Mental Training Lab
Master your mental game with the Mental Training Lab, hosted by Pete Kadushin. With 15 years of coaching experience and a PhD in performance psychology, Pete digs deep each episode to provide practical tools and expert insights so you can perform your best when it matters most. Enhance your focus, harness stress, and overcome challenges whether you’re an athlete, leader, or high-performer. Subscribe to learn how to elevate your game in work, play, and life.
Mental Training Lab
Stop Trying to Fix Athletes: Dr. Kate Bennett on Love, Psychological Safety, and Mental Performance
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In this episode of The Mental Training Lab, I sit down with sport psychologist and three-time national champion Dr. Kate Bennett, founder of Full Send Consulting, to explore one of the most powerful and often misunderstood drivers of performance: genuine human connection.
Kate’s work sits at the intersection of athlete well-being, mental performance, and transformational coaching. Heavily influenced by Jerry Lynch’s Way of Champions and Brené Brown’s research on shame, scarcity, and vulnerability, Kate helps athletes, teams, and coaches build cultures where people feel seen, valued, and loved for who they are.
We talk about why connection and mattering are more than “soft extras.” They are core performance drivers. We explore how listening without immediately fixing can create real transformation, why psychological safety makes courageous risk-taking possible, and how love in high-performance environments often looks like accountability, honest conversations, and a willingness to go into hard places together.
If you’re a coach, practitioner, athlete, or leader trying to build a culture where people can perform at a high level without burning out, this episode offers practical “marching orders”: listen more deeply, model vulnerability, create safety, recognize people for how they show up, and build the kind of belonging that helps excellence emerge.
Learn about Kate’s work at fullsendconsulting.co.
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This show is produced and edited by the team at Palm Tree Pod Co.