Mindset Wrap-Up

Consulting Considerations

As we look back at the month and fortifying our knowledge, a few considerations are worth mentioning:

• Taking a multi-disciplinary approach helps us deliver more impactful messages and training to meet our clients needs

• Reflecting on our personal beliefs towards high performance can help us better organize and establish a core mission/foundation to our work

• Our personal beliefs and our knowledge is what creates our own unique training methods

THE IMPACT ON CONSULTING

In 2011, I had just moved home from Arizona and set up my first college meeting to establish a consulting practice in the Twin Cities area. I remember making a few binders with summary documents in them (all Microsoft Word mind you…the days of Canva were not established yet). The individuals in the room included:

• Assistant Football Coaches

• Athletic Director of Student-Athlete wellness

They were intrigued by the idea of sport psychology, but weren’t sure what it was quite about. My “in” if you will was that I was a former student-athlete in the conference and reached to one of my old coaches. I proceeded to walk them through “mental skills training” and discussed its overall benefits.

I was told the following:

“Self-Talk could be interesting…these are smart kids, so I think they have a handle on some of the other stuff. We definitely think they can benefit from some of this, but we would just need to think on how we could make this work”

Of course, it didn’t go anywhere, but I mention that story for this. At that time, I was one year out of graduate school. No philosophy, no organization of my knowledge sets other than the big mental skills concepts I learned in school.

THE PATH AHEAD

As you look to elevate your impact, continue to balancing your beliefs and consume knowledge across multiple disciplines of psychology to establish your “brand/version” of training. Ultimately, it will also help you establish a more systematic intake/assessment process to set up, monitor, and evaluate your methods.

Furthermore - it will change how you talk about what you do to leaders…helping them buy into you and your approach to the work. Helping you navigate work from a connection and relationship standpoint vs. a high level review of an abstract field (which I may have mentioned a time or two in these conversations).