Mental Performance Skills

Our Sport Psychologist has vast experience in working with individual athletes and teams in a range of different sports. He is able to tailor programs for athletes and teams based on current performance and lifestyle needs with a focus best performance execution.

Sport and Performance Psychology can be used to develop your mental toughness and sharpen its core components for best execution of peak performance.  Our Sport Psychologist is able to guide you in developing mental skills regardless of the presence of a psychological problem or barrier. Put the work in to build a stronger mind!

Do you get worried about performing on the “big stage”? Performance anxiety can prevent you from doing what you enjoy and can affect your individual or team performance. Worst of all, performance anxiety can negatively affect your self-esteem and self-confidence. Although it may be impossible to totally overcome performance anxiety, there are many things you can do to control your emotions and reduce anxiety.

Most of us can recognise that change does not occur overnight. Change requires a process of identifying certain triggers to current unhelpful behaviours and the individual’s motivation to change those behaviours. Through using the stages of change model, we can assist individuals to make lasting positive behaviour change.

Do you feel as though you’re becoming less resilient in life or your performance? Are there a number of different factors including external factors that are having a detrimental effect on your performance? By using the PR6 resilience assessment tools and model here at Focused Performance Consulting we are able to identify the domains in which you would benefit from focussing your attention on for sustained performance.

In sport and other performance areas, there may be a significant amount of time between arriving at the venue and actually performing. The mind is a limited resource, so it is important to be able to switch your competitive mind on and off, in a deliberate way. Pre-performance routines are a great mental warm up, and can be used to advantage in many sports, such as tennis, golf, football, swimming, cricket, AFL and many more. They serve as a means to tune into your zone of optimal functioning in pressure situations, because a routine narrows your focus on important cues and energy, while reducing wasted energy on distractions.

Most athletes will return to play once they are physically cleared to play. However, whilst some athletes have been physically cleared to re-enter the field, they may not yet be mentally prepared to return. Some of these symptoms include the following: decreased confidence, decline in performance, stress/ anxiety, and fear of reinjury or return to play. Our Sport Psychologist can assist athletes in mentally preparing for return to play.

Mental skills training is the process that provides the methods and techniques to improve performance by developing self-confidence and creating a positive mind-set through goal setting, positive self-talk, visualisation, imagery, and self-efficacy. At Focused Performance Consulting our Sport Psychologist can assist you by tailoring a specific mental skills program to benefit your performance.

Self-confidence is commonly defined as the sureness of feeling that you are equal to the task at hand. This sureness is characterised by absolute belief in ability. At times ion sport an athlete’s self-confidence can both increase and decrease. However, it is more common for a decrease to have negative impacts on performance. At Focused Performance Consulting our Sport Psychologist can assist you in sustainable confidence in your sports performance.

Goal setting is a mental training technique that can be used to increase an individual's commitment towards achieving a personal goal. Having a short or long-term goal can encourage an individual to work harder, to be more focused on the task and to overcome setbacks more easily. Our Sport Psychologist at Focused Performance Consulting can assist you in defining specific and measurable goals for positive performance benefits and focussed lifestyle.

Are you experiencing burnout? Burnout, or overtraining syndrome, is a condition in which an athlete experiences fatigue and declining performance in his/her sport despite continuing or increased training. Overtraining can result in mood changes, decreased motivation, frequent injuries, and infections.

Successful teams have strong leaders and the importance of this role is evident in all categories of sports. The performance of a leader is very clear in interactive games and during matches. Although less obvious in co-active situations, the leader’s contribution to the effectiveness of a team’s performance is also influential.

Leadership maybe considered as a behavioural process that influences individuals and groups towards set goals. As such, a leader has the dual function of ensuring player satisfaction while steering the individual or group to success.

Career transitions are turning phases in athletes’ career development.  Therefore, they should be first defined in terms of their place in the career context. The broadest career term in psychology is a life career that encompasses an individual’s life-long development and achievements in various activities and spheres of life that unfold in a particular historical and sociocultural context. In sport psychology, an athletic career is defined as (1) part of and a contribution to an athlete’s life career, (2) a multiyear competitive sport involvement voluntarily chosen by an athlete and aimed at achieving a personal individual peak in athletic performance in one or several sport events, and (3) a sequence of career stages and transitions.