'A conversation with Dr Josephine Perry' - sports psychology and 'I can - the teenage athlete's guide to mental fitness'

In the final episode of Season 2, sports psychologist and author Dr Josephine Perry and Gordon MacLelland discuss sports psychology, the importance of mental skills and dig deeper into ‘I Can – The Teenage Athlete’s Guide to Mental Fitness.’

During the conversation they discuss amongst other things:

• The importance of mental health support for teenagers
• Creating a safe place for teenagers to share and note their feelings
• Children not being commodities
• The importance of positive conversations between parents and children
• Focussing on individual processes and values over scores and results
• Changing the narrative in organisations to be more process driven 
• The danger of comparisons
• Improving our ability to handle and recognise certain emotions and having appropriate coping mechanisms
• Confronting and having difficult conversations
• Identifying values at home and what is important to us and managing our conversations with our children to support these values
• Promoting the experiences of our children sporting journey over the outcomes
• The importance of children having autonomy over their sporting experience
• Parents ensuring they remain the parent and do not become another coach

Dr Josephine Perry is a Chartered Sport and Exercise Psychologist who founded and directs Performance in Mind, a consultancy integrating expertise in sport psychology and skills in communications. The consultancy supports athletes, stage performers and business leaders to develop the approaches, mental skills and strategies which will help them achieve their ambitions.

Josephine works helps her clients to overcome barriers to their success and wanting to feel more comfortable performing under pressure. Using a mixture of psycho-education and acceptance and commitment theory she works directly with high performers, is bought in to support teams, gives keynote speeches for corporates and sports companies and lectures in Sport Psychology at both the Open University and Roehampton University.

Josephine’s previous career was in media and communications so alongside seeing individuals for psychology support she is regularly commissioned to create compelling and engaging content for the media in the form of feature articles, white papers, research reports, expert comment, blog posts, podcast interviews and speeches. She has published four books to date: Performing under Pressure: Strategies for Sporting Success (Aug 2019), The Psychology of Exercise (Oct 2020), I Can: The Teenage Athlete’s Guide to Mental Fitness (April 2021) and The 10 Pillars of Success on Audible (August 2021)