beyond the toolkit: supporting the human behind the athlete
Learning when to pause, reset, and look at the whole picture
Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of conversations in the podcast world and sports psychology circles about “staying in your lane.” There’s this idea floating around that we should draw a sharp, rigid line between mental performance work (focus, confidence, mental skills) and mental health treatment (anxiety, burnout, identity)—and that if a performance client shows signs of deeper struggle, you should “refer them out” to a therapist for mental health work.
As a licensed therapist who works with athletes, executives, and high performers, I have to be honest: that’s just not how human beings work.
Of course, if a practitioner does not have clinical training, referring out is exactly what they should do. Ethical boundaries are non-negotiable, and a performance coach without a mental health background should never try to treat clinical depression or deep-seated trauma.
But for the athlete, being passed back and forth between different professionals can feel incredibly fragmenting. Lived experience rarely fits neatly into organized boxes or tidy categories. When a client meets with me at Unlocked Counseling, I don’t see a “performance entity” that I need to keep separate from their actual life. I see a whole person.
To clarify: I don’t assume that every performance dip is a sign of a deeper psychological issue. If someone comes to me simply needing a practical strategy to lock in their focus before a race or handle high-stakes pressure, that’s exactly what we focus on. I don’t try to look for hidden problems where they don’t exist, and I don't ask people to compartmentalize their lives.
Many incredible practitioners do excellent work helping athletes explore identity, navigate values, and practice self-compassion. Those frameworks are highly valuable. But when an athlete is dealing with a true clinical struggle, those tools can sometimes feel fragmented or mechanical if they aren't backed by deep therapeutic space. There is a profound difference between applying a tool to a problem and doing the deep, messy work of processing clinical anxiety, deep grief, or burnout sitting just beneath the surface.
Because of my professional training as a licensed clinical therapist and my own firsthand experience as a competitive endurance athlete, I do not pass my clients off to someone else when things get real (unless they are out of my scope of competence). We can move fluidly between performance tools and deeper clinical work because it’s all connected.
To share some real-world examples of the kind of work I do:
(With details changed to protect confidentiality)
1. The Executive Athlete: Fusing Identity with Achievement
I worked with an incredibly successful executive and endurance athlete who came to me for help with focus, consistency, and confidence. On paper, it was a standard performance request.
But as we dug in, it became clear that his high-performer role in the workplace was the only place he felt emotionally safe. His identity was entirely fused with achievement, and it was choking out the rest of his life.
The goal wasn’t to make him stop being a high performer—that’s one of his strengths, and it’s not going away. The goal was to build flexibility so he could leverage that strength in healthy, life-giving ways. Over time, he loosened his rigid attachment to achievement, made actual space for relationships and recovery, and finally fixed a chronic, years-long sleep issue. When he allowed himself to be a full human being, he actually found more enjoyment in his sport, which almost always leads to higher performance anyway.
2. The Adolescent Athlete: More Than Just "Toughening Up"
I love working with teenage athletes because they are often passionate, excited, and filled with idealism (and honestly, I can be the same way!).
Often, parents reach out because their kid isn’t performing the way they expect. From the outside, it looks like a confidence or focus issue. “They just need some mental skills.”
Sometimes, yes. But more often, sport is just the stage where everything else becomes visible. Underneath that performance dip, we often find anxiety, perfectionism, intense academic pressure, family dynamics, or neurodivergence like ADHD.
If we only hand a teenage athlete a performance toolkit, we send a dangerous message: “You just need to try harder or toughen up.” When what they actually need to hear first is: “There is a lot on your plate right now, and it makes sense that you’re struggling.”
But validation is just the starting point—not the end goal. I completely understand that parents are looking for real improvement, and we don't ignore the performance goals. The actual work is helping the athlete unpack that pressure so they can manage the anxiety, quiet the perfectionism, and look at their sport as a source of joy rather than a high-stakes test. By building that solid mental foundation, the actual performance skills—like focus, imagery, and routines—become much more effective. It allows the athlete to actually achieve high performance, but in a way that protects their well-being and longevity in the sport.
3. The Injured Athlete: Navigating Forced Transition and Depression
I worked with a competitive runner whose career was abruptly ended by a severe injury. For years, running hadn’t just been her sport—it was her primary tool for managing her mental health. We often hear the phrase "running is my therapy," but this case highlighted the natural limits of that approach.
When running was no longer an option, the buffer she relied on to manage her stress vanished, and she was suddenly faced with heavy life challenges that sport could no longer help her offset. She was left trying to navigate clinical depression while simultaneously trying to “force” herself to fall in love with cycling, hoping to quickly replace that missing outlet.
If we had treated her challenge purely as a performance issue, the goal would have been to optimize her cross-training or fix her motivation. Simple reminders to practice self-compassion or improve her self-talk would have been well-meaning, but they would have missed the source of the issue entirely.
The reality was much more complex. She needed a space to grieve the loss of her career, learn how to manage depression without her primary coping mechanism, and address the personal stressors that were compounding the weight of it all. By holding space for both the practical transition and the deeper therapeutic work, she was able to process the grief instead of just trying to out-train it. Like anything we are forced to let go of before we are ready, she will likely navigate the loss of her running career for a long time. But now, she can embrace her new chapter alongside that grief, creating space for whatever comes next.
A Recent Reality Check of My Own
I don’t just see this play out in my clients; I’ve been living it myself lately.
As an avid long-distance runner, I’ve been navigating some scary, ongoing heart-related symptoms. While I am still seeking medical treatment for some remaining unknowns, the current theory is that a stubborn virus caused some extreme heart rate spikes. Combined with a period of minimal recovery, it ultimately forced me to bail early on a recent marathon I had trained incredibly hard for.
It was a massive wake-up call. I have a deeply ingrained, lifelong tendency to keep pushing the envelope of what I can tolerate. I am incredibly good at underestimating my cumulative load and ignoring signs that I need to back off. I tell my own clients all the time that “stress is stress,” yet I still struggled to integrate that lesson when life stressors piled up and my body was screaming at me to slow down.
When I sat down with my own sports psychology coach, the conversations weren't about “fixing my mindset” or grinding through the block. They were about learning to listen to my body earlier, taking its signals seriously, and shifting my relationship with rest.
Gratefully, I am no longer in that scary zone. While I am still figuring it all out, I’m currently running without a training plan—intentionally stepping back from structure and big expectations for this season. It’s a daily practice of finding that balance, paying close attention to my body's signals while I reset, so that when I am ready to return to structured training and big goals, I can do it from a place of true, sustainable health. This wasn’t just a performance challenge or an isolated medical issue. It was a core belief issue that directly impacted both.
MY Unlocked Counseling Philosophy
My philosophy is simple: Support the human behind the athlete.
Sometimes that means working on race anxiety and mental skills. Sometimes it means talking about and working through burnout, grief, relationships, or perfectionism. Most of the time, it’s a fluid mix of both.
You can’t optimize the performer if you ignore the human. Real, lasting shifts happen when we look at the whole picture—not just in sport, but in life.
Want to dive into this depth of work?
I partner with athletes and high performers virtually, offering online counseling that holds space for both your highest ambitions and your full human experience. If you’re ready to move past surface-level quick fixes and look at the whole picture, click the button below to schedule a free consultation
