Dan Abrahams on Sport Psychology

Dan Abrahams is a Sport Psychologist who works alongside individuals, teams, coaches, and organizations all over the world. He is known for his passion to demystify sport psychology and for creating simple to use performance techniques. Dan is a former professional golfer and holds a first-class Honors Degree in Psychology and a Master’s Degree in Sport Psychology. Dan is extremely articulate, thoughtful, and intentional about the word choices that he uses, but he still does it with an energy and tenacity that is second-to-none. In this episode, Dan will talk about his mindset and how he approaches things. He will also talk about nuance and the value of nuance, personality’s role, and how working inside of a team is different from playing golf or another individual sport. In this episode we discuss Dan’s ability to be skeptical and contrarian, and where his mindset of “and” instead of “or” came from (6:00), how science and art relate to his work (12:28), how he works with clients (18:59), consistency (25:21), language surrounding outcome, performance, and mindset and how they differ (34:09), Bryson DeChambeau (40:15), the similarities and common threads between working with individual-sport athletes and team-sport athletes (46:01), mental health in sports, more specifically how we can help athletes not only live with their anxiety or mental health challenges, but how we can help them reach a point of thriving (57:40), how Dan thinks about thoughts, feelings, and “thinking” (1:11:27), what he does to make sure he’s at his best when working with clients (1:17:25), and how personality affects responses to situations (1:21:22). Thank you so much to Dan for coming on the podcast! You can check out Dan’s podcast here and his website here. Also make sure to follow him on twitter @sportpsychshow, @DanAbrahams77, and @AbrahamsGolf. I wrote a book called “Shift Your Mind” that was released in October of 2020, and you can order it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Additionally, I have launched a company called Strong Skills, and I encourage you to check out our new website https://www.strongskills.co/. If you liked this episode and/or any others, please follow me on Twitter: @brianlevenson or Instagram: @Intentional_Performers. Thanks for listening. -Brian