What I Do: MPC
What Do You Do: Mental Performance Competencies
“What do you do?” I often tell people that “I help others be their best selves by improving how their brain approaches sport and other facets of their lives.” While this is true, I want to dive deeper into what mental performance consultants (MPCs) truly do.
A More Familiar Field
One struggle that a sports psychologist or MPC faces is breaking away from perceptions of psychology, which still lean towards a person lying on a couch and just talking to the clinician about their problems. While this tool can be used, it is not what we do. Instead, I like to relate it to teaching and athletic coaching; for this example, I want to focus on athletics.
In athletics, whether you play a sport or just exercise, you’ve likely had a coach or trainer guide you. Coaches help you master foundational skills and combine them to achieve great things. These foundational movements are throwing, jumping, running, pushing, pulling, squatting, and moving on one leg. Then, once you’ve grasped these, we combine them into bigger skills with multiple pieces, such as a long jump in track. Finally, they help you decide what is important for your actions (i.e., a distance runner does not need to focus on the upper body like a thrower). Especially early on, it is common for athletes to want it all, and the coach can help you narrow in on what is most needed.
Sports Psychology
Just as a coach helps you master physical skills, an MPC focuses on mental skills. Based on the work of Durand-Bush et al (2023) and my own experience, here are 12 key competencies we work on:
● Motivation - The desire and drive to do something
● Confidence - Belief that something can be accomplished
● Resilience - Ability to bounce back from a failure
● Appraisal (My only addition) - Do you see events as threats or opportunities
● Self-awareness - Ability to recognize internal experiences and how you are reacting to things or feelings.
● Stress Management - how you handle and deal with stressful situations
● Emotion and Arousal Regulation - How we handle the highs and lows in our emotional state.
● Focus - we can hold attention to something and shift proper stimulus.
● Athlete-Coach Relationship - The ability to take coaching feedback and communicate with leadership.
● Leadership - The ability to guide people to their best performances and motivate them to be their best selves.
● Teamwork - One's ability to work with a group towards a common goal and fill the role you are assigned.
● Communication - Ability to use verbal and non-verbal cues to transmit information.
Alright, so those are the foundational skills, so now what? What do I do once I have learned what can be taught?
In simple terms, when the athletes or teams work with the MPCs, we start by assessing strengths and weaknesses in these foundational skills, like the strength coach testing maxes, speeds, and jump heights. Then we create personalized plans that help maintain or build the strengths while raising the weaknesses.
We do this by pulling on a science-based toolbox that each practitioner develops with specialties on different psychological skills, then weaving this science toolbox with the unique needs of each client that is worked with. For those who can afford long-term service and have the time, this often looks like a multi-week collaboration between the professional and the client. In other cases, it may be a single session or two where the professional does their best to teach specific skills that will hopefully make a difference for the client. Just like with a strength coach, you can have a well-thought-out and periodized plan or a few quick-hit drills that may compensate for an area of weakness, depending on your need.
Summary
So what is it that the MPC does?
An MPC helps identify and improve foundational mental skills crucial for an athlete’s performance. Our goal is to equip clients with tools to succeed independently, though we remain available for support.
If you still have questions, I will leave you with this: If you have used a personal trainer, sports coach, or strength coach to help you with your physical training blind spots, is it not worth talking with an MPC to see if there are blind spots in your mental game that could be improved?
Till next time, take a breath, go be the best you, and live your life.
Citations
Durand-Bush, N., Baker, J., van den Berg, F., Richard, V., & Bloom, G. (2023). The gold medal profile for sport psychology (GMP-SP). Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 35(4), 547–570. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/10413200.2022.2055224