Mental Health Strategies for Sports Perfrormance

At some point all of us as athletes have had a race where we have let our head rule our body and didn’t achieve our full potential, on that day. As part of our club long term athletic development programme we have organised a seminar to help address this. Niamh Connolly is a busy Cognitive Behavioural Therapist based in Dungarvan Co. Waterford. As a result of a growing waiting list in her private practice, and a rising interest in, and appetite for, CBT, she established ‘The Mind Gym’ in 2017. ‘The Mind Gym’ teaches how to overcome a variety of issues and challenges, to reach optimal mental fitness. Mental and physical health are two sides of the same coin – you can be in your best physical shape, but if your head is not in the right place, you won’t reach your full potential. Niamh’s aim is to demystify these mental struggles, and teach easy to use strategies that both identify the issues and improve the mindset. In an informative, but informal style, Niamh will help you understand how negative thinking patterns and performance anxiety can happen, along with demonstrating the clinically proven skills and techniques used to overcome them. As she says “our mind is our most important muscle” and she wants to share the best exercises to keep it fit and healthy!