Christmas is one of my favourite times of the year. Christmas carols, catching up with family and friends, and lots of yummy food all contribute to the wonderful festivities! Unfortunately, it is often a time when good habits disappear out the window and the realisation of unkept past New Year’s resolutions create the onset of […]

The Mental Notes team is often trying to develop new and better ways of helping our clients achieve their sporting goals. This is a good thing as it means that we are constantly looking to improve our performance as sport and performance psychologists in the same way that our athletes are looking to improve their […]

Seven Days in Utopia by David L. Cook is a book written about golf for all levels of golfer however there is no doubt that sportsmen and women from a variety of sports and ability levels would appreciate some of the key messages of the book. It is a fictitious story of a professional golfer […]

One the many upsides of participating in sport is that sport provides a great training ground for life. Sport involves fun and hard work, success and disappointment, as well as joy and sadness. Understanding how to be successful in sport sets anyone up to be more successful in life. Whilst being successful in sport requires […]

Given we are deep into Olympic selection for many sports, it is an appropriate time to consider the opportunities that life offers outside of sport, to develop perspective but also to help sport performance. I have just finished reading Rafael Nadal’s book, Rafa: My Story, and I cannot stop talking about many of the valuable […]

Higher levels of Emotional Intelligence (E.I.) have been associated with superior performance by teams in business for some time and various coaching programs have been aimed at developing skills and abilities in this area.  Whilst E.I. has been thought to have a similarly positive impact in sport, the empirical evidence to support this has been […]

I recently finished reading Chris McCormack’s book, “I’m here to win: A World Champion’s blueprint for peak performance”.  The title grabbed me.  I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but I am glad I did on this occasion because I wasn’t disappointed.  I found this book enlightening, reflective, and awe-inspiring.  Chris is […]

Do you want to be an iconoclast?  Do you know what an iconoclast is?  Do you want to do something that others say can’t be done?  Because if you do, you are an iconoclast or are at least aspiring to be iconoclastic. Iconoclast by Gregory Berns is a page-turning tour de force that (unintentionally) cheekily […]

Every moment of every day we make choices.  We choose whether to get up when the alarm goes off or hit the snooze button.  We choose which path to take to get to work or training.  We choose what to eat for lunch and when.  We choose how hard we work/train. Many of these choices […]

First published in 1946, Man’s Search for Meaning by Vicktor E. Frankl has now sold over three million copies worldwide. In his bestseller, Frankl details his experiences in the concentration camp during World War II and how his observations of prisoners’ reactions (including his own) lead to the ground breaking theory, logotherapy. This theory helped […]