Sport Psychology is taken too literally. The field sport psychology is deceiving. Common phrases often heard related to this field are “sport psychology is only useful for sports,” or “sport psychology is only useful for elite athletes.”

We need to view sport psychology from a broader perspective. By taking a broader view of sport psychology, we can see that sport psychology is performance psychology. This means that performance enhancement skills used in sport psychology can be applied to many fields to increase performance. Sport psychology techniques used outside the context of sport are known as mental skills or performance enhancement skills.  Performance enhancement skills also known as mental skills have been used in non-sport settings to help business professionals and individuals in the military improve their performance.

Some examples of issues that a performance enhancement consultant helps with are: goal-setting, motivation, confidence, self-talk, transferring performance from practice to competition, injury prevention/recovery, and burnout prevention/recovery.