, and a line you can see connecting them.

The pattern

Most of what I do follows the same shape, whether the presenting problem is a slump or something heavier:

• Find the root. We talk through the issue until it's clear what's actually driving it. Sometimes that's personal. Often it's systemic, a role that was never defined, a communication problem with a coach, a family expectation nobody's said out loud. The visible problem and the actual problem are frequently not the same thing.

• Get it into the open. You can't work on something you haven't named. A fair amount of what changes in this work changes because someone finally sees the shape of what they're dealing with.

• Build something that targets it. Not a generic skill, a strategy aimed at that specific thing, or at the part of it you can control.

• Make it yours. I'll show you how the strategy is built so you can adjust it, extend it, and adapt it when the season changes. The goal is that you eventually don't need me to modify it for you.

What I draw on

ACT, CBT, EFT, and psychodynamic work, viewed through a systemic and humanistic lens. Which means two things in practice:

1. Systemic: I don't assume the problem is located inside you. Athletes arrive convinced they're mentally weak when they're actually in an unclear role, a strained coach relationship, or a family system with expectations no one has stated. Sometimes the intervention is a skill. Sometimes it's a conversation with your coach that you needed help constructing.

2. Humanistic: you're the one who knows what you want. My job is to help you see clearly and give you something to work with, not to install goals in you.

This is also why the performance work and the therapy aren't really two different methods. It's the same evidence base applied at different depths, which is what makes it possible to move between them inside one relationship instead of across two.

The first session

Concretely, here's what happens:

• I get to know you, what you want, what you need, what brought you in now. I explain how I work and the actual choices available to you: more skills or more talking or some of both, more direct or less direct, more performance or more therapy. Those are real options and you get a say in them.

• I ask what you're expecting, what you're hoping for, and what's worked or hasn't worked with other providers and coaches before. That last question tells me more than almost anything else, and it saves us from repeating something you've already found useless.

• You leave with two things: one concrete thing to practice before we meet again, and a working plan for where this is going. Not a full treatment plan, a plan. You'll know what we're doing and why from the end of the first hour.

One more thing

I'll tell you what I think. If what you're describing is a skills problem, we'll train skills. If I believe it’s more than that, I'll say so, and because I'm licensed for both, saying so doesn't mean sending you somewhere else and starting over. If I'm not the right person at all, I'll tell you that too.