When I started coaching, I naturally believed that improving performance meant improving training. It was a logical way of looking at sport. If an athlete needed to become faster, stronger or technically more efficient, my role was to understand what was limiting them and design the training process accordingly. The better the programme, the better the athlete should become.
After almost twenty years in sport, I still believe that good training matters enormously. What has changed is my understanding of what happens around it.
Working with athletes at increasingly high levels, from different countries and very different backgrounds, gradually made me realise that the training environment was only one part of the picture. I began to see athletes who had demonstrated remarkable abilities during training but were not always able to reproduce them when competition arrived. At the same time, I saw other athletes who, despite having similar levels of physical and technical preparation, were consistently able to express their abilities when the pressure increased.
That difference became one of the most interesting questions of my coaching career.
What happens between ability and performance?
At elite level, the differences between athletes are often smaller than they appear. Everyone competing at an international level has usually spent years developing the physical and technical qualities required by their event. They have trained repeatedly, competed many times and accumulated an enormous amount of experience.
Yet competition does not simply ask an athlete to demonstrate what they have developed. It asks them to express it at a particular moment, in a particular environment, under conditions that cannot be completely reproduced in training.
This distinction between developing a capacity and expressing that capacity became increasingly important to me.
An athlete can know exactly what they are supposed to do, have done it successfully hundreds of times and possess the physical qualities necessary to do it. None of that guarantees that the same performance will appear when it matters most. Research in sport psychology has explored this relationship through areas such as anxiety, attention, confidence, self-regulation and performance under pressure. The evidence is complex, and psychological factors do not affect every athlete in the same way, but it is increasingly clear that performance cannot be understood entirely through physical and technical preparation.
The more I worked with athletes, the more I became interested in the question behind this observation: what influences a person’s ability to express what they are capable of?
The answer was rarely just one thing.
The athlete does not leave life outside the track.
One of the most important things I learned through coaching was that athletes do not arrive at training as athletes alone. They arrive as people.
They bring their relationships, families, expectations, financial circumstances, worries, ambitions and previous experiences with them. They bring the consequences of what happened yesterday and the uncertainty of what might happen tomorrow. None of these things appear on a training plan, but they can still influence how someone thinks, behaves, concentrates and responds to pressure.
Some of the factors are obvious within sport. An injury can change the way an athlete sees their body and their future. Being left out of a national team selection can affect confidence and identity. A disappointing competition can influence the way someone approaches the next one. These are situations that coaches and athletes readily recognise as part of sporting life.
Other factors are much less obvious.
I have seen how an athlete’s performance can be affected by problems that, on paper, have very little to do with sport. A parent who does not approve of their child’s partner. The financial difficulty of repairing the car that is needed to get to training. Uncertainty about a visa and whether an athlete will be allowed to remain in the country where they are developing their career. Difficulties associated with living thousands of kilometres away from home. Problems within a relationship. Concerns about family.
These are ordinary human experiences. They do not make someone psychologically weak, and they do not necessarily represent a psychological disorder. They are simply part of life.
But life does not stop when training begins.
This was an important shift in my thinking. I began to realise that the question was not simply how to make training more effective. It was also how to understand the person who was trying to engage with that training and eventually perform under competitive conditions.
This is what eventually took me back to the books.
I did not begin my career in psychology. In fact, my route into psychology was almost the opposite of what might be expected.
I found my way into psychology after a long journey through professional sports coaching.
The decision to return to university came after years of encountering questions on the track that I could not answer adequately through coaching knowledge alone. I wanted to understand why people respond so differently to similar circumstances. I wanted to understand what happens to attention under pressure, how people regulate their emotions, how identity can be affected by performance, why relationships matter so much and how individuals adapt when their environment changes.
Most importantly, I wanted to understand the person behind the performance.
Studying psychology did not replace what I had learned through coaching. It gave me another way of interpreting it.
There was something particularly valuable about studying psychology while continuing to coach every day. Concepts that I encountered at university were constantly being tested against real situations in the sporting environment. At the same time, situations I observed on the track often sent me back to the literature with new questions.
That relationship between scientific knowledge and practical experience became increasingly important to me.
I was not interested in becoming someone who simply knew how to talk about psychological concepts. I wanted to understand how those concepts behaved when applied to real people, with real histories, relationships and circumstances.
Sport also taught me that context matters.
My experience working internationally made this even more complicated, and much more interesting.
Over the years, I have worked with athletes from more than twenty countries and, at different points, within the same training environment I have had athletes from South America, North America, Europe, Northern Europe and Asia.
This meant that I was constantly observing people who were experiencing similar sporting demands from very different cultural starting points.
An athlete moving from one country to another is not simply changing training facilities. They may be changing language, social environment, routines, relationships, expectations and the way in which they understand their own role. The same coaching behaviour or psychological concept may therefore be interpreted very differently by two people with different cultural backgrounds.
This is particularly relevant when applying psychological research. A large proportion of psychological research is produced within specific academic and cultural contexts. That research can be extremely valuable, but applying it responsibly requires an understanding of its limitations and of the context in which the original findings were produced.
My experience in international sport continually reminded me that psychological knowledge cannot simply be separated from the person and their environment.
The question is not only whether a concept has evidence behind it. It is also whether we understand the individual to whom we are applying it.
From sport psychology to human performance.
This is one of the reasons I gradually became less interested in thinking of my work simply as mental coaching.
Mental coaching is an important part of what I do today, but the underlying field of interest is broader: human performance.
Performance is influenced by training, but also by behaviour, relationships, identity, emotion, attention, culture, environment and adaptation. These factors do not operate independently. They interact continuously, and their importance can change depending on the person and the situation.
This perspective also helped me understand why many of the questions I encountered in elite sport were relevant beyond sport.
During my psychology degree, I became particularly interested in work and organisational psychology. The contexts are obviously different, and I would never argue that a company is simply another sports team. However, organisations also depend on human beings performing within complex environments. Leadership, communication, relationships, group dynamics, organisational culture, psychological safety and adaptation can all influence how people work together.
The connection is not that sport provides a collection of motivational lessons that businesses should copy. The more interesting connection is that both environments raise questions about how human behaviour interacts with performance.
That is where my interest in consultancy and education has developed: at the intersection between psychological knowledge and the practical realities of high-performance environments.
I still believe in training. I just no longer think it is the whole story.
My journey into psychology did not make me question the importance of coaching. It made me understand its limits more clearly.
A good training programme remains fundamental. Physical and technical development cannot be replaced by psychological preparation, and no amount of discussion about mindset can compensate for inadequate preparation.
But preparation is not the same as performance.
A training programme can create opportunities for development. What happens next depends partly on the person and on the environment in which that person has to express what they have developed.
This is why I have gradually moved away from seeing performance as the result of a single variable. There is rarely one explanation for why someone performs well or poorly. The same situation can produce completely different responses in different people, and the same person can respond differently to the same situation at different moments in their life.
That complexity is not a problem to be eliminated. It is something to be understood.
And perhaps this is the biggest lesson my years in sport have given me.
Before trying to improve performance, we should try to understand it.
First: understand performance.
Looking back, studying psychology was not a departure from my career in sport. It was a continuation of it.
I spent years trying to understand how athletes could become better through training. Then, through experience, I became increasingly interested in what happens when the athlete actually has to perform.
That question took me beyond technique and physical preparation. It took me towards psychology, behaviour, relationships, culture and the wider circumstances in which people live.
Today, this is how I think about human performance.
I am interested not only in what people can do, but in what allows them to express what they can do. I am interested in what happens when circumstances change, when expectations increase, when relationships become complicated, when someone moves across cultures, when performance goes well and when it does not.
Because performance is not something that happens separately from life. It happens to people.
And perhaps that is why performance can be so valuable. It gives us a context in which we are constantly confronted with ourselves: with our capabilities, our limitations, our responses, our relationships and our ability to adapt.
Performance is not the destination. It is the context in which growth takes place.
First, we need to understand performance.
Only then can we begin to understand what it can teach us about being human.
References
- Reinebo, G., et al. (2024). Effects of Psychological Interventions to Enhance Athletic Performance: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.
- Lochbaum, M., & Lane, A. M. (2025). Mapping 50 Years of Sport Psychology-Performance Meta-Analyses: A PRISMA-ScR Scoping Review.
- Ryba, T. V. (2017). Cultural sport psychology: A critical review of empirical advances.
- Schinke, R. J., et al. (2013). Acculturation in elite sport: A thematic analysis of immigrant athletes and coaches.