My Vision Quest
Beginnings of High Performance Coaching
My journey as a coach is a merging of four major streams of my life’s journey. The first stream was my experience as a young athlete. As a young athlete, I had some successes in sports through high school and college, but I knew that I wasn’t fully using my mental skills.
I knew how to train my body, but I didn’t know how to train my mind. I didn’t know how to improve my mental approach to handle pressure skillfully. In short, I needed to make some big changes, but I didn’t know how.
Those experiences started me on my life’s journey to unlock some of the mysteries of our mind and body systems to make significant mental and physical improvements.
The second stream was my life as a Jesuit seminarian. I learned the power of imaginative meditation, intensive and lengthy silent retreats, and personal transformation. I also learned the transformational power of community and meaningful friendships. I still view my meditative work with my clients as a kind of “retreat.”
The third stream was as an organizational development consultant. I worked with organizations of varying sizes where I learned how to help them empower themselves and speed up the process of making some big personal and collective changes.
The fourth stream has been my life as a sports psychology coach. I have coached athletes from many sports on how to master the immense mental and physical challenges of professional sports and the highest levels of amateur sports.
My Experiences
When I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was excited to test my methods in the most extreme and challenging sport there is, which is Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). We can learn powerful insights about human behavior in extreme situations. We can learn the unvarnished truth of who we are and what we’re capable of doing. I was confident that if my methods proved effective in MMA, that they would work in any sport.
Albuquerque is recognized as the epicenter of MMA training. World-class professional athletes come from all over the world to train at the famed JacksonWink MMA Academy.
In MMA, either two highly trained female or male athletes are locked in a cage with a referee for 15 or 25 minutes and the two people fight one another with only four-ounce gloves and nothing else. Their weapons are their minds and bodies. Their intention in the fight is to cause the other fighter to quit or to injure the other fighter to the extent that she or he can’t continue.
After a number of years of working with mixed martial artists, I’ve found that my methods consistently work, both quickly and powerfully. I’ve found that my methods can help athletes, who previously dreaded competitions, learn to perform exceptionally and truly enjoy every aspect of their sport.
I found that I could teach my methods within a matter of days or weeks, and they regularly started showing immediate, noticeable improvements. They often surprised themselves how quickly they had breakthroughs. In addition, I found that athletes regularly experienced personal transformations in their lives outside of sports as they acquired a more skillful mental approach. As they learned to be confident and empowered in their sport, they also learned to be confident and empowered in their lives. They learned that they are in life as they are in sports and vice versa.
I've also worked with people from all walks of life who were interested in using my methods for improving their life and work skills.I’ve found that my methods consistently result in personal transformations with people from many different walks of life. I’ve taught my methods to artists, musicians, business people, students, teachers, surgeons, healthcare workers, mentors, coaches and parents of athletes, among others.
The reason why my methods work with all walks of life is that skillful performance is skillful performance. Regardless of the tasks that we do, we bring the same mind and body systems to those tasks.
The combination of my influences and experiences led me to a powerful high performance sports psychology and transformational meditation system.