Anthony J. Klarica - The Performance Mindset

Professionally, Anthony has worked for over 30 years as a psychologist, coach and high‐performance manager in a wide variety of sports. He has worked with AFL teams, including Melbourne, Carlton as well as Hawthorn during their Grand Final three‐peat, the AFL umpiring squad, a wide variety of motorsports including V8 Supercar drivers, road and off‐road motorbike riders, tennis players and a wide variety of Olympic sport organisations and individual athletes. He has travelled extensively to work with individual athletes and teams at state and national events, world championships and Olympics. He has sat in coaches boxes and been on the interchange with players at football matches, attended Grand Slams and spent time in the pit lane to apply his trade. This has involved consulting and coaching in leadership, culture, wellbeing, performance and one‐on‐one counselling over many years, mainly through his Melbourne‐based business, Elite Performance.

He is a lifelong learner with an undergraduate degree in education and master's degrees in psychology and business, and has attended many short courses and workshops along the way. He has consulted on and delivered many workshops and presentations in the education and corporate sectors as well as sport. This work was built on the foundation of being a teacher and psychologist in a variety of settings, including working as a psychologist in schools, in industrial rehabilitation and a hospital setting.

Through his extensive work in education, he also founded the Six‐Star Wellbeing and Engagement Survey, which has been used by more than 45 000 students and teachers in primary and secondary schools across Australia and workers in corporate settings, and is now distributed by the Australian Council for Education Research (ACER).

Anthony still engages in a range of sports. He is an avid runner and trains regularly in the pool, at the gym and on the bike.

The Performance Mindset is a summation of his education, passion for learning and experience participating and working in many sports and other fields.

The Performance Mindset would never have been written without the encouragement and inspiration of my fantastic support team. I have benefited immeasurably from informal inspiration too, including from people who aren't even aware of the motivation and energy they provided. This extends to the many athletes, coaches, teams and general clients I have worked and been associated with over a career spanning more than 30 years. You are all a big part of this project and I thank you.

Closer to home, I thank my parents for their support, and the ongoing day‐to‐day support of my wife Johanna and our children Alister, Annabelle and Penelope who made this project possible.

Words of encouragement from friends never go astray. They created the energy I needed to start this book and keep going to the finish line. There are too many to mention here, but Philip Whelan and Craig Millar in particular have assisted more than they know. Helen Pitt, Merv Jackson and Greg Murphy have also been a great help and support. Thank you to Phil Whelan and Darren Gray for providing informed feedback on the manuscript, to Jedd Dow for assisting with referencing, and to Darren McMurtrie for working on the statistics and data. It was a team effort. Thank you.

Without a publisher this project would not have eventuated. To Lucy Raymond, Leigh McLennan and the team at John Wiley & Sons, thank you for taking on the project and guiding me through it.

I am exceedingly grateful to the amazing athletes and coaches who willingly gave their time and accepted invitations to be interviewed for the book. Their stories, insights and reflections not only confirmed the importance of a performance mindset, but also provided me with a source of inspiration. I am not sure I have done justice to their stories but I cannot thank them enough. Each of their stories is itself worthy of a book and several have authored or had books written about them. They are:

Youcef Abdi (athletics)

David Andersen (basketball)

Dean Boxall (swimming)

Jacqui Cooper (aerial skiing)

Scott Draper (tennis and golf)

Tayla Harris (Australian rules football)

Mat Hayman (cycling)

Sam Mitchell (Australian rules football)

Brigitte Muir (mountaineering)

Sasa Ognenovski (soccer)

Nicole Pratt (tennis)

Michael Ritter (motorsport)

Storm Sanders (tennis)

Garth Tander (motorsport)

Rohan Taylor (swimming)

Liz Watson (netball)

Jamie Whincup (motorsport)

Australia is a sport‐loving nation. Our opportunities to be actively involved in sport are abundant. Beyond participation, many people follow and support their favourite athletes, teams or sport with great passion. For our nation's size, Olympic and other international sporting performances are impressive, especially considering the range of professional sports codes women and men participate in.

The Performance Mindset evolved from my experience over 30 years of working with many sports and individual athletes in Australia. In that time, interest in the mental space of sport has grown significantly. Antiquated views that saw athletes simply as either ‘weak’ or ‘strong’ have been overtaken by a greater understanding of what is involved in maximising performance. A common perception is that talent and hard work are the only, or at least the key, prerequisites for high performance in sport. There is, however, another vital ingredient — mindset .

From my experience, I know that while talent and hard work are extremely relevant, they are not the foundation of performance. What underpins an athlete's performance is their mindset. As well as contributing to work rate, mindset is the key to unlocking any talent a person may possess.

In this book I explore a range of factors that influence mindset, including:

environmental (socio‐cultural and contextual influences on people, including access to resources, support, opportunities, and the culture of a squad, team, organisation or even a nation)

social (how people interact and deal with their environment, situations and others, as well as how they use resources, including the role of coaches and supports)

personal (how people think, feel and behave).

Naturally, the above overlap and interact. Importantly, I emphasise that mindset skills can be learned . They can be learned in many ways, beginning with a willingness to embrace mindset concepts. This learning is both intuitive and the result of overt focus and coaching. My goal is that p erformance mindset skills be learned from deliberate engagement in some of the processes I examine in this book.

The introduction puts forward a case for mental skills being the foundation of performance. Each of the seven ‘steps’ that follow explores a specific mindset topic: motivation, resilience, focus, leadership, culture, wellbeing and performance. I believe these topics are central to and contribute fundamentally to a mindset that enables maximum performance.

To gain insight into these important areas, I interviewed a wide range of amazing performers and athletes, as well as outstanding coaches, who willingly shared stories and experiences from their own journeys. Some of these stories are referred to across several chapters; others are presented in stand‐alone features.

To balance these real‐life examples, I have drawn on empirical research from the field of psychology and collected information from publications, documentaries and even social media. Additionally, I have offered some of my own thoughts, models, strategies, program examples, checklists and activities from my work in performance and other fields. At the end of each step I have included a ‘build’ section that lists practical strategies.