Overview
By signing up to the coach mentoring programme, you are entering into a system to help you develop your own cognitive and perceptual skills as well as those of your athletes. Too often these abilities are ignored in coaches, yet much of your role will be based on being able to take in the correct information to help you provide feedback and tailor training to the needs of your athlete/s. Not only will this programme help you hone your own skills, but it will also support you to embed cognitive, perceptual and psychological training into the curriculum you deliver.
The link between how we can take in and process information is strongly linked to high performance and is all mediated by our psychological strength. This mentoring programme provides comprehensive support from a world leader in these areas.
There are a number of different mentoring programmes on offer, for both athletes and coaches, and these are designed to meet the needs of anyone from a recreational coach all the way through to the elite level.
What Can I expect from mentoring?
- Identification of visual needs – As a coach, how do you ensure you are looking in the right places to gather the information needed to provide the best feedback for your athletes? Through this programme you will be supported to assess your own visual needs as well as those of your athletes.
- Enhance your knowledge and understanding – which visual skills are more important to be successful in the sport you coach? Which visual capabilities underpin these skills? How can you tell if your athletes poses these skills but are not implementing them, or whether they suffer from an underlying perceptual problem? Through the mentoring scheme you will be able to enhance your own knowledge and understanding of not only your sport, but also how the human body and mind can be trained to perform best within the constraints placed upon it.
- Individualised support and training programme – Would you like your training sessions to be more cognitively challenging for your athletes? Or to be able to train their perceptual abilities in sport specific ways? By signing up to the coach mentor programme you will get support in ensuring your sessions are well designed to challenge participants and maximise their training time.
- Self-reflection and goal setting guidance - Throughout the mentoring process, you will be guided to engage in self-reflection in order to enhance your personal awareness, which eventually will allow a healthy perspective on managing your performance through deep personal insight. Goal setting will be used to manage the process and monitor progress.
- A knowledgeable and reliable support system – By signing up to this mentoring programme, you will not just receive support in enhancing sporting performance, but you will also have direct and regular access to a qualified professional in general wellbeing and psychological support. This can take many different forms, but just having a regular contact with a confidential sounding board can be hugely beneficial in a number of areas.
Overall, the mentoring system is designed to enhance you as a coach and support you as a person. The exact format it takes will be tailored to your individual needs, but this programme will provide regular access to a highly qualified and supportive professional through which your personal growth will be developed and maintained.
Who is mentoring for?
Dr Zöe Wimshurst is a world leading expert in enhancing sports performance through understanding and improving perceptual and cognitive elements. She has worked with elite athletes such as Cristiano Ronaldo and Max Verstappen and high-level teams such as Great Britain Hockey and Harlequins RFU. Dr Zöe is a published academic author and holds a PhD in Visual Performance in Elite Athletes. She is also a Chartered Psychologist and holds additional qualifications in Counselling in order to provide holistic support.
With over a decade of experience working at a Senior Level within the British Education system, Dr Zöe has provided support, education and development opportunities to a range of individuals and mentored both students and staff to achieve their goals.
This programme is deliberately exclusive to ensure that all mentees get personalized input and full support.
The Programme
Two different levels of coach mentoring are available and as standard, each are offered on an annual basis.
| Programme A | Programme B |
|---|---|
| nitial consultation to discuss areas of growth in own coaching performance and aims for those you coach. Short and long-term goals will also be set. | Initial consultation to discuss areas of growth in own coaching performance and aims for those you coach. Short and long-term goals will also be set. |
| Assessment and monitoring of coaching skills to enhance perceptual, cognitive and psychological factors. | Assessment and monitoring of coaching skills to enhance perceptual, cognitive and psychological factors. |
| 60 minutes, online, individual, consultancy session each month | 120 minutes, online, individual, consultancy session each month (split into multiple sessions as required) |
| Assistance in designing training sessions which will prepare your athletes for the perceptual and cognitive demands of their sport | Assistance in designing training sessions which will prepare your athletes for the perceptual and cognitive demands of their sport |
| Observation up to four times per year (via video) of you coaching with feedback on how to adapt delivered sessions to enhance the perceptual and cognitive demands placed on your athletes. | Monthly observation (via video) of you coaching with feedback on how to adapt delivered sessions to enhance the perceptual and cognitive demands placed on your athletes. |
| 20% discount on ‘visual performance’ screening* | Annual in-person ‘visual performance’ screening* to assess your own visual abilities |
| Option (where safe and appropriate) for eye-tracking analysis of your coaching with feedback and guidance | |
| Annual fee: £2500 | Annual fee: £5000 |
*to take place in Bournemouth/Ringwood, or additional travel expenses are not included.
How to sign up
If you would like to sign-up to either mentoring programme, or to discuss them in more detail, please email zoe@performancevision.co.uk