CAMAlumni life
When people feel pressure and they want to step up, that's where I come in.
The presence of sports psychologists in and around elite teams is very much taken for granted these days, but things were quite different when Dr Dana Sinclair (Hughes Hall 1990) started her career. “Thirty-five years ago, you had to be quite entrepreneurial and make your own way.
I began working with the NHL (National Hockey League) and the NBA (National Basketball Association) in the late 1990s, and I had to go and figure out how to do that myself. People weren’t doing this work at the time, and certainly not women.”
A former athlete herself – she played national field hockey and ice hockey (she earned her Half-Blue at the Varsity match in 1992) – Sinclair says working with sportspeople can be challenging but enormously rewarding.
“I love watching my clients perform and do well,” she says. “I’m in tunnels at stadiums, on sidelines, under the floodlights, in hallways and equipment rooms – it can be a very joyous experience.” Sinclair left her native Vancouver for Cambridge in 1990 to undertake a second PhD, in Experimental Psychology, and work as a junior research fellow at Hughes Hall.
“I loved the intellectual exercise,” she recalls. “Cambridge gave me the confidence to step out and take on all that I wanted to try to do. To really think big and just go do it. Although I do also remember crashing a few May Balls – that was fun too!”
She returned to Vancouver to carve out a career in the largely unheard-of field of performance psychology.
“Slow down... learn how to settle."
"There are so many people who are talented, but if they can’t pull it together for the deadline or they are blocked by tension and lack of focus, they’re not going to be able to access that talent,” she says. “You have to be able to shift your mindset when you drift into tension and worries.” Indeed, mindset shift has become Sinclair’s specialism.
She’s worked with athletes in all of North America’s professional sporting leagues, as well as Olympians, surgeons, business executives, high-profile actors and even adolescents struggling with exams. “It’s anybody and everybody who wants to perform just a little bit better.
When people are feeling pressure and they want to step up, that’s where I come in. No matter what you do or who you are, the same kind of distractions pop up for all of us. My job is to learn what the hot spot or ‘derailer’ is for each person and help them settle, control and manage their tension so they can refocus on what to do in the moment – it’s as simple as that.” She recalls working with a World Cup skier who had crashed and almost died. Miraculously, he recovered and made a return to skiing, with help from Sinclair to face the mountain again.
“It was about getting through certain sections where he had crashed and all the trauma that came with it. We worked through it and we figured out how he would keep his focus, especially through the most treacherous portions. He came back to the World Cup scene with great success.”
Having published her first book, Dialed In: Do Your Best When It Matters Most, to great acclaim last year, she is now working on a second, in which she interviews leading figures in their field about how they overcame setbacks and navigated challenging points in their careers.
And her own top tip for performing under pressure? “Slow down,” she says, without hesitation. “Learn how to settle. Learn how to soothe yourself in five to ten seconds.
That can just be telling yourself: ‘Hey, come on, breathe slowly, exhale longer, get your shoulders down.’ Reconnect to your task.” And don’t obsess over confidence. “Everybody’s always talking about confidence. ‘I can’t do this if I’m not confident.’ That’s not true at all. You might want confidence, but you don’t need it. Confidence is unreliable – it’s about how you feel.
Performing well is about what you do.”
Although she describes her role as a mix of therapist and coach, she prefers to call herself a consultant. “I don’t do full-on traditional therapy work and I don’t do the traditional coaching work either.
My philosophy is to help people become independent, self-directed performers, to help them work out what gets in the way of them being great and then understand what to do the next time they feel tension rising. It takes courage to try to be good. When you really want something, it can be scary.”
Dr Dana Sinclair is founder and partner of Human Performance International. Dialed In: Do Your Best When It Matters Most is out in hardback now, and her new book, Dialed In: How to Perform Under Pressure, is out next year.
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