The first thing you learn working in professional sport is that nothing stays still.

Players come and go. Coaches are hired, fired, or promoted. Entire staffs can turn over between the start and the end of a game, as happened recently in European football.

And yet, through all of that, the job of the sport psychologist remains the same: help human beings perform, connect, and thrive under pressure.

But that’s harder than it sounds when you’re constantly starting from scratch.

When I consulted one organization a few years ago, I was one of a cadre of providers brought in - but the team had used several different groups of providers over the last few years.

Players had heard every motivational speech imaginable. The head coach was at his wits end with starting over. Players even joked about being the “breathing guy” or the “gratitude guy,” as though they’d heard and seen it all.

That’s when I realized: in high-turnover environments, trust is the first performance metric.

Everything else depends on it.

The Mind Room

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