How would you educate yourself in mental performance consulting if you were interested in doing more work in the field?

TY, WYOMING

~This is a picture of me standing in front of a field (do you get it? 😉

Ty, thank you for your question. I am currently reading a book about a Yaqui Shaman (The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda) who claims that in our lives only one question that matters: “does this path have a heart?” Since you are asking, perhaps the path of mental performance work has a heart for you. If it does, I can vouch for the wonders one encounters along the way.

My first response to your question is to encourage you to trust that you already carry much wisdom as to how to help young athletes from a mental performance perspective. As a caring person who is knowledgeable about running, and who has spent an enormous amount of time with high schoolers, your ability to understand and relate to them will go a long way. I have learned (and am learning) that the energy we bring to others is at least as important (if not more important) than what we know. I know that you have very warm and helpful energy.

Building on this, consider what you have already learned is important from a mental performance perspective and how you might turn that knowledge into short sessions or workshops (If you would like to offer short sessions or workshops – and even if you don’t, considering this will help your one-on-one sessions too). Then, look for opportunities to teach these lessons now.

I remember around the time that I first realized that I wanted to work in the sport psych field, I asked my mental performance consultant at the time how I should get started. I posed this question one evening after he had just finished a workshop with a group of athletes, who I coached. We were standing in a parking lot at the back of his car. Inside his open trunk was a giant flip chart upon which he had drawn his lesson. After I asked my question, he started tearing large pages off the flip chart and handing them to me. “Here! Take my stuff! Start teaching!”  He said. I was shocked. I didn’t think that I could possibly be ready to start teaching. But, his advice set me in motion.

I began by preparing small workshops for my own athletes. Back then, I definitely wasn’t ready to meet every challenge that could come my way. But, I was ready to share some helpful skills. Over time I have found that you learn the work, and your way of doing it, by working. So, any opportunities that you can find or create to do some work now, I encourage you to.

There are some skills that are necessary to learn in order to be consistently effective. In preparation for one-on-one consults I would recommend developing some basic counseling ones. In particular, the following:

• How to listen deeply (sometimes called active or mirror listening).

• How to collaborate with the athlete to finding answers/ next steps to their challenges together as opposed to just giving advice.

• Some guidelines as to what issues should be referred to a mental health professional.

On these topics I have found the following books helpful:

On Becoming a Person by Carl Rogers

How Can I Help? By Ram Dass and Paul Gorman

The Skilled Helper by Gerard Egan (I have not read this book completely, but it was recommended by one of the wisest people I have ever met and so I want to.).

Radical Acceptance, True Refuge, and Radical Compassion – 3 separate books by Tara Brach

No Bad Parts by Dick Schwartz

I would also encourage you to learn as much as you can about emotions. Study both how they occur in the body and mind and how to work with them. In traditional sport psychology a lot of attention (too much in my opinion) is directed toward thoughts. Emotions are what really run the show. The more that you can understand emotion and help your athletes understand emotion, the less power those emotions will have, and the more constructively they will be able to use their thoughts. Here are some books that have helped me:

How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett

You Are Not Your Brain by Jeffrey Schwartz

Intraconnected by Daniel Siegel (and anything by Dan Siegel)

In contrast to the counseling/ understanding the human being learning, the sport psych specific strategies are comparatively simple. Here are some helpful sport psych reads:

The Mindful Athlete by George Mumford

The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle – this was a resource I found very exciting in my early days in the field.

Psyching for Sport by Terry Orlick

I bet that Steve Magness’s new book Winning the Inside Game has good stuff – I have it in my pile to read.

Stop Thinking About What Other People Think About You by Michael Gervais (he also offers a course called Compete to Create that is available as an audiobook).

*This is surely not an exhaustive list of the great books available. Over the years I have read what I have felt moved to read as I have felt moved to read it. If I am missing something great, please let me know!

That said and all of these lists aside, I would encourage you to follow the topics that genuinely interest you. Read what you feel a pull in your heart to read. Teach what you feel passionate to teach. Stay open to all sources for learning and inspiration (certain films, books, music, other sports, poetry) and about that really grabs you, ask yourself, what means something to me here? You will teach sincerely what matters most to you and sincerity has a flavor that lasts.

Here are some other books and sources that have influenced my work:

Zen and the Art of Archery by Eugen Harrigal

The Wisdom of Uncertainty by Alan Watts

Falling Upward by Richard Rohr

Consolations I and II by David Whyte (anything by David Whyte)

The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron

Will To Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Momentum by Peter Vordenberg

The Rise of Superman by Stephen Kotler

The First and Last Freedom by Jiddu Krishnamurti

Endurance by Alfred Lansing

And There Was Light by Jacques Lusseyran

Zen Mind Beginners Mind by Shunryu Suzuki

Follow what resonates deeply with you. However, in one-on-one conversations, stay attuned to and follow what means the most to the athlete, but you’ll learn about that balance as you go 🙂

Finally, include stories as a means of teaching wherever possible. Recall them, collect them. Use stories from your life and stories that cross your path. Stories help facts and info become so much more than facts and info. I have found that when a lesson is couched in a story (or even a metaphor) it is much more memorable.

Here’s one to close:

It was the fall of 2014 and I had just begun grad school. I had also just realized that the particular degree that I was pursuing (Masters in Positive Psychology) would not certify me with credentials that would make me easily hirable. I was sitting in a huge auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania, terrified that I had made a very expensive wrong choice in my education.

That day, our class was listening to a speaker, Lindsay Doran, a famous film producer. She was telling the story of a summer afternoon in her backyard: Doran and her husband were looking out on their garden when they noticed a spider’s web that seemed to span an impossible expanse – one too far for the spider to have crossed on its own. “How on earth did that spider get from tree A to tree B?” Doran wondered. She decided to google it.

The answer explained that a spider spins because that’s what a spider does (“for the joy of spinning” is how she described it to us). To begin a web of enormous scope a spider will hang from a tree and spin and spin a long and longer thread. It will spin its thread and wait for the wind to blow it to a place where it can anchor it. From there it will make that web more beautiful and elaborate. But in the beginning it must simply spin and wait.

Her message was, you don’t need to know where you’re going, just do what brings you joy, spin, let your thread get long and wait to see where the wind blows you.

Personally, I could never have envisioned where the wind eventually blew me in my mental performance consulting career. Looking back, I can see that sitting in that very auditorium at that time was the perfect place for me. But, such clarity is impossible when you first begin spinning.

Don Juan has more to say about this:

“For me there is only the traveling on the paths that have heart… and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its whole length. And there I travel looking, looking breathlessly.”

~ Don Juan, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge.

Sincerely,

Shannon