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I had some time recently to reflect on why I chose this path to be a mental performance coach and here, now, I’d like to share it with you (long piece that I hope our @dominican_aspp students and @hoopsminded athletes will enjoy). So often we do what we needed, to retroactively fill in the gaps that were left in our lived experience. When I was 9 years old my eyes first properly set eyes on the game of basketball and my jaw was on the floor with what I was seeing, for about

I'm grateful to be given the time and space to write about the work of Dr. Ken Ravizza from reading his chapter in Expert Approaches to Sport Psychology. As many of us know, Ken was a giant in our field and yet in person he was a cuddly teddy bear. A sweet man, who talked close, looked you square in the eyes, truly listened, and truly cared. He embodied the idea of the practitioner being a walking talking example of mental skills by the very way of his being. I had the cha

Certainly a hot button issue last March Madness now, wasn't it? I've spent the last few years researching the ways in which basketball coaches value - good, bad, or indifferent - emotional regulation as a psychological skill within their coaching practice. While some of the results have been surprising, for the most part, the coaches responses were what you'd expect: emotional regulation matters for a coach's performance. Emotional regulation in coaching is a multi-facet

As I continue my work in Mental Performance training, a word (or 500) regarding my philosophy of practice are in order. I am lucky to have come through great training via my Master's program in Sport Psychology at JFK University and now serving as Affiliate Faculty with Holy Names University. Part of my Master's degree training was really honing in on a philosophy that is authentic and which encapsulates who I am and how I believe the work of mental training can best be prac

"It's been a long time, a long time coming But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will" -Sam Cooke Sam was right. Change is inevitable. His change was born out of desire for a better life. He didn't wait for it, he sought out such change and made it happen. Sometimes we don't want to change. We are in our comfort zones, comfortable with our world as it is. However, it is in those moments of comfort that we often stagnate. Seeking out challenges, seeking out discom

Sport is what you do, it isn’t who you are. That is a key distinction which many athletes fail to make as they get engrossed in their...

I listened to a segment by the great Kevin Eastman regarding the 10 concepts of great leaders, and "values" was one of them. He specified what he meant by "values" as that which you're willing to get fired over. It took me no time to think about my experience as a head coach for the semi-professional Men's basketball team in the Palestinian Basketball League, De La Salle. During that time, I was a young coach trying to establish myself and how I coached. One thing I knew

Often times we have the answers. If given the opportunity to answer questions about yourself and your sport experience, most people and most athletes will be able to do so. While some answers will be more in-depth than others, typically, when prompted we know deep down what our instincts, values, and standards are made up of. Part of the value of working with a mental performance coach is that they can provide the right questions. Open ended questions that are meant to elici

In researching emotional regulation among basketball coaches, gratitude came up, over and over again, as a technique that coaches actively use to maintain control of their emotional state. We know from research, and from the findings of Positive Psychology, that the positive impacts of gratitude reach far and wide. So, if we're drinking the Kool-Aid on gratitude, how do we train it? Like many other mental skills, it can be trained actively, but we must shift the paradigm

Often times we believe that if we change what we do, we will feel better. If we eat less junk food, we will feel better about our bodies. If we work out more, we'll feel like our day was more productive. If we get all of our work completed, we feel we are great at our jobs. In mental training, we help athletes and performers recognize that the reverse is true as well. When we think and feel positively and productively, positive actions and behaviors will flow more natura

In mental skills training we talk a lot about pre-performance routines. And it's for good reason: routines put in an athlete in a consistent state of mind by creating a "sequence of task relevant thoughts and actions" (Moran, 1996), A routine allows an athlete to keep consistency in the turbulent and ever-changing world of sport. There are many factors that change regarding your performance: location, venue, weather, time of day, opponent - just to name a few. By maintain

In sport, conditions change constantly. Your opponent changes, the venues change, the weather, how you feel a particular day - it can all vary from contest to contest. In order to create consistency of behavior (i.e. how we play), it helps to create a consistent pre-performance routine that will stabilize the way you think and feel leading into a competition. A simple and memorable way to structure your pre-performance routine is the acronym "PREP." "PREP" stands for Pick

What is the most important play in any game? We often say “the next play.” Make a mistake, miss a shot, turn the ball over. As coaches we want our players to forget about such errors and immediately focus on the next play. Well-regarded mental skills coach Graham Betchart, who has worked with Aaron Gordon, Jaylen Brown, Ben Simmons and other NBA players talks about getting your “next play speed” under one second. While all of this is true, the reality is that the next play is

How do you show up daily? #sixwordsportpsych "80% of life is showing up," said Woody Allen. Supposedly. Wherever the quote came from, as a society we value the day in and day out actions of those that show up. This, to me, speaks to Jacob Riis and the value of the little successes en route to a greater goal: " Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will spli

This isn't about Sport Psychology. Nor is it really a mental skill. This is truly a way to conceptualize your own free will and take hold of the choices and actions you live by. Think about a chessboard. There are 64 squares on the board. Think about these squares as the objective facts of your life: where you live, how old you are, how tall you are, that you live in a world with other people in it, that the moon exists (shout to Ali G). Sure, we can argue about what is

We all struggle at times. Confusion can supersede confidence. Basketball is a free-flowing game with a ton of information to absorb, internalize and execute on. For instance, your coach put forth a game plan with requirements in the full-court and the half-court, you are toggling between multiple defenses, you need to know where multiple players may be in a given set, and you have to be able to zero in on the rim when you have an open shot with a player closing out at you. H

Sport is what you do, it isn’t who you are. That is a key distinction which many athletes fail to make as they get engrossed in their athletic endeavors at a young age. Doing so creates an athletic identity within the individual which can take hold and provide great value while also preventing exploration of other potential avenues of interest. This form of identity has been defined as the extent to which individuals see themselves as athletes and seek recognition from others

Raise your hands if you’ve heard of mindfulness? [All the hands in the virtual classroom go up]. Raise your hands if you’ve read an article about the benefits of mindfulness? [75% of hands go up again]. Now raise your hand if you’ve meditated once in the last week? [10% of hands go up]. There is a disconnect here. As a society we have never been more crystal clear on the benefits of mindfulness. We know what it is, we understand how beneficial it is, and yet, many don’t pract

Motivation. What is it and why, oh why, does it seem to come and go? In plain terms, motivation is the direction and intensity of effort....

All teams are groups but not all groups are teams. Ah yes, the old adage. So what makes a group a team rather than a group? Well, a...