Sport Psychologists and Sport Psychology - The Facts
Sport psychology is still hugely misunderstood. We hope this clears up a few myths:
- Sport psychologists / performance psychologists can work with anyone wanting to improve their performance. Many of the mental skills we use to help our athletes work just as well for performing artists, dancers, musicians and even those whose performance is their work.
- Sports psychologists / performance psychologists can help with welfare issues (also known as mental health) but our main focus is always the mental aspects of the performance itself (such as pre competition preparation, decision making, motivation, confidence, nerves, concentration, performing under pressure, team cohesion to name the most common).
- Sports psychologists / performance psychologists can be deliver mental skills sessions in a much wider range of ways than a physical or technical coach due to the fact that we don’t need to see our clients in order to help them improve their minds.
- Sport psychology / performance psychology is one of the most misunderstood areas within both sport and psychology. We’re more like coaches than regular psychologists. Most people have no idea what we do and are very surprised when they actually invest some time to find out.
- Sports psychology / performance psychology ideally wants to be part of your everyday training so that you work on your mental toughness without really knowing it. For this reason at Condor Performance we provide services to coaches as well as athletes / performers.
There are a number of mental aspects that are common to ALL consistently high performances and it’s these that we target for improvement. Some of the more common ones are:
- Confidence
- Motivation
- Focus and concentration
- Decision making
- Emotions
- Time
- Leadership
- Performance anxiety / nerves
- Self-belief
- Attitude
- Body language
- Self talk and thoughts
- Performing under pressure
- Communicating with others effectively
- Information