Good Neighbor Podcast: Colorado Springs
Bringing together local businesses and neighbors of Colorado Springs. Good Neighbor Podcast hosted by Tony Hills helps residents discover and connect with your local business owners in and around Colorado Springs, Colorado.
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Good Neighbor Podcast: Colorado Springs
EP #97: The Mental Game: How Sports Psychology Enhances Performance Beyond Fixing Problems
What makes Trent Claypool with Summit Sport Psychology LLC a good neighbor?
Peak athletic performance isn't just about physical training—it's equally about what happens in your mind. Trent Claypool, founder of Summit Sport Psychology LLC, joins us to reveal how mental performance training can transform not just athletic achievement but entire lives.
Claypool brings a powerful dual perspective as both a clinical psychologist with 15 years of experience and a sports psychology specialist who has worked with elite athletes for the past decade. His journey began with helping athletes address mental health challenges like anxiety and depression, then evolved into optimizing performance through specialized mental techniques. As he explains, "Sports psychology is about enhancing performance, not just fixing issues."
One of the most eye-opening moments comes when Trent dismantles common misconceptions about mental training. The mind isn't static; it's remarkably adaptable through neuroplasticity. Mental strength isn't something you're simply born with—it can be developed through consistent practice, just like physical strength. This revelation transforms how we think about performance psychology, making it accessible to anyone committed to improvement.
Trent's personal story adds profound depth to his professional expertise. At 15, he experienced devastating loss when his best friend died by suicide, followed by the Columbine tragedy. Rather than being defined by trauma, Trent channeled these experiences into post-traumatic growth, developing resilience that now informs his approach with athletes facing their own challenges. His unique combination of clinical expertise with performance psychology creates a comprehensive approach that addresses both immediate performance goals and deeper psychological well-being.
Ready to discover how mental training could transform your performance? Visit summitsportpsychology.com to schedule a free 15-minute consultation with Trent and take the first step toward unlocking your full potential.
To learn more about Summit Sport Psychology LLC go to:
https://summitsportpsychology.com/
Summit Sport Psychology LLC
719-428-1200
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Tony Hills.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. Are you in need of a great sports psychologist? One might be closer than you think. Today I have the pleasure of introducing our good neighbor, trent Claypool, with Summit Sport Psychology LLC.
Speaker 3:Trent, how's it going, yeah, doing really well. Thank you for asking.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Hey, we're excited to have you on the show. We're learning to learn about your business, so tell us about your business.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I run and operate a business called Summit Sport Psychology and really our focus is on clinical psychology and mental performance training. So I have a background as a clinical psychologist for about the last 15 years and for the last 10 years I've been working specifically with athletes, initially starting off and helping athletes get their mental health needs met. So if an athlete had a mental health condition like anxiety, depression, PTSD, trauma, reaction, injury on the field, something like that, I would help them. But then I've also morphed that into doing more of the traditional sports psychology and performance enhancement, where we not only look at helping people recover from, you know, say, a mental health condition, but we actually ask the question of like, how do we help this person perform optimally, live the best life that they can live and perform at a high level consistently? And what's the mental game look like to do that?
Speaker 2:Okay, that's awesome. How did you get into this business?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I had known early in high school that from some of my own experiences that being a therapist or a psychologist was interesting to me, and so I went to the undergrad at the University of Wyoming and then went to graduate school here locally in Colorado Springs at the Colorado School of Professional Psychology, and I thought initially I wanted to be a family therapist because I like the idea of working with families. But as I went through and matriculated through grad school I started to have an interest in working with kids and adolescents and young adults psychologist and then also working on some really cool projects to promote cultures of sexual respect and sexual violence on college campuses. And all of that started merging with doing some liaison work with the Department of Athletics at UCCS, including eight straight years as being the team sports psychologist for the women's cross-country team who, if you don't know, is kind of perennially ranked at least in the top five or six in the country. Sometimes they're even up on the podium.
Speaker 3:And yeah, they've integrated mental training and sports psychology as one of their core principles and I've been been fortunate enough to be the person that gets to go with them on that journey, and so getting to do that work really helped me. See, you know this vision of launching my private practice, which I've done since 2000, I think 2020. So for the past five years I've been doing this thing on my own. Probably about 30% of my clients are just like traditional therapy clients, but the other 70% is that sport and performance psychology.
Speaker 2:Okay, what are some myths or misconceptions in your industry?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think the biggest one is that sports psychology is only for athletes who have problems, and one of the things I really wanted the listeners to hear today is that sports psychology is about enhancing performance, not just fixing issues. So in the same way that if you want to run faster or lift heavier, you have to put in those physical reps in the gym, I kind of see sports psychology as this wonderful place where you can come put in the mental reps and learn the mental tools on how to train the mind. And that's the one of the other big myths I wanted to highlight is that the mind is not this static, fixed thing. We've learned through research and neuroplasticity that the brain is really really flexible and if we can direct its focus and attention. A couple of other things.
Speaker 3:Some people see mental strength as this you either have it or you don't. And we also learned that you can grow your mental strength and that sports psychology is a little bit different than just talking to a therapist. A therapist is going to be really wonderful to address those mental health conditions, but if you're really wanting to look at how do I live my absolute best life, working with a sport and performance psychologist is really unique because we have special training and how to help people find the right mindset, the right emotional state, how to activate their nervous system in the right way for high performance moments. And you know, being a high performing athlete at one time in my career, it's something I'm intimately familiar with.
Speaker 2:Okay, who are your target customers and how do you attract them?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I would say the target customers in my business tend to be people who relate to sports and or athletics as a way to get the most out of their life. So most people who come to me have found me from some sort of presentation or workshop I've given to teams or in the community. And then I've also invested in a presence, starting to build a bit up on Instagram and my website. And then there's online marketplaces like Psychology Today or ZocDoc, where people find me sometimes too, but, yeah, people who want to ask this question of like, what does my absolute best life look like and how do I get there. That tends to be the people who are really attracted to working with me.
Speaker 2:Okay, outside of work, what do you do for fun?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I'm really fortunate to have a really wonderful family. My wife and I have been married several years, lot of time doing like little family things together. We love to go up to the hot springs and mountains, princeton and spend a day or spend the night there, and then we also like to travel. If I'm looking at like individual things I like to do, I'm a huge fan of weight and endurance training. I've done Ironman's 100k endurance races in the mountains. Yeah, so I if I this question of like how much can I suffer and for how long has always been really interesting to me. Like like that pain cave is a place that I wanted to to get to know intimately. And then, yeah, and outside of that, like my wife is constantly reminding me that life doesn't have to be this intense journey all the time so reading, and then I'm she's a fiber artist. She does this really cool crochet stuff. So I've actually been trying to learn some stitching and crochet stuff from her just to give my brain some new challenges.
Speaker 2:Okay, awesome let's switch gears can you describe a hardship, a life challenge you overcame, how it made you stronger and what comes to mind.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So a number of things came to mind here, but I think the one I'd like to talk about was when I was 15, my best friend had committed suicide and then, yeah, I'm sorry, yeah. And then about two weeks after that, the school shooting at Columbine happened. And I grew up in Wyoming and so there's like 500,000 people in the entire state. But one of the things people don't know about people in Wyoming is that we kind of think of Colorado as ours too, like all of the sports teams and like that's just where if you want to go do something, you always traveled south, and so things that happened in Colorado and Denver specifically kind of felt like they happened to us, like that was a part of our local community in some way, even though I know it's different, but like we really felt that personally.
Speaker 3:So at 15, you know, having lost my friend and then having the school shooting happen, the world was a pretty dark place to me.
Speaker 3:I was facing like a lot of existential crises and realities, wondering what the point of this was, and my parents were smart enough to realize that like some therapy would be helpful for me, and so I invested a lot of energy just into my personal growth, trying to understand how this happens.
Speaker 3:Also, really trying to just process through the pain and grief that I was feeling and that my friends and I were going through and I think, having the courage to lean into the discomfort of what was going to be required of me, to come out the other side of this as a healthy person and to not have some of these codependent behaviors where I try to rescue everyone around me or just don't get through the grief, and then just having the courage to engage in really hard conversations kind of set me up for life to have what we call like a post-traumatic growth response. You know, I'd never romanticize what I went through but I've been able to take that tragedy and recognize that some really important skills on how to get through hardship were born in those moments and I've made a commitment to keep those really active things that I do so that I just always have that accessible, but also so that my kids learn those from me, things like that.
Speaker 2:Okay, trent, please tell us one thing they should remember about Summit Sports Psychology LLC.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think one of the things that makes me really unique compared to, even say, a traditional sports psychologist or a mental performance coach is that not only do I know all the traditional sports psychology things but I'm also a really highly trained clinical psychologist.
Speaker 3:So there's almost nothing that walks in the door that I wouldn't have some level of preparation for, including training and really, you know, deep work oriented therapies like EMDR, eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing ego state therapies like internal family systems, which are kind of key therapies to help people work through trauma all the way to doing heart rate variability training and brainwave training through through types of bio and neuro feedback, and then on top of that, the extra training I have in issues around like gender-based violence and things like that. It gives me a unique way to understand some of the difficulties that athletes can be coming in with, because they sometimes think they just have to talk about sports. But when we talk about high performance we do need to make sure there's no other stressors imposing on them. So just being really well-trained to have that big picture on top of the sports psychology makes me a unique place to get into.
Speaker 2:Okay, how can our listeners learn more about Summit Sports Psychology LLC?
Speaker 3:Yeah, probably the best place would be my website, which is summitsportspsychologycom, or you can just Google Summit Sports Psychology and it'll come up. My Instagram handle is at summitsportpsychology. And then the other thing I wanted people to know is that they can schedule a free 15-minute consult on my website. I think it's just called Book Discovery Call site. I think it's just called book discovery call. But basically, if somebody is interested to see if this would work, I give them a free 15 minutes to chat with me, see what the process would be like, ask any questions they have, so that we can follow up and see if this is a good fit, but also answer some of those questions.
Speaker 2:Okay, great Well, Trent, I really appreciate you being on the show. We wish you and your business much success moving forward.
Speaker 3:Great, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpcoloradospringscom. That's gnpcoloradospringscom, or call 719-679-4720.