What is productive procrastination? It is replacing one adaptive behaviour with another adaptive (but less important) behaviour. An example here is organising our notes for an exam instead of studying for the exam. Before we go on, we need to understand procrastination because it is a decision. When we procrastinate, we decide to delay a course of action despite expecting to be worse off because of the delay. Research continually shows that procrastinators struggle with poor

When I type here about successful athletes, I focus on the psychological skills and techniques they learn to separate themselves from their competitors. Successful athletes build mountains in their mind of tough, durable terrain to protect and separate them from their opponents. Over the past 50 years, researchers filled shelves of evidence to argue that at every level (e.g., non-elite, junior elite, elite and super-elite), successful athletes show the highest levels of (1) m

To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world and the seed-plot of all other virtues. John Locke, letter, 1703 (Cooper, 2022) Back in 1990, ‘Put ‘em under pressure’ was the official song for the Republic of Ireland national football team’s FIFA World Cup campaign in Italy. Jackie Charlton’s exhortation was to ‘put ‘em under pressure’. It seems axiomatic that each team puts the other under pressure, so coping with pressure represents a

Athletes come to a sport psychologist for support in one form or another. Some athletes know exactly what they want and are disappointed or withdraw when they do not receive their preferences. There are at least three main preferences that athletes seek. First, activity preferences, which are the tasks the athlete wants the sport psychologist to engage in during the service delivery. Some athletes wish for the sport psychologist to raise and confront issues. Some athletes do

All athletes practise their skills daily or weekly in pursuit of excellence. But the question they all have about practice is a simple but challenging question to answer: How much practice is enough? Two points are obvious here: one, we can save a lot of time with better practice scheduling, and two, practising cleverly could save you time, effort, motivation and confidence. Eccles and colleagues have outlined what we understand by deliberate practice and how we can use it be

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it. Adam Bede (1859) George Eliot, English writer (1819–1880) When you think about influential leaders in sport, we can think of a few in every sport: basketball, football, American football, hockey, rugby, Gaelic games and many more. And when most people think about a pep talk before or during a game, the angry or disappointed mana