HOW THE WORK UNFOLDS
This page explains the three-domain integration model underlying my work with elite performers. For engagement details and consultation requests, visit [Mental Performance Consulting] or [Executive Coaching].
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This integration model is designed for elite and competitive performers where single-domain approaches have proven insufficient.
Drawing on doctoral training in movement science, certifications in mental performance consultation (CMPC), exercise physiology (EP-C), and strength and conditioning (CSCS), plus graduate training in clinical counseling and executive coaching, I maintain a limited roster focused on the intersection of nervous system optimization, tactical mental performance, and pattern-level work.
Performance challenges are rarely simple. Whether you're competing, leading, creating, or making high-stakes decisions, breakdowns often involve multiple systems converging—nervous system dysregulation, attentional interference, and automatic behavioral patterns. Single-focus interventions produce inconsistent results because they address symptoms, not systems.
My approach integrates three interconnected domains, adapting to where your specific challenge actually lives.
01 — Physiological Foundation
Performance happens in a body. If that body isn't ready—under-recovered, poorly conditioned, or stuck in stress mode—mental skills won't transfer when it counts.
This level addresses the physical systems that set the ceiling for everything else: sleep, recovery, conditioning, and nervous system regulation.
The Basics That Get Overlooked
Most performers focus on tactics and mental skills while ignoring the fundamentals that determine whether those skills are even accessible under pressure.
Sleep and Recovery — Are you sleeping enough? Is the quality adequate? Sleep is when the nervous system resets, memories consolidate, and adaptation occurs. Chronic sleep debt creates a physiological hole that no amount of mental toughness can fill.
Training Load and Recovery Balance — Are you recovering adequately between high-demand sessions? Overtraining doesn't just affect the body—it degrades focus, decision-making, and emotional regulation. We track training volume, intensity, and recovery to ensure you're adapting, not accumulating damage.
Cardiovascular Fitness — Your aerobic system fuels sustained performance. Poor conditioning means your body can't deliver oxygen efficiently under load. When your heart rate is spiking and you're gasping for air, you can't think clearly or execute skills reliably. Conditioning isn't just physical—it's cognitive insurance.
Nutrition and Hydration — Are you fueling adequately? Dehydration and poor nutrition directly impair reaction time, decision-making, and emotional control. Simple deficits create performance breakdowns that look psychological but are actually physiological.
Nervous System State — Is your body operating in stress mode (sympathetic dominance) or recovery mode (parasympathetic)? Can you shift between them when needed? We use heart rate variability (HRV) to assess whether your nervous system is balanced or stuck in high-alert mode.
When these basics aren't in place, mental skills become unreliable. You might execute well in practice when stress is low, but break down in competition when physiological demands spike.
Learning to Read Your Body
Most performers only notice their physiology when it's screaming at them—heart pounding, breathing shallow, muscles tight, energy crashing.
By then, you're in reaction mode. Options narrow. Performance suffers.
We develop interoceptive awareness: the ability to read your body's signals before they become overwhelming.
What we train:
Recognizing early signs of tension (jaw clenching, shoulder tightness, breath changes)
Noticing energy shifts (fatigue coming on, arousal rising)
Sensing arousal level (am I too flat? too amped?)
Tracking recovery signals (how does my body feel today? ready or depleted?)
The principle: You can't regulate what you can't sense.
Awareness creates choice. When you notice tension building early, you can intervene—breathe, adjust posture, refocus—before it hijacks performance.
Integrating Physiology and Psychology
These aren't separate systems. They're integrated.
Example 1: The "Anxious" Athlete
An athlete reports severe pre-competition anxiety. Mental skills help somewhat, but the anxiety keeps returning.
We assess: Sleep is poor (5-6 hours, fragmented). HRV shows chronic sympathetic dominance. Training load is high with inadequate recovery. Nutrition is inconsistent.
The "anxiety" isn't purely psychological. The body is physiologically stressed, operating in persistent threat mode. The nervous system is doing exactly what it should: signaling danger.
Intervention: Sleep optimization, training load adjustment, nutrition protocol, breathing mechanics to shift autonomic balance.
Result: Anxiety decreases significantly without extensive cognitive work. The body was the issue.
Example 2: The "Mentally Weak" Performer
A performer believes they lack mental toughness. They know what to do but can't execute under pressure. Visualization and self-talk haven't helped.
We assess: Aerobic fitness is poor. Heart rate spikes rapidly under load and stays elevated. They're operating near maximal cardiovascular capacity during performance, leaving no physiological reserve for decision-making or skill execution.
What looked like a mental issue is actually cardiovascular insufficiency. The body can't support the cognitive demands of performance.
Intervention: Aerobic base building, heart rate training zones, gradual exposure to performing under cardiovascular load.
Result: Improved conditioning creates physiological reserve. Mental skills now transfer because the body can support them.
Example 3: The Overtrained Executive
An executive can't focus in meetings, makes impulsive decisions, and feels constantly irritable. They assume it's stress or burnout and want cognitive strategies.
We assess: Chronic under-recovery. Working 70+ hours per week. Poor sleep. High caffeine intake. HRV trending downward for months. No physical activity.
This isn't a mental skills issue. The body is in chronic stress response—sympathetic dominance, elevated cortisol, insufficient recovery. Cognitive strategies won't work when the nervous system is dysregulated.
Intervention: Sleep prioritization, training load reduction (both work and physical), movement and aerobic training, nervous system regulation work.
Result: Physiology stabilizes. Cognitive function returns. What looked like an executive functioning issue was physiological depletion.
Why This Level Comes First
If you're under-recovered, poorly conditioned, nutritionally deficient, or operating in chronic stress mode, mental skills become unreliable.
You might perform well when conditions are easy, but break down when demands spike—not because you lack mental toughness, but because your body can't support performance under load.
This work isn't preliminary. It's foundational.
Everything else builds from here.
02 — Tactical Mental Performance
With physiological capacity established, we develop tactical mental performance skills—deliberate, conscious abilities that support execution under pressure.
This draws on evidence-based sport and performance psychology: the science of attention, decision-making, emotional regulation, and behavioral execution in high-stakes contexts.
Attentional Skills
Performance requires flexible attention—the ability to narrow focus for precision, broaden for situational awareness, and shift efficiently between the two.
We develop present-moment awareness, distraction recognition, and rapid attentional redirection. The challenge isn't maintaining perfect focus—it's recognizing when focus has shifted and redirecting efficiently. This is meta-attention: attention to attention itself.
Working with Difficult Internal Experiences
Fear of failure, performance anxiety, self-doubt—these aren't necessarily problems to eliminate but experiences to work with skillfully.
Traditional approaches emphasize control or suppression, but suppression consumes cognitive resources needed for performance and can paradoxically amplify what you're trying to avoid.
Instead, we develop psychological flexibility: the capacity to notice what you're experiencing (fear, doubt, physical tension), create space around it, and act according to your performance values—even while the experience persists.
This isn't positive thinking. It's learning to perform effectively with discomfort rather than waiting for it to disappear.
This includes working with internal dialogue. Self-critical patterns ("I always choke," "I'm not good enough") aren't something to suppress or replace with forced positivity. They're information about underlying concerns. We develop awareness of these patterns and practice relating to them differently—noticing the thought without fusing with it, redirecting attention to what's controllable.
Pre-Performance and In-Competition Routines
Routines create consistency in variable environments. They're behavioral sequences that direct focus to task-relevant information, regulate physiology as needed, and connect you to purpose and process rather than outcome.
We build routines that are flexible rather than rigid—maintaining your process while adapting to contextual demands.
Decision-Making Under Pressure
High-pressure situations compress time and amplify uncertainty. Decision-making quality depends on pattern recognition developed through experience, cognitive efficiency when time is limited, and awareness of when emotion (fear, excitement, frustration) may be affecting perception or narrowing options.
Example: The Yips and Performance Breakdown
A golfer develops the yips—involuntary muscle spasms during putting. A baseball player can't make routine throws. A musician's hands freeze at critical moments.
This looks purely psychological ("choking"), but it's rarely that simple.
Assessment across domains:
Physiological: High sympathetic activation during performance. Breathing becomes shallow and rapid. Muscle tension increases significantly before the critical action. Poor sleep and chronic stress outside performance.
Cognitive: Attention shifts from process (mechanics, target) to outcome (consequences of failure). Internal monitoring increases ("Is my hand shaking? Am I going to mess up?"). Meta-attention is absent—they don't notice attention has shifted until they've already failed.
Pattern: Often emerges after a significant failure or public embarrassment. The brain has learned to associate this specific action with threat. Identity is over-fused with performance ("If I can't do this, I'm not who I thought I was"). Fear of the yips becomes worse than the yips themselves—anticipatory anxiety creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Intervention—Integrated Approach:
Physiological: Breathing mechanics before and during the action. Progressive muscle relaxation training. Sleep optimization. HRV training to shift autonomic balance.
Cognitive: Attentional anchoring—external focus cues (target, feel of the club/ball, rhythm). Meta-attention training—noticing when attention shifts to outcome or internal monitoring, redirecting to process. Pre-performance routine that locks in process focus.
Pattern: Exploring the identity threat ("What does this action mean about who you are?"). Reducing fusion between self-worth and performance outcome. Exposure work—deliberately practicing the action in low-stakes contexts to re-pattern the threat association. Psychological flexibility—performing with the anxiety present rather than waiting for it to disappear.
Result: The yips typically resolve not through one intervention but through integrated work across all three domains. Physiology stabilizes, attention stays anchored to process, and the threat association weakens.
What looked like "choking" or "mental weakness" was a multi-system breakdown requiring multi-system intervention.
When Tactics Alone Fall Short
You can develop extensive mental skills and execute routines consistently, but if automatic patterns are interfering, these conscious skills may not transfer reliably when stakes are highest.
The performer who visualizes success but repeatedly stumbles at breakthrough moments. The executive who knows stress management techniques but can't stop overworking. The founder who has strategic clarity but freezes at critical decisions.
When you know what to do but consistently don't do it, that's often not a tactics issue—it's a pattern issue.
03 — Pattern Recognition and Behavioral Change
This is where the work goes deeper.
Beneath conscious skills and tactical preparation are automatic patterns—learned responses, emotional habits, self-concept configurations—that shape what you perceive as threatening, what you avoid, and what you protect.
These patterns are typically adaptive in origin. They developed for good reasons. But what once served you may now limit you.
Common Pattern Themes
Performance patterns often manifest in recognizable ways:
Fear-Based Patterns: Struggling at similar high-stakes moments, self-sabotage preceding breakthrough, over-preparation as avoidance of actual performance, perfectionism that prevents starting or completing.
Identity-Based Patterns: "I'm not the type of person who..." (leads, takes risks, shows vulnerability), over-identification with success where failure feels like personal collapse, achievement that feels hollow because it doesn't align with authentic values, the gap between external success and internal experience—achieving outwardly while feeling uncertain or fraudulent internally.
Meaning and Motivation Patterns: Loss of enjoyment in something you once loved, performing for external validation rather than internal purpose, achieving goals followed by "now what?", burnout framed as "loss of passion."
Relational Patterns: Feeling you need to prove something, using performance to establish worth, difficulty resting or recovering without guilt, success creating distance in valued relationships.
Performance occurs in a relational context—with coaches, teammates, family, organizational culture. Conflicts with coaches, team dynamics, family pressure, or toxic organizational environments often trigger or reinforce problematic patterns. We examine how these relationships shape your experience and performance.
The Coaching Process: From Automatic to Conscious
Pattern work typically follows a progression:
Pattern Recognition: Patterns often operate outside conscious awareness. The first step is making them visible. What consistently triggers the pattern? What's the automatic response? What might the pattern be protecting you from? What does it cost you?
This isn't purely intellectual—it's experiential recognition, noticing the pattern as it activates.
Exploring the Structure: Patterns have architecture. They're often maintained by emotional learning from early experiences, identity organization, automatic strategies for managing anxiety, and underlying motivations beneath stated goals.
When patterns appear rooted in significant developmental experiences, unresolved trauma, or clinical mental health concerns, I recommend working with a licensed mental health professional. My role is to help you understand behavioral patterns in performance contexts, not to provide psychotherapy.
Developing New Response Patterns: Understanding the pattern is necessary but rarely sufficient. Insight alone doesn't reliably change behavior.
Transformation comes from developing a different relationship to the pattern: noticing without identifying, creating space between activation and automatic response, clarifying what genuinely matters, and taking committed action aligned with values even when the pattern pulls toward familiar protection.
Performance Philosophy and Meaning
Sometimes exploration reveals the pattern isn't the problem—the performance context itself warrants examination.
This is when we explore your performance philosophy: What does success actually mean to you? What are you willing to sacrifice for it? Is this pursuit sustainable? Where's the intrinsic motivation?
These are existential questions. For high performers, they're immediately practical—your relationship to meaning directly affects your capacity for sustained excellence.
Someone experiencing burnout may not lack discipline but purpose. Someone who's lost joy may not be underperforming but performing for misaligned reasons.
Integration Across Domains
Effective work moves fluidly between all three domains.
Someone experiencing pre-performance anxiety might benefit from autonomic regulation training, attentional anchoring routines, and understanding the identity concerns driving the anxiety.
Someone struggling with decision paralysis might explore sleep optimization, decision-making frameworks, and examining perfectionism that may be limiting boldness.
Performance rarely breaks down at just one level. Single-level interventions often create partial, unstable change.
Scope and Collaboration
What This Work Provides
Performance-focused integration of physiological, tactical, and behavioral domains. Evidence-informed strategies adapted to your specific context. Pattern recognition and behavioral change within performance settings.
What It Doesn't Replace
Medical care, clinical diagnosis, or treatment of mental health conditions. Psychotherapy for trauma, clinical anxiety/depression, or personality disorders. Nutritional counseling, physical therapy, or medical exercise prescription.
When your needs extend beyond performance work, I'll recommend appropriate licensed professionals. Often the most effective approach involves collaboration—you working with me on performance while also receiving specialized care from other professionals.
How We Work Together
This isn't a fixed protocol. It's an adaptive framework responsive to where you are and what you need.
Some clients spend more time on physiological foundation. Others move quickly into pattern work. Many move back and forth as different challenges emerge.
The work unfolds through dialogue, experimentation, and refinement. You're not a passive recipient of interventions—you're an active collaborator in your own development.
Progress isn't always linear. Sometimes it's circuitous. Sometimes you'll revisit earlier domains with new understanding. That's not regression—it's integration.
The goal isn't perfection. It's sustainable high performance aligned with who you are and what genuinely matters to you.