How the Work Unfolds

I work with high-level performers on challenges where single-domain approaches have failed. Drawing on doctoral training in movement science, dual certification in strength and conditioning (CSCS) and exercise physiology (ACSM-EP), mental performance consultation (CMPC), and graduate training in clinical counseling and executive coaching, I maintain a small roster and work at the intersection of nervous system optimization, tactical mental performance, and deep pattern work.

Performance challenges are rarely simple. Whether you're competing, leading, creating, or making high-stakes decisions, breakdowns often involve multiple factors converging at once—nervous system arousal, attentional difficulties, and deeply ingrained behavioral patterns. This is why single-focus interventions produce inconsistent results.

My approach integrates three interconnected domains, adapting to where your specific challenge actually lives.

01 — Physiological Foundation

Performance is embodied. Your autonomic nervous system shapes your capacity for focus, emotional regulation, and adaptive response under pressure. When this foundation is compromised, mental performance strategies alone won't produce reliable results.

Assessment and Optimization

We start by exploring indicators of your physiological readiness: heart rate variability (HRV) as a window into autonomic balance and recovery, sleep patterns and quality, training load and stress accumulation, and arousal regulation patterns. This draws on exercise physiology principles applied with rigor—periodization, adaptation, recovery, and load management.

Developing Interoceptive Awareness

Many performers don't recognize physiological shifts until they're overwhelming—racing heart, shallow breathing, muscle tension. By then, intervention options narrow. We work on recognizing signals earlier: subtle changes in breathing depth, jaw tension, temperature shifts, gut sensations. This is interoceptive awareness—learning to read your body's signals before they cascade into reaction.

The principle is straightforward: regulation requires perception. Awareness creates the possibility of choice.

Why This Matters

Consider the executive who frames their performance anxiety as a confidence issue, but whose HRV patterns suggest chronic sympathetic activation—their nervous system operating in persistent high-alert mode. Cognitive strategies alone won't address this. The intervention might begin physiologically: sleep optimization, autonomic training, breathing mechanics.

Or the performer who believes they need greater mental toughness, while recovery data suggests chronic under-recovery. What appears as a mental challenge may have significant physiological components.

This level isn't preliminary work—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 between the two. We develop present-moment awareness, distraction recognition, and rapid attentional shifting. 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 requires 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.

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 coaching 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, imposter experiences—achieving externally while feeling internally fraudulent.

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, and 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 concerns, I recommend working with a licensed mental health professional. My role as a coach 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 coaching 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 influencing boldness.

Performance rarely breaks down at just one level. Single-level interventions often create partial, unstable change.

Scope and Collaboration

What This Coaching 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 coaching scope, 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 dive 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.