- A lot of people ask me, what is performance psychology?
And it's a fascinating field because
it's really a rare discipline within
the mainstream field of psychology,
and really it's the other end of the spectrum
from what most people think of
when they think of clinical psychology,
or therapy, or counseling.
And really to get a grasp on the field
and learn what it's about,
it's, it's helpful to look
at the continuum of human performance.
On one end, you have disease, disorder,
you have people that are not functioning very well at all,
and the other end of the spectrum,
you have people who are outperforming the majority.
And somewhere in the middle,
we have this thing called average or normal.
Well, the field of psychology, in general,
is about training folks to find abnormality,
find disease, find lack of performance,
and help those folks in that end of the continuum,
get back to normal.
So the questions and the, the, the lens
with which they look at human performance is always about
what's wrong, how do we fix it,
to get people back into mainstream,
back to normal.
And the field that I work in is really the other end.
It's taking people who are already very healthy,
who are already above normal,
and learning how far up the end of the continuum can we go.
Or taking people who are in the normal range
and say I don't want to be normal anymore.
I want to go as far as I can above normal.
Well, what tends to happen is,
if you look at a mainstream psychologist,
clinical psychologist, and they're dealing
with a superhuman performers, to, they're abnormal.
And working with those folks, you'd say,
gosh they've got a lot of things
that aren't normal about them.
If they were to apply that trade,
they would move them in the wrong direction
on the continuum, if that makes sense.
And what I, if I were to work with folks
with eating disorders, or alcoholism,
or those sorts of abnormalities,
I would move them in the wrong direction as well.
So really what clinical psychologists do
is take abnormal people and make them normal.
And what I do is take normal people and make them abnormal.
And so what do we mean by abnormal?
We're talking about having unusually high degree
of self-confidence and usually high degree of commitment,
and concentration, and exceptional ability at communication.
You, you evaluate yourself differently,
you approach your performance differently than most people.
And so the performers I work with,
we really embrace this notion of being abnormal.
And all that means is embrace working to be different
than the mass population.