Channel your inner elite athlete at work with these tips from Olympic mental performance consultants

If you’re tuning in to the Paris Olympics, you’re no doubt marvelling at the physical feats of the athletes: the ability to flip through the air and stick a landing, slice through the water with powerful-but-precise strokes, navigate a bike across slick pavement at speed.
There is another skill set these athletes have honed, however, that’s not immediately obvious. It’s what’s known as “the Gold Medal profile” – a set of mental performance competencies that research has shown “underpins podium performance.” According to this evidence-based framework, if you are able to master things like resilience, confidence, self-awareness, stress management, emotion regulation, teamwork and communication, you’re setting yourself up for your best possible chance at one day wearing a medal around your neck.
Because having your head in the game really does matter, many Olympic teams work with certified mental performance consultants (CMPCs), sports and performance psychology professionals who’ve been specifically trained to help athletes with the mental aspects of elite sport. Got performance anxiety? Suffered a setback? Need help finding motivation? That’s where these CMPCs come in.
And while most of us aren’t likely to represent our nation in the highest echelons of competitive sport, there’s a good chance we’ve encountered these same challenges in our work lives.
“There are so many transferable skills,” says Christie Gialloreto, a CMPC who works for Canadian Sport Institute Pacific and who is contracted to the Canadian rowing team to provide support during the Paris Olympics.
“If you look at the Gold Medal Profile, those are all fundamental competencies we want in the workplace. What’s your motivation? Do you have confidence? Are you resilient?”
In the spirit of Olympic excellence, we’ve tapped two CMPCs for their tips on how we can channel an elite athlete’s mindset into our own (non-sporting) success.
“Most people in our North American work force think that when it comes to work, more is always better. People are encouraged and rewarded for doing more all the time, when in fact, we may be more productive when we engage in more rest and recovery time,” says Lori Dithurbide, a CMPC currently in Paris with the Canadian women’s gymnastics team.
“Endurance athletes, for example, will go into a rest period of training in the days leading up to a big race to maximize their performance and be fresh for race day.”
Mental performance works the same way, she says. “If we do not give our brain and nervous system time to rest and recover, it will not be able to perform at its best consistently,” she says. “Just a 10- to 15-minute mental break can make a significant impact on both your health and productivity.”
To rest your brain, go for a walk (bonus points if it’s in nature) and spend time with people who make you happy. But don’t mistake scrolling on your phone for a real mental break.
One of the biggest things Christie Gialloreto focuses on with athletes is self-awareness; parsing out the cause-and-effect connections between feelings and outcomes, the mind and the body.
“You can’t just take a deep breath without paying attention to what the mind is doing as well,” she says. “You can’t just change your thinking without attending to the body.”
If you’re walking into a big meeting and you’re full of nerves, for example, she recommends pausing outside the room and doing a quick “mind body” check.
“How’s your thinking? How’s your breathing? We work to get those [aspects] into a really healthy space so you can walk into that room feeling like, ‘I’ve got this,’” she says.
Because of toxic societal norms that teach women to be filled with self-doubt and punish us for being “too sure” of ourselves, women tend to struggle more with confidence than men, notes Ms. Dithurbide.
“So, I would always encourage women to engage in skills or strategies that would increase and improve confidence. This can be different for each person, but focusing on your accomplishments and what you can do as opposed to what you think you can’t do is a good place to start,” she says.
Setting small goals each day using a to-do list can help you keep track of how many things you are accomplishing.
“That can be a simple way to get momentum started on your confidence,” Ms. Dithurbide says.
Ms. Gialloreto encourages women to build resilience by remembering how they’ve weathered past setbacks or triumphed over previous challenges.
“Working with younger athletes, we’ll work on a very simple ‘red light, green light’ model,” she says. “Tell me about a green light experience and a red light experience. What were the differences between them? And in that red light experience, what did you learn from it? How did you recover from it?”
At the heart of this is self-reflection, she says, which can lead to unpacking some of the deeper reasons behind, say, wanting to quit your sport … or your job.
“We can start to break [those reasons] down, and understand what we can do about them,” says Ms. Gialloreto, who recommends journaling and speaking to a professional as two ways to do this. “We’re taking a closer look at some of the negative core beliefs that you might have about yourself or your experiences.”
When it comes to managing stress, Ms. Gialloreto talks about “going to the centre of the tornado,” which is essentially about finding calm in the chaos.
She’s a big fan of all the usual suspects – meditation, mindfulness, exercise – but she’s also aware that we don’t always have time for that.
In stressful moments, she recommends trying an exercise she gives her athletes when they’re trying to squeeze self-care into their schedules: bathroom breathing.
“Put a little sticky note in your bathroom that says, ‘Breathe,’ and every time you go in there, take 10 deep breaths.”
It’s a small way to slow down and reset, she explains. “It’s a way to drip in self-care throughout the day.”
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