Sound Mind Sound Performance

23/09/2025

🌿 Why choose an Australian industry-trained massage therapist? 🌿

Not all massage therapists are the same — training and standards matter. By booking with an industry-trained therapist, you’re ensuring:
✅ Safe, evidence-based treatment tailored to your needs
✅ A deep understanding of anatomy, injury management & rehabilitation
✅ Recognition by health funds (where applicable)
✅ The peace of mind that you’re in the hands of a qualified professional

Your body deserves more than a “quick rub.” It deserves expert care. 💆‍♂️💆‍♀️

Book with an industry-trained therapist today and feel the difference.

20/09/2025

In my latest LinkedIn newsletter, I break down how trauma-informed leadership and Adverse Childhood Experience Insights transforms team dynamics, why athletes don’t buy in when dysregulated, and why the best coaches sequence regulate → relate → reason before strategy.

Why Cliques, Cultural Clashes, and Communication Break Teams Before Talent Does When you walk into a locker room, you can feel it before the first drill begins. The tension.

19/09/2025

Track sensation Jessica Hull has broken new ground for Australia, collecting the country’s first ever medal in the 1500m at a World Athletics Championships by holding on for bronze to secure the fourth global medal of her career.

18/09/2025

Favouritism isn’t just a locker-room drama. It’s lost contracts, fractured trust, and millions in wasted athlete investment.

In my latest newsletter, I explore why athlete–coach relationships are the hidden ROI factor every CEO should be tracking, and how trauma-informed coaching can prevent burnout, bias, and brand risk.

Read the full breakdown here

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-favouritism-breaks-locker-room-hidden-cost-od9bc

Jordan Ellis, a 19-year-old Rugby prospect, lost trust in his coach after watching favouritism override performance. Within six weeks, he was disengaged, considering transfer, and questioning his career.

16/09/2025

At , I sat in on a session that put the scale of our challenge into perspective..

Approximately 46 million youth and high school athletes in the U.S. vastly outnumber college, , and combined, yet this group remains the most underserved when it comes to psychological skill development.

The speakers showed how are being used to introduce skills like , , , and . From Beth Brown’s Adventures with Divot & Swish series to Petitpas & Van Raalte’s Rudy’s Secret CAP and Emma’s Big Adventure, the evidence was clear..
who start young with carry them into their , , and eventually their .

• Kristine Enderle, Editorial Director at APA’s Magination Press, shared how they’ve built an entire catalogue of self-help books for kids and teens.
• Beth Brown introduced her Adventures with Divot & Swish series (2021, 2022), which uses storytelling to model courage and confidence.
• Judy Van Raalte & Al Petitpas discussed Rudy’s Secret CAP (2009) and Emma’s Big Adventure (2019). Rudy’s “secret cap” helps him manage anger by staying Cool, asking for help, and thinking positively. Emma’s story covers moving schools, sport challenges, finding social support, and discovering personal passion.

For me, the message was undeniable, if we wait until athletes hit to introduce mental skills, we’re already too late. , codes, and governing bodies must think in terms of long-term system building, not just short-term .

has a chance to lead here. We talk about and participation, but true will mean embedding mental from the youngest age groups, in formats they can actually engage with.

That’s the standard we will be bringing into every conversation with elite clubs in the coming days.

Links & Resources:
- Adventures with Divot & Swish
https://adventureswithdivotandswish.com/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

- Divot & Swish in the Ozark Mountains: The Superpower of Confidence https://jenkinsgroupinc.com/adventures-with-divot-and-swish-in-the-ozark-mountains-the-superpower-of-confidence/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

- Rudy’s Secret CAP https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Rudy_s_Secret_CAP.html?id=VLCOQQAACAAJ&redir_esc=y

- A Framework for Planning Youth Sport Programs That Foster Psychosocial Development (Petitpas, Cornelius, Van Raalte & Jones, 2005)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232538265_A_Framework_for_Planning_Youth_Sport_Programs_That_Foster_Psychosocial_Development

- Youth Development Through Sport: It’s All About Relationships (Petitpas, Cornelius, Van Raalte, chapter from “Positive Youth Development Through Sport”, 2007) https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203944783-15/youth-development-sport-relationships-albert-petitpas-allen-cornelius-judy-van-raalte?utm_source=chatgpt.com

09/09/2025

New Newsletter


When Coaching Misses the Mark

This week’s piece draws on new research published in Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health by Cushion & Townsend (2023). The study examined how sport coach mentors perceive trust and how they actively work to foster it in their relationships with athletes. Through 18 in-depth interviews, the authors found that trust isn’t something that happens by chance, it’s deliberately created. Mentors described strategies like reducing hierarchy, showing reliability, being authentic about mistakes, and empowering athletes. These insights give us a practical blueprint for re-thinking how feedback, criticism, and consistency shape performance.


When Coaching Misses the Mark

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/coaching-culture-matters-traumainformedathlete-ypboc

08/09/2025

isn’t just physical, it’s psychological.
Every , every setback, every “why can’t I recover faster?” moment eats away at and .

Most athletes are handed rehab exercises… but no one gives them the tools to:
- Reframe the mental side of pain
- Build resilience when recovery feels slow
- Use science-backed to actually speed healing

That’s why we created the 36-Page &Injury Guidebook - a complete system that fuses , , and practical strategies to help you stronger, not just “get by.”
Inside, you’ll learn:
- The science of how your brain processes pain
- that put you back in control
- Step-by-step strategies for faster, more effective recovery
- Resilience techniques to stop pain from defining you

And because mindset is everything, we’ve added a section on as a Performance Tool.
One phrase at the right moment can shift your and your game.

Don’t let pain set your limits. Equip yourself with the strategies elite performers use to rise above it.

Grab your copy today. Your comeback starts here.

This 36-page guidebook offers a comprehensive approach to managing pain and injuries, blending scientific knowledge with practical reflective exercises. Designed to help athletes and individuals recover faster and more effectively, this guide provides insights into the psychology of pain, strategies...

03/09/2025

This isn’t just another newsletter.

The Trauma-Informed Athlete

This is a weekly plan for tackling the stressors that undermine athlete well-being, including anxiety, burnout, identity struggles, and esports-specific pressures.

Each issue will include:
✔️ peer-reviewed research
✔️ practical coaching applications
✔️ reflections from my own experience working with athletes.

The goal is straightforward: to equip coaches, researchers, and support staff with clear evidence and real-world insights, enabling them to respond to athletes more effectively.

If you are an athlete or work in sport psychology, coaching, or athlete support, I invite you to subscribe. If you know someone who would benefit, please share this with your network.

🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/105357907/admin/page-posts/published/

19/07/2025

Independant Living Skills for athletes at its finest. 😅🤣 A creative player is an unexpected player right?

18/07/2025

Jayden, 15 – Out-of-Home Care Athlete

Jayden is a talented rugby player who lives in a residential care home. She was removed from her biological family at age 9 due to and and has since been placed with multiple carers. Jayden struggles with trust, keeps people at a distance, and rarely speaks about her past. But on the field, she comes alive. is where she feels in control. praise her, teammates respect her, and for 80 minutes, she’s not a “kid in care” she’s just Jayden, the .

She trains hard, eats well for recovery and energy, and avoids events to make every game. Her self-worth depends entirely on performance. If she plays well, she feels good. If she misses a tackle, she shuts down. She’s terrified of not because of pain, but because she fears losing her .

Jayden has no real plan for life after sport. She doesn’t see herself as anything other than “the athlete.” have noticed that she becomes withdrawn and even during off-season or after losses. She , saying, “I don’t need it, I just need to win.”

Without intentional support, Jayden’s strong athletic identity could become a risk. If she’s injured or dropped from the team, the fallout could trigger a breakdown, because no one’s helped her build identity beyond the game. I've seen it first hand. Many athletes see their whole as being tied to their sport. They often feel proud and fulfilled when they do well in their , and they spend a lot of time and effort training and competing. This strong sense of being “an athlete” is called athletic identity (Brewer et al., 1993).

The more someone sees as their main , the more their whole life can start to revolve around it, how they eat, who they hang out with, how they spend their time. This can lead to high self-confidence and great performance while they’re competing (Tušak et al., 2005), but it can also be a problem if it becomes their only identity.

If don’t get a chance to explore who they are outside of , like other , , or , it can be hard for them to adjust when sport is taken away. Lemmons (2019) points out that this can be when they and aren’t prepared for life after sport. That’s why it’s so important for athletes to build a strong sense of who they are beyond just being an athlete.

18/03/2025

"Live from the Sydney School Championships, representing Cherrybrook Tech. Focus. Flow. Full send. The mind leads, the body follows.