Inside Performance: Your Guide to the Mental Game

Episode 1 — What Is Sport Psychology?

Many athletes and performers have heard people talk about sport psychology, yet despite being one of the most discussed components of performance, it is still one of the least understood. Performers often come to me looking for quick fixes, mental tricks, or motivational boosts.

But sport psychology goes much deeper than that.

Before we explore this essential piece of the performance puzzle, we need clarity on what sport psychology actually involves. If we imagine performance as a jigsaw puzzle, where optimal performance is the final complete picture, many performers are missing psychological pieces. Without them, the picture remains incomplete.

This series exists to change that. You are going to go on a journey of understanding, learning, and applying the mental side of performance.

1. What Sport Psychology Actually Is

Sport psychology is both a scientific and applied discipline. It focuses on how the mind influences performance, how performance influences the mind, and how thoughts, emotions, behaviours, and context interact.

It supports both performance enhancement and wellbeing. While improving performance is a major component, the field also focuses on mental health, managing stress and pressure, dealing with transitions, navigating setbacks, developing identity, and building sustainable careers in sport.

Performers cannot consistently perform at their best if they are not well. That is why wellbeing sits at the heart of this discipline.

2. What Sport Psychologists Actually Do

The role is complex, unique, and varies depending on the performer’s needs. But some consistent areas of practice include:

• Helping performers develop psychological skills such as confidence, focus, emotional regulation, and reflection.

• Increasing awareness and understanding of their inner world.

• Supporting performers through setbacks, transitions, and injuries.

• Working alongside coaches and multidisciplinary teams to build high-quality environments and cultures.

• Using evidence-based approaches such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Psychological Skills Training (PST), and humanistic, person-centred methods.

Sport psychology is not about giving motivational speeches. It is about building skills, insight, adaptability, and resilience.

To understand why this matters, we first need to understand the inner world that drives performance. That is where we go next.

3. Performance Is Driven by Your Inner World

Performance is not just technical, tactical, or physical. It is deeply influenced by thoughts, interpretations, beliefs, past experiences, attention, emotions, and physiological states. This is your inner world.

Every action you take as a performer is influenced by this internal content.

Yet many athletes underestimate how much their mind shapes their behaviour. They try to suppress or control internal experiences and believe they must feel confident or positive to perform well.

This misunderstanding becomes a major barrier to development.

Being willing to explore your inner world is essential. Awareness allows you to make informed choices about your performance and development. It helps you understand why you respond the way you do and what influences your actions.

We cannot change what we cannot see. By increasing awareness, you uncover patterns, triggers, and habits that may be working for or against you. These experiences are not threats. They are information. They are what make you human.

This awareness becomes the foundation of developing psychological skills. Episode 2 will take you deeper into this starting point: awareness.

4. The Mental Side of Performance Can Be Developed

A common misconception in sport is that mental skills are innate. Many performers believe confidence is something you are born with, resilience cannot be improved, focus is fixed, and emotional responses cannot be changed.

None of this is true.

Mental skills are trainable, just like technical, tactical, and physical skills. The brain adapts. We call this neuroplasticity.

With awareness, performers can learn to recognise unhelpful thinking, emotional, and behavioural patterns and develop ways of responding that support performance. Psychological flexibility, attentional control, confidence, and resilience are all skills that can be improved with practice.

The mental side of performance is not a mystery. It is a trainable component available to anyone willing to commit to it.

5. Why This Matters and Where We Go Next

Although the science behind sport psychology is complex, applying it does not need to be. The psychological side of performance can be understood, practised, and integrated into your training in simple, practical ways.

It can help you respond effectively under pressure, make better decisions, build confidence, enhance enjoyment, and support your wellbeing.

Take a moment now and reflect on where your inner world shows up in your performance. When did your thoughts, emotions, or beliefs have an impact on how you performed?

To begin developing your mental game, we start with awareness. This is the foundation.

Episode 2 will take you into that foundation: how to build self-awareness as a performer.

Research-Informed Note

Sport psychology is grounded in decades of research showing that psychological factors such as confidence, attentional control, emotional regulation, and resilience significantly impact performance (Weinberg & Gould, 2019). Studies consistently highlight that high-performing athletes invest time into developing psychological skills and that structured mental training enhances performance, wellbeing, and adaptability under pressure (Gardner & Moore, 2007; Bull et al., 2005). Psychological skills training, acceptance-based approaches (ACT), and CBT-based interventions have all demonstrated effectiveness across youth, collegiate, and elite performers (e.g., Mamassis & Doganis, 2004; Mahoney & Hanrahan, 2011; Moffat & McCarthy, 2023).