Unlocking your team’s potential with Brainspotting
An athlete's performance isn't just shaped by physical training and nutrition—it’s deeply influenced by mental health as well. While some are only beginning to recognize the importance of mental wellness, others are actively strengthening and developing it. By doing so, they experience significant improvements in focus, motivation, resilience, and ultimately, their overall performance.
Athletes often find that some situations reduce their energy, slow their reaction time, and increase the difficulty of focusing under pressure, but they only sense the physical limitations without realizing that it’s the mental response to a great amount of stress, anxiety, or trauma. When we start to recognize the importance and impact of mental health in our lives, we not only perform best and at our full potential, but we manage to cope with setbacks better and stay motivated through the toughest challenges.
Brainspotting is my main therapeutic approach to help athletes break through these mental barriers that have appeared due to a traumatic injury or an overwhelming emotional trigger that are impacting their overall performance.
What is Brainspotting and how does it benefit athletes?
Brainspotting is a therapeutic technique used to help athletes process and heal their emotional or mental blocks impacting their athletic output by finding the “brainspots” that hold these memories. Each brainspot stores the trauma, stress, and other unresolved emotions that are taking a negative toll on their ability to perform. To solve this, brainspotting is the guide for the individual into accessing these areas of the brain and processing these stored emotions to support their mental clarity and emotional resilience toward future situations.
In simple words, the impact of brainspotting is:
Enhance focus and clarity: By accessing the brainspots that have slowed down their performance and acknowledging the triggers, they will know how to handle their emotional response by staying at a deep level of concentration and performing their best under pressure.
Reduce anxiety and stress: They learn how to stay calm and focused during competitive times so that anxiety and stress no longer impact their performance like they used to.
Build emotional resilience: To help the athlete process and heal past emotional experiences so they can recover faster from setbacks.
Improve teamwork: When the team tries brainspotting it creates a new shared experience and supports their emotional health that improves communication, trust, and collaboration.
How Brainspotting supports team development
Brainspotting is not a therapeutic approach to be tried at home without an experienced practitioner, but once you start working with someone in the field the results for your team are limitless.
The individual sessions for athletes focus mostly on solving specific performance issues unique to the client, meanwhile, the group workshops and team-building activities that use brainspotting as a tool, strengthen their performance by enhancing their mental resilience and focus on and off the field.
As sports team coaches, you're already focused on optimizing your athletes' physical abilities and skill development. But as we know, mental resilience and emotional well-being are equally essential for peak performance. Athletes who face mental barriers—whether it's anxiety, stress, trauma, or performance blocks—can struggle to perform at their best, no matter how physically prepared they are.
Interested in starting your journey towards peak performance?