Therapy for Athletes

Achieve Peek Performance

Access higher levels of your athletic potential with Soulful Psychology®’s revolutionary Performance Therapy services. Our specialized strategies help athletes develop the mental strength to excel in their sport and life. We help athletes unlock their mental blocks and thrive. Find more fulfillment in your athletic career with our innovative approach to athlete coaching. You can gain skills for overcoming mental setbacks, we have the psychological tools to help you access the skills to succeed.

Build Your Mental Strength

Having the pleasure of working with athletes, we find their problems are not always rooted in performance … their problems are often psychological.

As successful as our clients are, we find they struggle with psychological challenges that compromise their ability to perform at their greatest potential. Issues off the field/court tend to spill over into issues in the game. We help our clients heal their feelings of loneliness, imposter syndrome, relationship conflicts, stress, anxiety, and burnout, that are often undetected issues with athletes.

Too often we see professional athletes who self-destruct due to personal issues outside their sport. Athletes tend to use coping strategies that include pushing themselves forward; but doing so can be a double-edged sword, in that, it helps drive them to work harder and become successful yet at the same time it also creates internal problems that cause decreased joy, increased agitation, and ultimately they become numb. They often feel lonely, isolated, stuck, devoid of passion, bored, and annoyed with people. The littlest things will set them off and lead to either erupting or dissociating. Ultimately, they feel detached from soul and the purpose for what led them into their sport in the first place.

Personal life matters can distract athletes from reaching and maintaining their peak performance. We know how to help athletes as we understand the unique burdens their carry in their roles.

We work with athletes in the following areas:

Developing healthy boundaries with family and friends that become burdens or obligations that distract an athlete from maintaining focus in their sport or causing them suspensions or fines.
Conflict resolution with teammates or team staff members.
Strategies for reducing social anxiety and performance anxiety.
Techniques for reducing depression that may arise from injury, retirement, loss of playing time, or media scrutiny.
Career planning and transition strategizing for life post retirement.
Evaluating and treating mental health issues that hinder peak performance.
Counseling services for processing trauma or early-life stressors that get triggered from the stressors of sport.
Skill building to reduce pressures of grueling game schedules, work-life balance, and expectations to win.
Navigating how to deal with media scrutiny.
Enhancing comfort and skills for public speaking.
Teaching and implementation of mental skills development through techniques such as mindfulness, visualization, progressive muscle relaxation, and stress reduction.

Performance Therapy with Soulful Psychology® can help you heal the emotional pain that keeps you from fulfilling your greatest potential and enable you to feel at peace.

A Different Kind of Performance Therapy

Performance Therapy with Soulful Psychology® works with athletes who feel like they lost their way; struggling with performance issues and personal problems. We work with athletes at the top of their profession who are distracted from peak performance due to struggling with the anxiety, depression, and stress. We provide therapy services that are tailored for athletes as we understand the specific challenges they face.

The roots to many issues athletes experience often stem from unresolved psychological aspects that many coaches and consultants are not trained to uncover. Mental skill building coaches do a great job of helping athletes with focus and perspective, however, when athlete’s issues are deeper than a change of mindset, they are in need of a much more specialized psychological exploration into the unresolved emotional conflict at the root of their performance issues, which requires specialized understanding of the problem.

Soulful Psychology® consists of expert psychologists and therapists who are proficient at providing invaluable tools to help athletes heal their underlying emotional strains. Although we provide profound mental skill building tools for athletes, we also specialize in helping athletes identify the root-causes to their performance issues, which tend to be hidden psychologically below the surface. We can help athletes free their unresolved conflicts to liberate them to experience peace, passion, and joy in their sport and life in general.

The deep-dive we assist our clients in experiencing enables them to feel in control of their life and no longer running from problems. Athletes are already experts in their field, which is what led them to be as successful as they are; therefore, the greatest growth can come from areas they may not be so aware of, which is usually psychological. This is why traditional coaching is helpful up until a certain point, yet the most growth and achievement often comes from the expertise of helping athletes gain access to, and become masters of, their psychological skills.

Revolutionary Methods for Success

Our revolutionary methods help unlock the hidden solutions within our clients’ psyche. We do so by implementing our proprietary methods of soulful exploration to uncover underlying psychological roots to performance issues. Our clients often express feeling relief, self-control, peace, joy, excitement, and enhanced performance that comes from awareness and healing of the underlying problems.

Our revolutionary approach analyzes the parallels between current performance problems and the resemblance to unprocessed experiences in one’s personal life. We help clients integrate the parts of their personality that feel deficient, insecure, and vulnerable so that clients can face their unconscious fears and become whole. The following scenario exemplifies the approach to we take to analyze performance issues from a Soulful Psychology® lens:

Scenario: You feel frustrated at your teammates because they don’t have the same dedication as you. Verbal and physical altercations erupt from being on separate pages about role expectations.
Emotional Analysis: You feel alone and frustrated; unsupported and unappreciated. You feel depressed, rage, and at times want to give up. You might turn to substances or other vices to cope.
Unconscious Exploration: Your feelings of frustration and loneliness might have psychological underpinnings from early-on in life when you needed to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders because no one else would or could. This led to unprocessed frustrations and sadness from feeling self-reliant, which on the one hand served you well in your sport but on the other hand left you feeling alone and frustrated that no one came to your aid in time of need.
Soulful Awakening: Processing these feelings with Soulful Psychology® Performance Therapy can help you draw the parallels between frustrations with teammates and unprocessed emotional wounds that need to be discussed, so that you can find peace and not project your frustrations outward onto others. As a result, you can experience reconnection with your internal solace, reengagement with your clarity, and reinvigoration with your performance … we refer to as Soulful Awakening.

Win In Your Sport and In Your Life

We have worked with athletes to develop the psychological strength to enable their top performance. Our work with athlete clients helps us understand how you may feel overwhelmed by the mental and physical demands of competition. The amount of travel, expectations, and pressure to perform can be daunting. It is difficult to balance the demands of being a high-performance athlete. The mental strains can cause fear of failure and thus performance anxiety. Having to deal with injuries, public scrutiny, scandals, media invasiveness, and relentless fans with unrealistic expectations can be taxing.

It is no wonder that about 52% of athletes struggle with issues pertaining to mental health. Additionally, the NCAA Student-Athlete Health and Wellness Study found that around 44% of student-athletes expressed experiencing symptoms of mental health daily. You might also be struggling with retirement from athletics due to age or injury, and the identity loss it has created. It can feel depressing to be disconnected from the sport that has shaped your identity. There can be loss and grief that we can help you process.

There is also a tendency for athletes to develop eating disorders due to the incredibly high demands of maintaining their body. Additionally, family dynamics and personal relationships are also concerns for athletes, which often get overlooked and become challenging to balance.

We realize that athletes are prone to hiding their emotions and struggles so that they are not be perceived as weak or become held back from competition. You may hide your feelings and tolerate the pain, which creates avoidance that disrupts sleep and performance. This can mask your need for relief, which is the most important characteristic for performance.

We work with athletes to identify the roots of their issues, which often stem from psychological underpinnings that need to be processed and healed in order to perform at the highest level. In many cases behavioral issues both on and off the field/court can be related to unrecognized and therefore unresolved emotional wounds that get triggered from competition. Too often athletes are overlooked for their mental health struggles, which need to be examined and tended to for mental and physical wellbeing.

We can work with you on:

Developing mindfulness practices to integrate the mind-body connection, which is extremely necessary for high-performance. Our mindfulness techniques help to calm the mind by mastering complete attention to the present moment, which can quiet the mental chatter or crowd distractions.
Utilizing visualization skills to identify best-case scenarios for achieving your desired performance outcome. Visualization helps you picture overcoming adversity and also helps you to foreshadow the upcoming competition in your mind, which prepares you for manifesting your thoughts. We can help you mentally rehearse a winning outcome, which helps condition your body to manifest that outcome.
Increase your positive internal self-talk, which includes helping support yourself through difficult moments in a competition. We help you replace negative chatter in your mind with calm, peaceful, positive perspectives that eventually become the normal and consistent thought pattern. This can enable you to move on from a mistake quicker and reinforce confidence with the use of positive appraisal after a successful moment in the competition. We help you develop mental resilience to perform at your best both on and off the court/field.

On-Site Performance Therapy with Soulful Psychology®

We provide on-site therapy services for our clients who need care in realtime for their specific needs. We recognize that athletes who reach the level of success as our clients have often sacrifice themselves for their sport. Certain moments can activate traumatic feelings that need on-the-spot psychological attention to fix. Some athletes also struggle with social and performance anxiety. Therefore, we provide psychological coaching services that include the following on-site resources: