Empower To Perform

What actually helps

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Nothing on this page is invented. Every technique here was named by one of the athletes interviewed, or comes from the sources listed at the end.

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Tell someone

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Athletes tend to keep stress to themselves, which only makes it grow. Saying it out loud to a coach, a family member, a teammate or a friend lifts a weight — and the other person often has advice, or at least reassurance, that you would not have reached alone.

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Work with a professional

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A sports psychologist or mental coach is trained for exactly this. Sakkari says working with one “completely changed the way I deal with intense moments”; Gusin's mental coach taught her to stop treating nerves as an enemy. Iakovakis, from an earlier generation, relied on his coaching team instead and notes that teammates who did work with psychologists coped better with pressure.

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Breathe

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The one technique every athlete mentioned independently. Slow, deliberate breathing before a start, used as a tool rather than a hope.

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Keep the routine identical

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A fixed warm-up, done the same way every time, and deliberate isolation from anything that breaks concentration. Iakovakis added spoken affirmations — you're ready, you've got this — repeated before every race.

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Rehearse it in your head first

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Gusin's method, taught by her mental coach: visualise the competition in detail before arriving, including everything that could go wrong — a coach giving directions you don't want, the crowd, a bad first attempt. When you get there, you have been there before.

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Control what you can control

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Focus on strategy and execution, not the result. The outcome depends on an opponent, a draw, a wind reading and a hundred other things you do not own; the warm-up and the race plan are yours.

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Sleep and eat properly

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Lack of sleep intensifies stress, and recovery routines help keep an athlete level. On nutrition the athletes are careful rather than certain: Gusin says plainly that she has not researched the link with anxiety specifically, only that her body and energy are worse without good food. That honesty is worth keeping in.

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Have another self

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The strongest idea in the project. If your whole identity is the athlete, then a bad competition is a verdict on you as a person. Gusin keeps “another Tatiana” — friends, a job, a life that has nothing to do with the high jump — and says that is what makes losing survivable. After the worst final of her career, in an Olympic Games, she went and celebrated with her friends anyway.

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After it goes wrong

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Give yourself time to feel it first. Then look at the race honestly: name what went wrong, name what went right — Gusin's rule is that even in a bad jump something worked, and that piece goes into the next one — and remember that every great athlete has bad days. Then start again.​​​

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