There’s been a lot of commentary in the media recently about the lack of support that elite athletes receive when it comes to their mental health. At Mental Notes Consulting, we are, and have always been passionate about athlete health and wellbeing alongside their performance.
Part of our role in working with athletes and their coaches is to encourage them to have a healthy respect for their brain.
If you look after your brain then it looks after you.
You’ll notice we’re sharing articles and videos that highlight the way you train your brain to make the most of your brain’s capacity and to keep it healthy.
We will continue to share our expertise, insight, and learning about our brain to help athlete performance as well as health and well-being.
Our face-to-face work with individual athletes involves conversations and discussions. Simply put, it involves talking. The way we work means that there is the opportunity to think out loud, share ideas and concerns, and to learn skills to promote life-long healthy habits for your brain.
Why does talking help? Talking helps you to…
- Understand yourself better and understand other people.
- Reflect on what feelings are evoked and why.
- Decide how to manage these feelings or take action to alleviate them as well as develop ways to respond in a more proactive way.
- Reduce tendencies to hold negative thoughts in without processing them.
- Learn how not to get swallowed up by events and to form a game plan to deal with them.
- Get problems out in the open rather than turning a problem around and around in your head going nowhere.
- Know you’re taking action and that you have a built-in support structure that you can access.
- Bring about change at the level of the brain through identifying habitual thoughts.
What can you expect from talking? You can expect to…
- Set aside regular time and space for you to talk about your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours and their influence on your life
- Experience a respectful, dependable, non-judgmental, and confidential working relationship.
- Understand your feelings and behaviour better and, if you want to, to change your behaviour or the way you think about things.
- Develop the tools to help you to make these changes for the present and into the future.
Those of you who know us already know we are fans of talking. Our role is to listen to you talk and help you achieve your goals in sport and life. Talking is a way that we can help you to value and nurture your brain’s health to promote healthy high achievers.
Dr Andrea Furst | Sport & Exercise Psychologist CPsychol HCPC Registered
andrea@mentalnotespsych.com. Andrea is based in London and provides both face-to-face and virtual sport psychology services to athletes worldwide.