Helping athletes understand the interplay between mind and performance is Gerard Faure-Brac's aim at New South Wales Institute of Sport (NSWIS).
It's a goal the sport and performance psychologist wishes more codes, coaches and administrators shared.
While employing psychologists to help educate athletes is increasingly commonplace in some countries, Faure-Brac says Australia has been slow to follow the same path.
"It hasn't kicked in here the same way it has in the US and, to a lesser extent, in England. Psychologists teach people thinking skills — how to think correctly and focus in pressure situations. These are things every athlete — every person — needs to be able to do."
Faure-Brac grew up in Sydney, playing rugby union and basketball at school, and studied education, human movement and psychology at the University of Sydney, intent on becoming a teacher of physical education. He worked in schools for less than a year before heading overseas, teaching for a period in London and then supporting himself with a variety of casual jobs as he travelled the world.
Increasingly interested in sports psychology, he undertook a graduate diploma at the University of Western Sydney on his return and then continued to master's level studies, while paying his way and keeping fit working for Total Earth Care, an environmental consultancy and bushland regeneration company.
Work as a sports psychologist came gradually, after he began an internship, and later paid work, in the adolescent mental health system.
He was able to show administrators at the Gna Ka Lun facility in Campbelltown that when young patients participated in programs that combined physical activity and relaxation, incidents of aggression and the need for extra medication dropped over the following 24 hours.
His hours of work expanded and he ran programs at Gna Ka Lun, Rivendell School and the Walker Unit for acute patients at Concord.
"It was a cross between PE teaching and sports psychology, teaching kids how to recognise symptoms of arousal, anxiety and psychosis and manage them."
More mainstream work in the sports sector came gradually through external provision of services to the NSWIS and he took up his current mix of employment with the institute and provision of services to private clients and Tennis Australia in 2011.
Faure-Brac says most coaches working with sports institutes understand how psychology can help people achieve goals but the message is proving slower to reach some professional team sports and players who associate psychology with treatment of mental illness rather than skills development.
"Just as a strength and conditioning coach can teach an athlete the right weights to lift to develop the right muscles, sports psychologists can teach the right way to think about the right things at the right time."
For people aspiring to work in the field, his message is to be flexible and patient. Sports psychology is a small world in Australia so people wanting to build careers need to first build networks of contacts and be prepared to take casual and part-time opportunities when they become available.
Increasingly, they may also have to consider overseas study. Faure-Brac says the number of master's level programs in sports psychology has declined in Australian universities in the years since he completed his qualifications.
He hopes it is not a permanent trend: "One of the things that came out from the investigation into how Australia performed at the London Olympics was the fact that we didn't have many sports psychologists there. Why not?"
