Well-being for Performance

Performance sport and well-being are inextricably linked.

If you take a basic positive psychology model, like PERMAH+, it shows that people are at their best when they have/are:

  • Positive emotions

  • An environment that aligns with, and enables them

  • A sense of meaning & purpose

  • Positive, healthy relationships

  • Accomplishing (performing) and contributing to something

  • Positive physical, mental and emotional health.

A person’s experience of sport impacts all of these things, AND, a person’s experience of these things in life impacts how they show up to sport.

Research Based & Practice Driven

The 8 constructs of well-being all impact how a person feels and functions.

If we feel good and function well, we can perform optimally and for longer. This takes purposeful action & high self-awareness.

Life & sport will always throw challenges, so we need to develop the toolkit and awareness to flex and adapt to the things that come.

Individuals & teams who proactively build the skillsets for high wellbeing, have better self-regulation, resilience, readiness and are able, when they do experience adversity, to minimise it’s impact and bounce back quicker.


Constructs of Well-being

Chunking wellbeing into 8 areas to help coaches and leadership understand different ways to positively influence their sporting programmes & environments. 8 Constructs include:

  1. Physical well-being

  2. Mental & Emotional Well-being

  3. Cultural Well-being

  4. Social Well-being (relationships matter)

  5. Financial Well-being

  6. Spiritual & Creative Well-being

  7. Career

  8. Self - identity, passions, purpose, learning, growth

* There are female-specific considerations within each of the above constructs to enable sports to create bespoke support for maximising female athletes.


Enabling Flourishing

Proactively & purposefully working towards having high well-being in staff and athletes that enables:

  • Eudaimonia - flourishing as a whole person & having a meaningful life - inside sport and beyond it

  • Feeling good (physically, mentally, emotionally)

  • Functioning well (physically, mentally, emotionally)

  • Pursuing potential (on the sporting field and in life)

  • Values Alignment (life choices & with sport)