Mental Performance Coaching – the disabled approach

I have been so so humbled to contribute a chapter accepted for publishing by Routlege, Psychology, Sport, and Disability: Lived Experiences within Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology.

We are very much in the beginning stages of writing but while I was working on my chapter this evening I really felt like I was spitting some pure fire – so in it’s compeltely raw and unedited form (I anticipate a ton of editing a revisions) I wanted to share a part of my specific experience and learning as a disabled sport psychology practitioner:

It is important as a practitioner that you take care of yourself. At the graduate level we consider the ethics of self-care and it’s a part of my regular practice to seek out insight from other MPCs as well as have regular clinical mental health sessions with a sport psychologist. One ethical obligation I’ve learned as a disabled MPC is the non-negotiable of being anti-ableist, starting with oneself. For me, this means not neglecting my physical health, including my residual limb, sound side leg, and prosthesis on top of any other medical needs I have. In sport, and society it is too easy to be swept away in the urgency and speed of professional sport. Working every day and wearing burnout like a badge of honor. There is no nobility in needless suffering, and if you do it at the cost of your own functioning than you are failing both yourself and your athletes in the care you can provide. Not only is it responsible to take care of yourself, but it is also the demonstration of how we want our athletes to care for themselves. Enforcing a boundary at work is a silent signal of choosing my health and performance over the whims of things outside of myself and my control. As a disabled person, it is too easy to agree with society about being a burden. That your medical appointments are too often, too inconvenient. That your vulnerabilities need to constantly be an uplifting source of inspiration and strength to constantly “push through” rather than slow down and meet yourself where you are at. When we betray ourselves, we are telling our athletes to ignore themselves as well. And rarely, if ever does self-sabotage result in elite, sustainable high performance.

Another pillar of my coaching philosophy comes directly from the Self Determination Theory of Motivation (Standage and Ryan, 2020). The more competent I am in who I am, the more stable and authentic I can be in my presence. Since I am the vessel of my work, the better and truer I show up, it shows in the work. The more connected I feel to my work, the more I connect and am rejuvenated by the athletes with whom I work. Most importantly – the paradox of mental performance, we want to teach our athletes all the mental skills and reframes so they essentially no longer need us. Just like how disability management is a lesson in autonomy, we want our athletes to demonstrate healthy autonomy. How can we teach that if we are constantly depending on the external perceptions of ourselves having it together at the cost of ignoring our own needs? Being autonomous is choosing the right thing on your own, not the thing we think everyone else wants for or expects of us. It’s not an easy job, especially with the additional variable of being disabled. The beauty in all of the work however, is how often I see it as a mirror. Both my experience and the work with the athletes reflecting off of each other all the time. When I learn about and from them, there are parts I learn about and from myself. I have become a better practitioner when I have been better about embracing and caring for my disability just as much as I embrace and care about others. Our greatest expression of sport never comes from suppressing parts of ourselves, especially the vulnerable ones – but rather letting them out to breathe, to feel the sun, and to be fully present in every part of ourselves. It’s when our weakest parts can still show up and function at an elite level – that’s truly high performance.