Book Private Mental-performance Lessons with Coach Brendan

Growing up sports were a huge part of my life. I always had my hand in something, but once I reached high school, my primary focus was baseball and wrestling. Through my time playing those sports, I realized the impact one’s psychology has on their performance. This was an area I particularly struggled in. While in college I learned about the field of sport psychology and immediately connected with the overall mission of the field which is to understand and help athletes improve their performance and well-being through psychological skills. Through this work I have picked up distance running and golf as my primary athletic endeavors, where I get the opportunity to practice all the skills that I teach.

To put it simply, I can help someone improve their game by providing a psychological model to follow. As an athlete you spend so much time and effort honing your craft, practicing all aspects of your game, but leave your psychology up to chance. Maybe you find yourself searching for motivation through quotes or hype videos, hoping to stumble upon something that could work. Through working with me, we can build flexibility skills to develop a model, so you know that what you are doing actually works for you. Developing this model isn’t easy. We will work to hone methods that is solely focused on what works for you, not what should work or has worked for others. This model will be steadfast, serving as a point of consistency, reliability, and dependability in the face of the pressures of performing.

Every session is individually tailored to your specific needs.

In our very first session, I will ask questions about your background and your experiences to learn more about what brought you to see me. From there we will discuss a systematic approach to start to build your psychological model. From there our sessions will have a few consistent attributes:

The “catch up.”

I want to know how things have been going since our last session:

- How have the methods worked or not worked?

- What were interesting psychological experiences you had?

- What were some wins?

- Where were the struggle/sticking points?

Learning.

Anchored to your experiences we will reinforce the things that worked and talk about why they have been working. We will also be looking at what didn’t work and analyze whether we need to rework or scrap that intervention. This is the portion where we will learn more about our psychology in a fun, engaging way.

Practical Application

After learning about why things are occurring, we will talk about how to use those principles in an effective, flexible way. I will give you some tactics to try between now and our next session.

His name is Chris Corkum. Cork was my baseball coach, boss, and mentor throughout high school and college. Over the course of 8 years playing for him and working with him, he taught me invaluable lessons about the depth of being a coach. He showed me the how to coach from a place of honesty, respect, and compassion. Sometimes, coaches can get lost in the weeds of records, accolades, and wins & losses. Cork showed me the importance of meeting your athletes where they are and helping them grow incrementally. This lesson was the beginning of my coaching philosophy and serves as a foundational component of the way I work with athletes.

I have been working as a mental performance coach for 7 years where I have worked with a wide range of performers (i.e. baseball players, golfers, horseback riders, tennis players, wrestlers, and strongmen). Currently, I am working with the Air Force, teaching flexibility skills to fighter pilots. The work that I have done is backed by decades of research and is continually growing. Moreover, the impact of my work isn’t found in numbers and statistics. Many of the performers I have worked with operate in high pressure environments, I help people recognize and understand that pressure while remaining connected to the “why” of what they are doing. Too often, we take our psychology dreadfully seriously, but it doesn’t need to be that way. The focus of my work is to soften the way we view the world around us, which then lets us be great.

Flexibility training is focused on 3 main abilities. Our ability to experience, attend and orient. Experience our thoughts and emotions as they are, without judgement. Attend to the present moment fully. Orient to our chosen “why.” These three skills combined gives you the opportunity to perform your best, REGARDLESS of what thought, or emotion shows up in the moment. I have seen the impacts this training in situations ranging from competing on the golf course, to life-or-death moments moving at the speed of sound.

Psychology can feel like it needs to be tackled, like a problem that needs to be solved. I’m here to tell you that you don’t need solving. My goal is to take some of the weight off, by learning psychological principles in a fun, digestible, and open way. So rather than solving problems, you get to experience your sport as it was meant to be: fun, challenging, and meaningful. I not only want to see you play better, I want to see you thrive in all aspects of life! Flexibility training is the perfect tool to do just that.