Latest / The Growth Project / Episode 376: Behind the Scenes of Mental Performance with Ashley McFeeley

Transcript

Episode 376: Behind the Scenes of Mental Performance with Ashley McFeeley · The Growth Project

• 0:00
  So it's definitely not an easy path. It is not to say you show up to work, and I magically know what I'm doing every single day of my life.
• 0:07
  But I think that because I do love what I do and I love the work that I get to do, it makes it a lot easier to I have to want to work for actually the extra pieces. I want to look for opportunities to continue to work.
• 0:21
  Welcome to the Growth Project podcast, a podcast brought to you by AMP Los. I'm excited to be here today.
• 0:29
  Doctor Gaby caveat is. And I will be interviewing a guest today on the podcast.
• 0:35
  A guest who I'm really excited to have on. Her name is Ashley McFeely. She has a master's in mental performance as well as a master's in clinical mental health. And she is currently working at a powerful university within the athletics department, helping out, student athletes. So really excited to have you on, Ashley.
• 0:56
  Anything I missed there in terms of credentials, background?
• 1:01
  I don't think so. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
• 1:04
  Excited to have you. And this. So our listeners now, Ashley and I actually go,
• 1:09
  way back, we did our mental performance, sport psychology master's together at Florida State back in. Gosh, that was what, 2019 to 2021?
• 1:19
  Oh, right. In the midst of Covid as well.
• 1:22
  Going way back in time.
• 1:23
  so we met we met in our master's program. And then I continued on with, my PSP at Florida State. And you actually went on with a second master's in clinical mental
• 1:34
  So, we kind of come from different backgrounds,
• 1:37
  but still working within the world of sporting performance psychology
• 1:41
  Back in the back, in the good old days of online. I love on classes. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I mean, let's go back to that. We had because we had what, a semester in person. And then the other year and a half, basically online or hybrid.
• 1:57
  it was good times,
• 1:58
  a good way to learn how to adjust.
• 2:00
  Yeah. And then just so,
• 2:02
  our listeners know as well, Ashley and I actually both work together at IMG Academy, where we did the virtual,
• 2:10
  mental performance coaching for youth athlete. They trained to use like 13 to 18.
• 2:16
  So a lot of our conversation today, it's going to be centered around,
• 2:19
  sports psychology principles and mental performance coaching with youth athletes, parental involvement, and then also discussing a little bit about,
• 2:27
  the transition from working with youth athletes to collegiate athletes.
• 2:31
  And then really excited to talk about how you integrate both the mental performance side and the mental health side into the work that you're doing.
• 2:40
  looking forward to it.
• 2:42
  Okay. Well, let's jump right in. Let's talk.
• 2:44
  IMG Academy. Let's go into working with youth athletes.
• 2:47
  What were some of the,
• 2:49
  biggest takeaways from your experience working with youth athletes?
• 2:52
  Yeah, I think it was definitely an, a different experience. With the IMG Academy, actually, at the same time that I was working for Ivy Academy, plus, I was also working full time as a mental health counselor for just teenagers in general for high schoolers. So it gave me a really interesting perspective as far as being able to differentiate just kind of general population in mental health versus that mental performance side of, athletes that presumably want to compete in college.
• 3:22
  Definitely think you see a really wide variety of athletes and kind of where they're at skill wise, but also where they're at as far as their mental performance, all these concerns. So I think it was really interesting to be able to work with some athletes who have no idea what mental performance is, and you're just working from the ground up, kind of teaching them the basics and others who are really, really involved.
• 3:42
  And you get to kind of work on the more elite side of things that are really fine tuning the skills that they already have, and then kind of add skills to it to,
• 3:49
  yeah, gosh, you're bringing me back to those times as well. And I remember we had a lot of discussions,
• 3:55
  while we were both working there, about how
• 3:58
  challenging it can be to to not really know what you're walking into in a session, whether it's going to be an athlete with absolutely no desire to engage in the sessions, or an athlete who's
• 4:08
  motivated, wanting to really chase their dreams of reaching, you know, a D1 level school,
• 4:15
  within their sport or whatever that looked like.
• 4:18
  So I'd be curious here, how did you approach those differentiations, whether you had an athlete who was super interested or very, interested?
• 4:27
  a lot of it was learning and growing with them. So I think at the at the beginning, it was a lot of trying to figure out, okay, how do I work with with athletes who are showing up to a virtual session, nonetheless, not even in person or showing up to a virtual session don't really want to be there.
• 4:43
  They're there because their parents told them to, or they're there because their parents paid for the session. And being able to just build rapport in the first few sessions and really try to find a way to make some of those virtual sessions that are active, to make them want to kind of participate, whether it is just asking them about life outside of sport or how long they've been playing their sport, really kind of those basic questions that lead into just getting them comfortable with me to start.
• 5:09
  And then I think really leaning into using online tools, online resources that can make the sessions more interactive. So it's not just kind of setting one on one, talking about things like we do often in the mental health world, but also just being able to get the get them to be able to practice the mental performance skills during the sessions in settings that might be as similar as we can get them to being on the field while they're just sitting on a computer.
• 5:35
  I think that's definitely a big piece of the athletes that weren't necessarily as interested in sessions, but also for our athletes that were more engaged. Definitely being able to use those tools still were really helpful. And then I'd say on the more engaged side is working with what they already know and kind of working with what they've learned from past or the performance.
• 5:55
  I had a few athletes who were really in deep into mental performance books, so I would buy the books that they were reading also, so I would I was able to kind of read them with them. So we were able to kind of go through like a book club, and instead of being able to kind of work through that and the skills that they learned in those books and kind of amplified the skills, being able, being able to help them apply them in person, and also kind of just setting everyone up in a sense where they get through other with the idea Academy plus structure.
• 6:24
  They for everyone who doesn't know they have a passion for the most part originally. And then they're able to renew. So when we have those eight sessions, being able to set them up, I tell them all as a as a way to build a toolbox. So that way when they're done with their sessions, if they don't continue to renew sessions, they have tools that they can use for the rest of their lives, whether it's in sport or out of sport, or we renew and they continue to kind of fine tune and add to those skills.
• 6:47
  Yeah. It's a it was a very unique structure in that way. And you hit on a couple things there like the virtual nature of it, like we're talking AMG Academy Plus, which is you're strictly working with these youth athletes on a zoom call
• 7:00
  for it was what, 40 minutes. Right. We had with them. And it's like how do you keep
• 7:06
  a
• 7:07
  engaged on a zoom call,
• 7:09
  and interested in the topics.
• 7:11
  But then also,
• 7:12
  I love what you said about getting them,
• 7:15
  like, reading books along the lines of the principles that you were teaching them, creating this mental skills toolbox,
• 7:21
  and finding value in that way. What were some of the mental skills that you found to resonate most with youth athletes?
• 7:30
  I think you make a great point on the side of just getting a teenager to sit down and focus on the session and bringing in, I think focus is it was one of the biggest things that I worked on with that families, in that it's a very applicable skill to school because for, but also at the school and outside of life.
• 7:48
  And that's something that I talked to their parents about either from the first session is we're here for sport, we're here to increase mental performance. But you perform when you're in sport. You also perform when you're at school, when you're at home. And so being able to really hone in the biggest kind of reoccurring challenge that a lot of my athletes came in with was focus was being able to just hold their attention span, being able to show up to practice and when coach is off talking about the instructions and talking about the rules, being able to sit and look at them after an entire day,
• 8:16
  and then being able to kind of expand that attention span for longer periods of time and figuring out ways to, when we do find ourselves getting distracted, ways to refocus and ways to kind of hold it as much as we can, or be able to find ways that we can just focus on one little
• 8:30
  thing and find that progress in practice when it is really, really hard to just hold that attention span or pull that focus.
• 8:37
  Yeah, that's attentional control. Attentional focus is one of the I would say, the dominating skills.
• 8:44
  That also resonates the most with youth athletes and that like you said, it's a life skill that, you know, we see all the time,
• 8:55
  kids in school struggling to stay focused.
• 8:57
  Teachers get frustrated by that. Coaches get frustrated by that.
• 9:00
  So if we're able to help them with their skills and teach them strategies for, like you said, maintaining focus for longer bouts of time, but also the ability to refocus when they get distracted.
• 9:11
  Do you have any helpful,
• 9:14
  strategies to share where maybe if there's a youth athletes listening to this or parents listening to this
• 9:19
  tips they can share with their kids?
• 9:21
  I love a concentration grid. So for those of you who don't know, concentration grids are they're just grids there. You can either get them on your phone or you can print them out and do them just in person or on or with a marker. They're grids and they're they start with number zero and they go all the way up to 99.
• 9:39
  Seems like a very simple task. The numbers are all scattered and you go through and you find zero, you find one, you find two all the way up to 99, and you do it as fast as you can, just explaining it. That seems very simple. And a lot of the times I feel like when I explain it to my athletes, they're like, okay, this is going to take me 35 seconds.
• 9:57
  It is a very complex task. It is not the easiest thing in the world. And so I really, really like to use those for that focus and concentration. Just because if you are just doing those and and nothing else with them, it can. There are benefits to expanding your attention span and being able to refocus when we lose focus.
• 10:16
  But also it adds this level of pressure. So when we start to work with competitive athletes and they have that just natural drive for competition, they want to get better. They want to take time off of how long it takes them to complete the grid. So you start to add pressure by trying to get them to decrease their time.
• 10:32
  So then that's when you can start throwing those skills and start adding breathwork throughout to make sure that they're keeping their breath consistent, or start putting breathwork ahead of time to try to drop their heart rate a little bit before they started to kind of work with what then transfers to those pre-game nerves, those pre-game jitters, or when our heart rate increases, when we start to get competitive, when we start to get excited, then all of a sudden we can be like, oh, well, I just did this breathwork before I did the grid.
• 10:58
  Let me try and see if I can drop my heart rate a little bit before I go compete.
• 11:02
  remember using that grid so many times with my youth athletes as well.
• 11:06
  They did get very competitive with it as well. I think you
• 11:10
  I, if I remember correctly, you had I mean, we had rosters of like 40, 50 athletes sometimes that we were working with,
• 11:17
  you would kind of keep a, spreadsheet, the times of your athletes, if I'm remembering correctly, and they would ask you, like, what's the fastest time you've had somebody complete the grid this week and before they did it, so that then
• 11:32
  they could try to beat it. And I thought that that was such a cool way to get engagement on a virtual setting where they don't even know who these other athletes are. They could be all over the the world, all over the nation. But it's that competitive nature. And then,
• 11:45
  so I thought that that was really cool.
• 11:48
  And then,
• 11:49
  what's your touchdown with like the pregame jitters and how this helps with that transfers to that? I mean, it's spot on. Any time that you're getting ready to, to start a task that sometimes time I know we would add pressure to the concentration grids by timing them,
• 12:03
  or giving them a goal to, to reach within a certain amount of time.
• 12:07
  And,
• 12:08
  that process kind of does initiate a little bit of that excitement or that nervousness going into it for being able to regulate your breathing, bring your heart rate down,
• 12:15
  kind of those physiological
• 12:17
  responses to stress,
• 12:19
  and gaining control of that. So yeah, it's a great tool.
• 12:21
  I love using it with my
• 12:22
  athletes and even, you know, my, my older athletes as well.
• 12:26
  Enjoy it. You know, my collegiate athletes I remember would really enjoy using those,
• 12:31
  think that that's that's great.
• 12:32
  I do want to transition a little bit into parents. And we were, you know, at IMG, we had the athlete sessions with two types down. We had eight athlete sessions, but we also had,
• 12:44
  included in that two parent sessions.
• 12:48
  Talk to us a little bit about the dynamic of balancing parental involvement with mental performance.
• 12:54
  For sure. I actually this might be an unpopular opinion about parent sessions I actually really love. I think it was a really unique opportunity. If I was able to connect with the parents all the time. It's more difficult with schedules, but able to connect with them, to be able to to fill them in.
• 13:10
  On the importance of mental performance. And a lot of the time it seemed like these parents were getting sessions and assuming, okay, mental performance is just going to help my kid in sport. I want them to play. I want them to be competitive. If they want to go. Do you want I'm going to do what it takes to get them to that level.
• 13:25
  And and 99% of the time when I'm sitting down with the parents, we're having a discussion, just like I said earlier, about mental performance in sports. Technically, yes. I am here to help your child improve in his fourth and excel in his sport. But also I'm here to help them with skills that are going to help them throughout life.
• 13:42
  And I'll always use the example kind of like I said earlier, but the more specific example of mental skills we're performing when we're in our sport, we're performing when we're in school, but we're also performing essentially when we're doing dishes, right. That's a task. And parents love that because that's something they want their kids to be doing. And so I think really being able to connect on that level can be helpful for them to realize, like, okay, let's buy in more like, let's not just push this on, sport.
• 14:09
  Let me ask my child, let me check in with them, see what they're learning, see how they're applying it, and recognizing that it's easier to see if they're practicing these skills at home, when they're doing dishes, when they're doing their homework, when they're getting into a routine, than than it is when they're on the field. And we don't have that direct connect to them.
• 14:26
  So it makes them feel a little bit. I feel like it make them feel a little bit more connected. To be able to actively pursue that kind of active role with their with their kid that was going with like working with me on other performance sessions rather than just being like, okay, I'm on the I'm working on skills that we're going to use on the field.
• 14:43
  But then when your kid's on the field and they're working in something mental, it's you can't see inside his brain. So being able to kind of talk through that back home and working through breathwork, working through some of those skills when we are at home can be really helpful to have the parents kind of being a little bit more.
• 14:59
  if I were a parent and you told me that the time my kid is spending with you is not only going to help them be a better athlete, but also going to,
• 15:06
  help them with their ability to do chores around the house. And the more responsible kid I would be all in. So I love that you do that in those sessions, kind of clarifying that these are life skills, not just sport skills.
• 15:21
  parental involvement in youth sports. There's so much literature on, you know, what appropriate parental involvement should look like. And when it becomes overbearing or, disengaged and the repercussions on either side of that, what have you seen in terms of like the best degree? And hopefully some parents benefit from this, best degree of parental involvement.
• 15:45
  What does that look like?
• 15:46
  I'm definitely with you on the range. Right. And it's really hard to pinpoint what that was that they kind of decided. And it looks different with every family, which is which is for sure. I think my best example is actually one of the athletes that I had referenced earlier in terms of bringing his own books into the session.
• 16:02
  So how he actually found those books was his dad was really involved in the mental performance world, and had given him books to read as suggestions. It wasn't necessarily a requirement, it was more so, hey, you want to excel in your sport? Here's some books if you want to try it. He read the books on his own and then he, the athlete, chose to pursue mental performance sessions.
• 16:23
  So I think being able as a parent, to give your children and give your athletes the tools to kind of investigate the mental performance world to some extent and let them see for themselves if they want to be a part of it. I think a lot of the times parents will want their kids to succeed, and I think the athletes also want to be successful.
• 16:42
  But if they're not super into the performance world, I just don't think there's as much potential to be able to grow in that. Right. We can still plant seeds, we can still kind of get them into that, into that realm of what mental performance can do and give them some of those introductory things with the guidance of parents.
• 17:01
  But when the athletes feel like they had, they're there because they have to be there. They lose that sense of autonomy and all of a sudden we're just not getting as much out of the sessions because they feel like they have to be there because their parents are, for lack of a better term, forcing them to be there for them to be there where if we can help them by checking in either.
• 17:20
  Maybe I had some athletes that their parents would check in that night at dinner. So like once a week after we have our session, they check in, they kind of talk about what they're doing, check in again on some days and see how this goes, went throughout the week. So those parents who are involved in that sense, where most of the week the athlete gets to do their own thing, they work on their mental performance skills, but then the parents will kind of jump back in and be like, okay, what are we doing?
• 17:43
  Let me check in on what I never called homework, but I'll call tasks with homework. Check in on the class and see if they're doing that. So then that way when we get to sessions, we don't have to go back into repeat and re practice. They're able to do that throughout the week without it being without it feeling like homework.
• 17:59
  I don't use the word homework. And yeah, it's the same concept. But I think there's a lot of negative connotation with homework because we have to do it, and I want it to be something that they want to do. So when we're done with those eight sessions, they can continue to do it on their own. Their parents can continue to check in periodically, but it doesn't feel like someone is just kind of hovering over them, waiting for them every single day to do something.
• 18:19
  yeah. That word homework has such a connotation to it, especially in this age range that we're talking about where they're probably already overloaded with homework from school. And I have to do another name for this coaching session.
• 18:32
  going back to something else you said, which is their perception around the sessions. And parents play a huge role and framing that I have, you know, recently worked with of of quite a few youth athletes.
• 18:48
  Well, I've been with amp loads and I can recall one who came to the session and you know, I started with the parents in the session to
• 18:59
  I don't even think I should be here, but my parents think something's wrong with me, and you know that now translates to his experience. He's only here because his parents think something's wrong with him. And there's a whole stigma around that, that we try to break, as practitioners in this field around, you don't have to have.
• 19:19
  And most athletes that we work with have nothing wrong with them. They just want to pursue better. And, we're here to support that process.
• 19:27
  when they come into the session with that mindset, it's a whole nother challenge to try to overcome.
• 19:32
  And I'm sure you've encountered that as well.
• 19:34
  For sure. I think that's also one thing. I've definitely seen that from a variety of levels, whether it was from my athletes that I worked with, the times reports, or even particularly the athletes that I work with now. I think that they're especially the more so in the mental health world, but I think mental health and mental performance get wrapped in together a lot.
• 19:51
  Right? So we still have that thing that we are constantly fighting on the side of. We can go seek mental health. We can definitely go seek out the performance when there's nothing wrong, when we just want to get better. And I think that's one thing I'm also really cautious of when I'm in sessions, whether it is now in mental health, in performance or in the patches, in mental performance, in the reframing things as challenges rather than concerns.
• 20:14
  So I think that takes a little bit of the stigma away, because when it's a concern, then immediately our brain goes to, oh no, there's something wrong with me. Like there's somebody's worried about me, somebody's concerned. Or when it's a challenge. We overcome challenges every day. And so being able to look at it from the perspective of, okay, like a challenges, normal challenges, something I can overcome, a concern then goes back to, okay, something's wrong with me and I have to fix it.
• 20:38
  It doesn't necessarily. These aren't things that necessarily have to be fixed, but there are things that we can overcome and cannot continue moving forward.
• 20:44
  that's a great reframe,
• 20:45
  sometimes to avoid doing like session notes and things like that. Old templates used to say, okay, well overview presenting concern and like, well, it may not be a concern,
• 20:57
  there are challenges.
• 20:58
  So I, I love that reframe.
• 21:00
  You, you kind of touched on how this stigma in everything translates not only with youth athletes, but even at the collegiate level,
• 21:07
  which is where you've been spending your time,
• 21:11
  for the last couple of years now.
• 21:14
  Mostly with collegiate. And talk to us a little bit about what that transition
• 21:19
  has been like for you and some of the major differences you've seen,
• 21:23
  So it does feel like a couple of years, but actually we are coming up on a year in July. Oh. Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay. So much longer than that for sure. For sure. I think it's I think this opportunity, this role that I have at the university setting, I think is really I dealing with my current job.
• 21:44
  It's exactly what I wanted to do, in the sense that it does combine mental health and mental performance. I think that working with collegiate athletes in and of itself is a challenge, in that there's a lot of changes, there's a lot of adjustments, there's a lot of just moving pieces. There's less of the parent role. So some of the challenges that come with the youth athletes are a little bit, I'd say mitigated or a little bit less in the collegiate setting.
• 22:08
  But it definitely comes with the side of moving away from home. We're now competing at an even more elite level. The vast majority, if not all of the collegiate athletes that come in to degrees of role come into the D1. Nonetheless, the powerful world want to go play pro as well. So it's not we don't necessarily see that side of what you would expect in some cases if you didn't play, or if you didn't play in college or if you didn't play even at a, either.
• 22:34
  Did you see one level where that's the achievement? Being able to play at that highest level in the collegiate setting is a huge achievement. But a lot of the times what we see is they come in and they're the next achievement is to play pro and we almost lose some sight on on the accomplishments that we've made so far in that.
• 22:53
  With that in mind, I know. Yeah, that's a little bit more on the mental health and the performance side. I think that this role really gives a great opportunity to lessen. Come on that thing. Right. So we, I say this probably once a month, just when I'm talking about my job and, and that side of things is, my role is a student athlete, mental health counselor, but I am a certified mental performance consultant.
• 23:16
  So being able to work into both sides and almost getting some of these athletes into my door just for mental performance can be really, really helpful. And I've seen really big differences in some of these athletes that don't necessarily have major mental health concerns or major mental health challenges, but they are able to benefit from that kind of a little bit more traditional mental health kind of therapy realm, rather than just focusing on mental performance all the time, it's been really helpful to check in about their sport and be like, how are things going?
• 23:49
  Is there anything that we feel like we want to change? Anything we want to work on, get them in the door, and as soon as we start talking about sport, things start coming up. And then at that point we go sport, we go back to life, we go back to sport. And I think it's really it's been really interesting to kind of find the balance between when we're working on mental performance and when we're working on mental health, and some athletes will kind of differ and separate the two which is there, and the other, other sessions will go mental performance for four weeks.
• 24:17
  And then something happens in life and thankfully they're already comfortable with me and they're already seeing me on the mental performing side and are able to come in for their session and just unload whatever's happening in their life. And just and I have had athletes in the past that will literally come in my office and go, can we just go mental health today?
• 24:33
  Or can I just vent today? And it's really great to know that they have that opportunity and to know that they've already built a rapport because they want to do excel on their sport. They wanted to get better in their sport, but then be able to come back into the same person that they've already trusted with information to be able to just kind of unload on what what they've been hauled onto from the week or from their personal life.
• 24:52
  It's not even related to sport.
• 24:54
  Yeah. I mean, I was just about to say the level of rapport that takes to have your athletes comfortable to to come into your doorway and say, I need a mental health day. I need to, you know, unload and vent about everything that is causing, you know, my, my mental health to dwindle.
• 25:13
  it's not easy to get athletes to that point. So,
• 25:16
  it sounds like you're doing some really great work on the front end of building that rapport.
• 25:21
  I'd love to hear how you get athletes to come to your door.
• 25:23
  I feel like college athletes, in my experience working with college athletes, I mean, they've got so much going on,
• 25:30
  not just in sport, but in school.
• 25:32
  And then all of the things that they do within the community, as a part of their sport,
• 25:39
  it's a lot. So then you throw in this new,
• 25:42
  piece of mental performance or mental health and how do you get them bought in? How do you get them showing up at your door
• 25:49
  or any questions? They are definitely busy individuals.
• 25:52
  Right. And I know it's a very common side to look at it as we're a full time student and we're a full time athlete. So being able to find the balance of all of these outside factors and and finding time to actually prioritize your mental health and mental performance, I think is huge. I think a lot of that is just being present, just showing up.
• 26:09
  So when I first got in, when I first started working at the University, I didn't have a lot of athletes just because I had just gotten there also over the summer. So a lot of the athletes aren't there yet. And so we all work as each and everyone in our department works as like a liaison of sorts for specific teams.
• 26:26
  So being able I spent pretty much all of my time that I was not working actively with athletes in that for six weeks, going to practices, and that looks a lot like standing outside at soccer practice in the 89 degree humid Florida heat in the middle of the day, but it also looks like showing up, making conversations after practice, using those small moments to just help them feel comfortable when they're in their environment.
• 26:51
  That field, that practice facility, is their home. That's where they feel safe. And when you're going in there and meeting them where they're at there, it can be really, really helpful. I think being able to just show them that you're willing to show up extra hours or willing to show up in the heat, I cannot tell you how many, 2 or 3 hour rain delays.
• 27:11
  I sat through in the fall season, having having both soccer teams in the fall season of any quarter. So going to having games where I'm literally standing partially on my preparation, I'll give it that. No rain jacket in the pouring rain like there are, there are games where I could have left, right? It's not required to be there, but being able to show up and sit through that and knowing that they're also said they're playing through that, they're not even just standing there.
• 27:39
  I think that really make a lot of strides to be able to show them that you're willing to be there and you're willing to kind of be essentially in the trenches with them and then really just reaching out, being proactive, having, meetings with coaches, meetings with our treatment teams are great for being able to be really involved with our athletic trainers, our nutritionist, our dietitians, our nutrition team, and, our sports medicine team.
• 28:02
  And being proactive with things, right, season ending injuries I have been very adamant about. You have a season ending injury. I want them to be referred. Even if they never show up to my office. I want to be able to reach out and let them know that their support. Right. So now that we have our department is growing, we have the accessibility to be able to kind of catch these pieces proactively and make sure that these athletes have support before they might necessarily need it or feel like they need it, then being able to go that way sometimes even.
• 28:32
  I mean, if a couple weeks ago have an athlete that I schedule a session, but more so just a meeting with knowing that we might not take it to full sessions, but having them be able to just kind of find like office sitting down chatting for 5 or 10 minutes if they're willing to do that, works wonders. I also am in the two year building, so I try to take advantage of my athletes that are there for tutoring and studying, and I'll just walk around the hallways.
• 28:55
  I think really just being present in their in their environment and being able to make those conversations and just show them that you care outside of their sport is definitely goes a long way with getting them kind of in your office and being able to talk about most of the time starts the sport, and then a lot of the times it will trickle.
• 29:12
  And that could just like the mental health in general,
• 29:14
  anybody who is listening and is interested in the field of sport psychology,
• 29:18
  working,
• 29:19
  with athletics,
• 29:20
  hopefully this breaks a little bit of that glitz and glamor mentality, around working within sports. Because to your point, it is not it is not all just, you know, you're in athletics and you've got all these athletes coming to you like, no, there's a there's a real portion of this that is you're just on the sidelines and you're in the heat, you're sweating, you're in the
• 29:42
  a lot of your day where you could be, you know, maybe engaging in personal activities with your friends
• 29:48
  you're sacrificing that to build relationships with your athletes.
• 29:53
  And I think that that is something that's very misunderstood
• 29:56
  about our, our roles
• 29:58
  with teams is that I always used to relate it back,
• 30:01
  to athletic trainers.
• 30:02
  And I would always tell, you know, consultants that I was mentoring, okay. You're not required to be at practice. You can show up once a week for 30, 45 minutes, do your team session and leave by all means. But if you want to create relationships with your athletes and have them coming to your door, you need to do exactly what you just talked about, which is being present.
• 30:27
  Even when you're not directly engaging with the athletes and like I said, I would always related to athletic trainers. They are there for every single practice, every single game, regardless of if they're needed or not. And that's how we should be, at least in the beginning stages when it comes to building relationships with teams, with athletes being as present as possible.
• 30:50
  Now, of course you have to have boundaries around that, because if you set the expectation with the team that you're going to be there every single day for the entire practice, that's a lot on you as a consultant. But,
• 31:01
  finding that that balance is really important.
• 31:03
  And it, it will play a role in the rapport building.
• 31:07
  you hit on that directly, which is great,
• 31:09
  yeah, I think finding that balance is, is definitely huge. And you're right, we there's it's impossible especially with having kind of teams that overlap. It's impossible to be at every single practice, even at every single home game. I do what I can to get to as many as I can.
• 31:22
  Especially with my sports, I have a lot of games. Baseball's a huge season, so I'm trying to make it through as many games as I can. But also just making sure my presence is normal on there. So even if it's not 100% of the time really making an impact when I am there engaging with the athletes, if in the middle of the game I'm not engaging with an athlete unless they engage with me first.
• 31:41
  But after the games being able to chat, if someone ask me a question before the game, just being accessible, being there for them.
• 31:48
  all about accessibility and presence.
• 31:49
  any aspiring and then I'm performance consultant or,
• 31:53
  mental health specialist, focus on athletes.
• 31:55
  Can apply this in their approach,
• 31:57
  building those relationships. And this ultimately being able to help more
• 32:01
  through that. Now kind of the final thing I wanted to go into today, which is, to me, a very interesting area,
• 32:09
  is this combined approach of mental performance and mental health.
• 32:15
  I remember when we were in our sport psychology master's program,
• 32:19
  think it was even in our ethics class, we took,
• 32:22
  there was discussion around how in the field of both mental health and mental performance, there's some controversy or varying opinions around what it looks like to dual practice. And, you know, being very aware of the bounds of your competence and things like that.
• 32:42
  Talk to me a little bit about what you found to be,
• 32:45
  the bounds of that and then how you integrate the two.
• 32:50
  I think that's a great point, is I think, there's a lot of discussion, especially in the mental performance world as far as what does this look like? Do we need to combine the two in the sense of like, do we need licensure or certification?
• 33:03
  And both. Can we have split? How does it look. And I think it's something that we're all still trying to figure out I will say, and I will fully admit my bias on this side in that in the sport psychology program, that's actually when I decided I definitely wanted to go mental health. I had considered mental health prior to defining the sports like world that sports psychology tell me in the sports psychology classes that, hey, if you have an athlete that has mental health concerns, you got to refer and then my head, selfishly, I was like, what sports psychology concerns are going to happen that aren't rooted in mental health?
• 33:39
  And while there are some on kind of a more vague level, right, when we are just rooted in performance anxiety, when when our stressors are our sport. Definitely the same statement. I definitely see that more now, but I also do think that they combine, and I think that we are moving into a place where I would not be surprised if, if that mental health was a little bit more of a requirement moving forward on the on the sports psychology side, especially in settings similar to the one that I'm in, right?
• 34:07
  So at a university setting that even I don't know if you saw recently, NFL is not requiring mental health conditions. For all of their teams. I think that is huge. That is a whole different topic for another day. But I think that really goes to show in those roles. I would not be surprised if they hire mental health clinicians that also have some, some level of education and mental performance.
• 34:29
  Right? You're working with athletes. You want that side of things. I do think there's a little bit of gray lines there, and I am curious. It can feel to some extent of the work that I did before I had my mental health degree. But I am curious from other perspectives, from other roles what that looks like. In a sense that I do have the flexibility right now where, like I said earlier, if I'm working with an athlete and we are mental performance every day, just building skills, everything is board based and all of a sudden they're like, dang, like, I'm really going through it.
• 35:00
  Or maybe something happens that we really need to talk through it and it does lean more on mental health for a further period of time. Then, that does make me curious. As someone who might not have mental health education, what does that look like to you at some point? Do you refer, do you have a conversation about the way that's leading to you separate and have I have had some athletes that work with a different mental health counselor, and they just come to me for mental performance that can be difficult as well.
• 35:29
  And so I think trying to find a balance, I'm not sure where even within a 5 or 10 year time frame of finding that and finding that in between, right in the sports psychology world feels so new. And the the certification that the NPC also feels new and that we're not even at a point where that's even required to some extent.
• 35:47
  And so I think being able to kind of separate them and make it a little bit more clear, there is a continuum for anyone who's curious, but it is on the ask website. It does show kind of when we would seek mental health and when we would seek medical performance. But there's it's a continuum, there's an in-between.
• 36:03
  And I think recognizing your competencies as someone who practices as a health aim, as a performance, but also for others who just practice one or the other, I'm kind of recognizing your education and where that falls. I will say a lot of my kind of search for competency on that, on that side to comes back to reading. I'm looking on my desk right now.
• 36:23
  I just bought four books. My book obsession is unreal, but I did just buy four books, that have been recommended by other people and just hard connected. Right? And two of them are very heavy mental health based. One of them is just on anxiety. One of them is very specifically on just like sexual assault, sexual trauma.
• 36:44
  So really specific topics that sometimes I don't get either as much experience in that or I don't have as much kind of mentorship on that side of things. So places where obviously the anxiety ones have more experienced, but just out of like an interesting book, you can always learn more. But I think being able to to use that time outside of work, do I spend most of my free time thinking about sports and thinking about work?
• 37:06
  Yes, but in a way that's fun, right? So being in a way that it gives me that opportunity to learn and to to kind of continue to grow as I continue to invest in some of these areas. And then I think from there I will be. I'm currently to give a little background, registered mental health counseling intern.
• 37:23
  So I'm four weeks from applying for licensure. Right there on the course. I'm still just under supervision for licensure in mental health. I'm not I can't get any extra trainings until I'm licensed. So I've already kind of been looking into what trainings I want to do and being able to specialize on that side. And I think a big piece of that is just continuing those trainings, continuing conversations with people in the mental performance world, building skills on that side, going, I went to I've been to ask, the sports conference most years.
• 37:52
  I will continue to go to that to learn from there. And then just being able to build you, you almost have to build it on your own, but kind of be forward about or be on top of finding those skills and continuing your competencies in the areas that you want to specialize and in the areas that that you see often.
• 38:10
  Right. There's some there's some areas that I might not see as often in the, in the roles that I play. And so maybe those are areas that I don't spend as much time doing research on. We'll also I'm not sure if this is a common thing in my role, but I almost always have two research articles pulled up on my on work computer.
• 38:31
  I don't I lean into research so heavily, and I think that being able to do that, just applying that just to build new skills, but also to find ways to kind of incorporate that too, but make sure that I'm staying confident in what I'm doing, I think is really important.
• 38:44
  So it's definitely not an easy path. It is not to say you show up to work, and I magically know what I'm doing every single day of my life.
• 38:52
  But I think that because I do love what I do and I love the work that I get to do, it makes it a lot easier to I have to want to work for actually the extra pieces. I want to look for opportunities to continue to work.
• 39:03
  Yeah, I mean, the continuing education pieces,
• 39:07
  something that we
• 39:09
  analysts are huge on just the evidence based practices continuing to expand our our knowledge and awareness around the most recent research.
• 39:18
  It's a huge part of it. And then, like you said, finding that,
• 39:22
  middle ground or
• 39:23
  how the mental health and mental performance worlds tie together like it's not clear cut.
• 39:27
  And I agree, I do think that it is hard to separate to a degree, mental performance in mental health.
• 39:33
  But it's interesting because you've gone the route of,
• 39:36
  training in both domains. And I've stayed specifically in the performance
• 39:41
  psychology domain.
• 39:42
  So I know for me, there are definitely times where I've referred athletes out for mental health concerns.
• 39:47
  for any practitioner who is leaning more on the performance side, I think that it is just so important that you are fully aware of your competencies that, you know,
• 39:59
  undergo some sort of mental health,
• 40:01
  training where you at least understand the warning signs and the symptoms of mental health,
• 40:07
  concerns so that you know when to refer.
• 40:09
  And again, like within our field, there is so much gray area around, around this idea of dual practice, but, I agree, I don't I don't think you can fully separate them.
• 40:24
  So it's been great kind of hearing the insight you have on meshing the two and the advice you've had for anybody in the field,
• 40:31
  when it comes to continuing education and just reading and staying interested and, you know, areas that you see being prevalent with your athletes.
• 40:40
  So,
• 40:41
  hopefully,
• 40:42
  people have taken some great,
• 40:44
  takeaways from this conversation. Anybody who's interested in the field, I know I keep getting,
• 40:50
  messages and, we get, you know, inquiries on our website about young professionals, college kids who are just interested in this field and don't understand fully what it is. So hopefully this conversation today created some clarity around that.
• 41:09
  allows people to, to continue growing this field and, positive manner.
• 41:15
  Well, I know we're we're kind of wrapping up today. Is there anything else actually, you had to share, about your experiences or any advice you have? Finally, for our listeners?
• 41:26
  I just feel like I think a lot of, a lot of what we talked about today kind of comes back to and especially what we were just talking about on the continuum is putting the athlete first. I think that a lot of the times, if we're able to take a step back and kind of think about what we're doing and, and how that relates to whether it's putting ourselves first or putting the athlete first.
• 41:44
  Yes, we do have to put ourselves first sometimes, right? That is just part of self-care. But I think being able to go back even, like we talked about the practices and showing up then and being able to build that rapport, but then also that continuum of the mental health side. And there is a mental health first aid training that I would recommend for people who aren't in the mental health world to give you some of that information on the signs and symptoms.
• 42:04
  And it's more of a crisis thing, but it is really helpful when you're in kind of in those situations. But I think being able to kind of look back and check yourself in some situations and think, okay, this is what I'm doing, putting the athlete first, or is there a way that I can put them first feet even more?
• 42:18
  Doing what's best for the athlete really is super important in that case. And just kind of checking yourself on that.
• 42:23
  Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And putting athletes first, but also remembering sometimes you do have to put yourself first
• 42:28
  avoid that burnout. We talked about it all the time in sports and and the work that I'm doing in the corporate setting, it's, very prevalent.
• 42:34
  So thank you for taking the time to be on the podcast today. For our listeners, if you have any feedback or questions, please submit that to us. We love hearing from you guys.
• 42:47
  if you enjoyed today's episode, like, subscribe.
• 42:50
  we look forward to having you all listen to our next episode. Thank you everyone.