PLAYfree with Aaron S. Goldman
“What I try to do is give athletes and coaches the skills to “play free” from the burden of expectations, pressure, anxiety, self-doubt, and uncertainty.”
As our covid world continues to bring more awareness to mental health concerns and issues, I am excited to share with you the correlation between sports and mental health. Only until recently have we started talking more about how our mental and emotional performance is related to our overall being both on and off the court and playing field.
I recently met mental & emotional performance coach, Aaron S. Goldman of PLAYfree and had the opportunity to have him share with us his journey and passion for helping youth and athletes alike work on improving their sports performance. It’s about letting everyone involved in the sport “understand the developmental, social, and emotional needs of young people, as well as how to best support their young athletes’ holistic well-being, self-determination, and love for the sport and themselves.” Aaron also dives deeper into how this field can help others as well, not just youth and athletes, whether you are a musician, an artist mental & emotional performance coaching can help master your art and still be a holistic person! Definitely worth a read for those interested in this area!
Curito:
Aaron, could you introduce yourself a-little to our readers?
Aaron:
This is always a tough question for me to answer, but I’ll give it a go. Fundamentally, I am a lifelong learner who loves challenges, loves kids, and loves sports. I’m a former high school and college athlete, former club and high school coach, and I am a passionate advocate for athletes as complex, imperfect, and courageous human beings who deserve to express themselves in environments that are supportive of their overall well-being. I’m a brother, a son, and a friend. I love dogs. See, now it’s starting to sound like an online dating profile…
I think what I am mostly is a human being who is trying to cultivate patience, compassion, inspiration, and humor as I learn to navigate and grow and evolve in a pretty messy and complex world.
Curito:
How did your personal experience and career path lead you to create PLAYfree Sport?
Aaron:
My relationship with sports has always been multi-faceted and also, in looking back, somewhat complicated. I’ve been a fan, a player, a coach, a student, a program administrator, and now a coach educator and athlete developer. I’ve also worked in the world of physical rehab and sports massage, kinesiology, and personal training, so I’m a big fan of supporting the mind-body connection. My undergraduate studies focused on pre-med science with the intention of going into either pediatrics or orthopedics. Looking back on my winding career path, I’m realizing that sports were always a guiding principle. Before any of that, though, I was just a kid in Boston who fell head over heels in love with basketball.
The sights, sounds, smell, excitement, noise, and energy of the old Boston Garden completely captivated me. The sheer size of the players and the way we collectively adored them (or not, if they were Philly or New York or the Lakers) opened my eyes to the power of sports; when I was young, I didn’t understand the ugliness that sometimes comes with fandom. I only know that basketball carved out a place in my heart where it still lives today, a place that is growing as I understand more about athletes.
So, I’ve always played basketball, but I also played youth baseball and soccer and flag football, swam competitively, ski raced, and played water polo in high school and college. Sports gave me an energetic and competitive outlet, a social circle, a sense of belonging that I often lacked in my “regular life.” They were a place where being abnormally tall was an advantage rather than an acute discomfort. There were so many positives about playing sports, including lifelong friendships and lessons about success and failure…and also a lot of times where it fell short of its potential and caused more hurt than help.
This became even clearer as I got further into my coaching career, as I saw the unnecessary ego involvement and poor behavior from athletes, administrators, parents, and coaches (including me), and the ways in which youth sport environments have many of their priorities very wrong. What eventually brought me to the decision to study the social, emotional, and psychological side of sports was a realization that I didn’t have the tools to create the best possible experience for my athletes. Some of those tools had to do with culture-building and coaching methodology and developmental knowledge. Fundamentally, however, I had to face my relationship to myself, my own identity as an athlete and coach and the ways that I had expressed my own obsession, self-doubt, insecurity, and ego through athletics, often to my own detriment and to the detriment of the people around me.
On the business side, I like being in charge of my own schedule, and I like the ability to collaborate with other independent people in the field. It’s important to me to have the ability to take time for other pursuits and projects when it’s called for, so self-employment was the only way to go. I had some experience with it from running my own massage therapy practice, and at this point I’m not ready to work for someone else. I hadn’t really considered it until now, but “playing free” also means me having the freedom to create the work environment that works best for me and allows me to be inspired at my own pace, especially during these uncertain times.
Curito:
What does PLAYfree stand for? Can you elaborate on what mental & emotional performance is?
Aaron:
In the world of developmental science, education, and sport sociology, there is a growing movement to reintroduce what is called “free play,” which essentially means allowing kids to just go out and create. It can be as simple as rolling a ball out onto a field or just letting kids run with their imagination. Ever watch 6-year-olds just hang out and play? They come up with the most amazing imaginary worlds when the adults in the room don’t interfere by imposing their notions of “how things are supposed to look.” It’s easier for us grown-ups to at least imagine staying mostly hands-off when the kids are very young, but at some point – a point that unfortunately is getting earlier and earlier in organized sports and in parenting in general – we start imposing adult sensibilities on our children.
The focus becomes winning, trophies, making travel teams, being ranked and recruited and getting scholarship offers and making money, which turns young athletes (and students) into a commodity. We also equate safety (from the big bad world) and structure with success, leading us to over-structure and over-schedule and over-coach them, stripping away their ability to use their imaginations, to create, to just go out and play for the joy of the game. One serious consequence of this is that we create people who believe that they are entitled to having someone else solve their problems for them (because that’s what their parents are doing), which leads to fragility and a lack of resilience and other critical life skills. Sports are a place where we’re seeing this lack of resilience manifest.
Unfortunately, those same parents, coaches, and administrators often expect a lot from their kids, even while they’re making it impossible for the kids to develop the tools that are necessary to perform. So, PLAYfree honors the need to let the children play, and focuses on helping coaches, program leaders, and parents understand the developmental, social, and emotional needs of young people, as well as how to best support their young athletes’ holistic well-being, self-determination, and love for the sport and themselves.
The other part of PLAYfree’s mission is rooted in principles of sport and exercise psychology, or “performance psychology.” As athletes and coaches, we experience the full range of human emotions, and we do it in an environment where it is necessary to perform under changing, usually uncontrollable, and often pressurized conditions. We experience thoughts that distract or confuse us or change our self-perception, and it can hurt both our performance and our well-being. What I try to do is give athletes and coaches the skills to “play free” from the burden of expectations, pressure, anxiety, self-doubt, and uncertainty. That’s not to say that we’re trying not to feel or think those things, only that we are learning to handle them, to develop resilience through intentional training in areas like mindfulness, goal setting, self-talk, visualization, and identification of core values and priorities.
“When confronted with a challenge or a tough choice or something as simple as an uncontrollable outcome, these athletes without life skills can break easily and are prone to some kind of mental health issue. ”
Curito:
How is mental performance training different from other professionals providing mindfulness practice and counseling?
Aaron:
There is a lot of overlap. Performance psychology is a relatively new field compared to other psychology disciplines, and I think it benefits from that because there is so much room for growth and new ideas and methods. For example, much of what we do in the field is very rooted in counseling practice and theory; there have also been amazing people that have brought practices like mindfulness, self-compassion, and guided visualization, as well as organizational skills like communication and social literacy into the field of mental performance. It’s very versatile!
Many sport psych graduate programs are also housed in their school’s kinesiology department, which allows us to focus on the mind-body connection. In recent years there has been a concerted push to bring more counseling psychology into the field as the need for both athlete’s mental health and social and multicultural consciousness become more visible. Many people in the field are both mental performance coaches and clinical counselors or psychologists (although I myself am not, by choice).
I think that one difference is what gets the person in the door. In other words, someone seeking counseling may be there for any variety of reasons; for athletes, it is often a performance issue that motivates them to talk to either a sport psychologist or a mental performance coach when, due to the still very macho culture of sports, they don’t feel like they are allowed to have a mental health issue. Despite the paradigm shift that is happening, change takes time, and the culture around sports still has strong views about vulnerability, suffering, and asking for help as signs of weakness or illness or wrongness. Even though everyone is dealing with something, many athletes won’t seek out help for fear of ridicule or even because they have never been given the opportunity or space to consider asking for help.
What mental performance can do is bridge the gap in a way that gives them what might be considered a more tangible goal; rather than having to say “I’m suffering and I need help,” which an athlete might not ever do, it can be “I want to perform at a higher level.” This gives them the opportunity to work on some of the same issues – especially if their mental performance coach is also a clinician – and to do so in more relative comfort under the guise of performance.
Curito:
Why do you think now more than ever we are seeing a need to address mental health issues on and off the playing field for professional athletes, college athletes, and youth and its community?
Aaron:
I think that technology has a lot to do with what feels like an explosion of mental health issues in sports. I see a couple of generations of young people with ever-diminishing real-world skills – like interpersonal communication, the ability to handle criticism, problem-solving, and navigating adversity – and I attribute that in part to what I mentioned before about the practice of sheltering our kids from responsibility and accountability through overscheduling. Another powerful contributing factor is the ease with which we can hide behind the anonymity, convenience, and controllability of the internet, especially social media, and the lack of effort we have to put in to get what we think are the answers to our questions. We live in a “quick fix” society that is full of people and businesses touting their “5-step process to better health” or whatever it is; unfortunately, those solutions almost never exist, especially when it comes to mental health. The “magic bullet” is a lie that robs us of the vital process of learning how to communicate, collaborate, make tough choices, solve problems, and grow.
We see it in youth sports with what I call the Showcase Culture, where the focus is entirely on individual achievement, outcomes, and recognition - all quick, fleeting, selfish and fixed pleasures - rather than development. When confronted with a challenge or a tough choice or something as simple as an uncontrollable outcome, these athletes without life skills can break easily and are prone to some kind of mental health issue. This lack of life skills combines with instant access to athletes through media to make the spotlight of a sporting environment a potential pressure cooker; then we add to that the ease with which we – fans, media, etc – can say whatever we want from behind the safety of a screen or because we feel entitled after paying exorbitantly for tickets, or in the case of youth sports, for entry fees and club dues.
What we end up with is the dehumanization of athletes, which will almost inevitably lead to mental health issues. This is especially true for Black athletes in sports in which the people with the so-called control, and most of the fans, are almost all White. Sports are one more commercial enterprise in which the structure has been built around White control and exploitation of Black bodies, livelihoods, and worthiness, and this is also a powerful source of mental distress; what we are seeing right now is a concerted and powerful movement by athletes to reclaim their humanity, and one way is being open and showing vulnerability, sharing their struggles and coming together around common causes.
I don’t know that the need is greater now than in the past, because the structure and culture of sports has been fairly static for a long time, but I will say that because of the visibility of people – like athletes – in the public sphere due to a 24-hour, instant news cycle, social media, and everyone’s access to technology, mental health issues may be amplified. There is always another side to the coin, however. These athletes that have chosen to begin to reclaim their humanity by speaking out on social and systemic issues and mental health have a wider audience to reach precisely because of social media.
I think what we’re seeing right now is the need for a lot of discernment and very conscious and intentional engagement in the online environment, rather than the paradigm of mindlessness and reactivity that is so easy to fall into. I think that as athletes continue to come together and fight for their humanity and to reclaim their worth from the inherently inequitable systems in which they must operate, the need for mental health support will continue to grow.
Curito:
How have your offerings yielded results for individuals who work with you? Is it something that one can measure or is it a very personal experience for each person?
Aaron:
The results of mental performance training usually don’t show up linearly the way that they do for technical and physical training, so measurement can be a challenge. However, that doesn’t mean that the results aren’t tangible. Experiencing less distress or anxiety, improving overall well-being, and reconnecting with the joy in what we do aren’t necessarily things we can put on a scale, but they are things that each of us often experience in a very real and visceral way – and in a way that might be unique to each of us. Athletes that I have worked with have relayed things like this to me both directly and through their coaches or parents, and knowing that makes what I do worthwhile.
I tend to look at performance and measurable results as byproducts of hard-earned mental and emotional resilience, increased or reclaimed joy, and improved well-being. So, my focus on performance with an athletes is sometimes secondary to those things, because I believe that happier, more resilient, and better balanced athletes with a healthy sense of self-awareness and the ability to both take responsibility for, and forgive themselves for, their mistakes, will perform at a higher level. Ultimately, however, it is up to the athlete to apply the skills and tools that we are training, just like they have to do with the technical and physical skills in their sport.
One of the challenges of sport psychology work is that what often gets an athlete in to see someone like me is that they have had some kind of “catastrophe” or have hit a wall, so there’s a certain amount of working back up to normal that has to happen before we get to performance enhancement. The athletes that I’ve worked with that have really taken on the task of applying everything they’re learning have absolutely improved their performance; again, it is important to remember that there is no magic bullet no matter what someone tries to sell you, and the longer a given person has been participating in the broken system of sports, the longer the road to wellness and performance can be. In light of this, one thing I’ve had to get comfortable with is that I might not know until later whether or not what I’m doing is helping.
Curito:
How would you describe the clients that come seeking your services? Are you addressing a void in the marketplace?
Aaron:
I work with a pretty broad range of people. I have consulted with non-profits on culture and mission questions and worked with youth and college teams as a mental performance coach; I also work with individual athletes of all ages on life skill development and mental performance – my youngest athlete right now is 12 years old and my oldest is 66. I love all of that work; I would have to say that one of my favorite things to do these days is my work with coaches on culture-building and athlete development. Essentially, anyone who is interested in improving their sport experience, becoming more self-aware and self-determined, performing at a higher level, or creating a better performance environment is someone I would be thrilled to work with. And not just athletes! The skills and perspectives that apply to sports also apply to any other performance environment – theater, music, public speaking, business, and the list goes on.
As for the marketplace, I live in a small town that is part of a relatively small county in terms of population. While there are other people here doing counseling work with athletes, and there are certainly people who call themselves life coaches everywhere, there aren’t other people here doing what I’m doing as far as I know. One thing about filling a void in a market is that sometimes you have to first help people understand that the void was there in the first place before they realize that they need what you’re offering. That can take time.
“The skills and perspectives that apply to sports also apply to any other performance environment – theater, music, public speaking, business, and the list goes on.”
Curito:
Who are some of your mentors and what inspires you to wake up every morning to continue to drive your vision with PLAYfree Sport?
Aaron:
I’ve had the luck, privilege, and blessing to work with some amazingly compassionate, intelligent, dedicated people in the fields of youth development and mental performance. The list is probably too long for this answer, but I’ll try to name the big ones.
I have to start with Dr. Amy Baltzell, who in addition to being one of the foremost practitioners and a researcher and author in the field of mindfulness in sport and other performance arenas, is someone who I am grateful to call a friend. She was one of my advisors and professors in graduate school at Boston University, and is one of the most compassionate and dedicated people I’ve ever met. Her Counseling Theory & Methods in Sport Psychology class, and the love she showed all of us, affirmed my chosen path when I got to BU.
Another is Dr. John McCarthy, also from Boston University. He is the director of the coaching and positive youth development tracks within the school of education and has probably forgotten more about coaching and youth development than I could ever hope to know. Working with him transformed my life and clarified my career path, and his words and guidance show up in just about everything I do. He also showed a lot of patience and forgiveness with me when I made some big mistakes; that was one more important thing he taught me just by being who he is.
The last people I will mention are Rob DiBernardo, Bob Diehl, and Dana Dunwoody. They were doctoral students when I was getting my masters, and I learned so much from them about working with kids and athletes, about coaching, standing up for myself, sharing knowledge, and listening to people with backgrounds different from my own. They ask questions in ways that challenge me to get clear on what I really want, and they do it while simultaneously holding a space of encouragement, compassion, and safety. Although we don’t speak often, I consider them all to be good friends and colleagues who I can call up at any time if I need help.
Knowing that there are people like all of these that I’ve mentioned out there doing this work is something that inspires me. I also see so much need in so many areas for people who teach with humility, patience, compassion, humor, and love. Sport just happens to be something that I can really relate to, so that’s my open door, and the positive potential of sport environments really gets me going, especially when a team or organization or experience isn’t living up to that potential for whatever reason. I participated in a lot of environments like that as a player and a coach, and I want to help young athletes have an experience different than my own.
Curito:
Can you give some examples on how mental & emotional performance amongst professional athletes and coaches have really helped these individuals professionally and in life?
Aaron:
One of the great things about the current movement by athletes to reclaim their humanity and use their voices is that topics of conversation that used to be off limits because of social stigma or fear of retribution are becoming accepted. This includes athletes advocating for social justice causes, using the power of their labor to effect change, and speaking about mental health. I think that the most prominent example for me is Michael Phelps. He has shared a lot recently about his journey, his struggles with anxiety and addiction, and the psychological and emotional effects of spending so many years, and having so much success, in such a high-pressure and high-expectation environment. It takes a lot of courage to show our true selves to a world that has reduced us to our accomplishments and their expectations of who we should be, and that hangs on our every move - and every mistake. Vulnerability in the face of that paradigm is the bravest action an athlete can take.
I haven’t spoken to him personally, but I suspect that Michael Phelps, and other athletes who are social justice, wellness, or mental health advocates, would say that there was a sense of liberation in allowing themselves to be truly seen and in allowing their voice to be heard. I know from my own journey that acceptance of my full self - with all my warts and quirks and failings, as well as my strengths and joys - helped me make peace with the struggles and mistakes of my past. There were times when I didn’t have the skills or the awareness to make the right choice, times when I hurt myself or others with my poor coping strategies. Facing up to my own fallibility, my own humanity, set me on the journey towards healing the things inside myself that caused me so much anguish when I was playing sports. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I would guess that other athletes have similar things to say, in addition to their own unique perspectives.
Curito:
How has COVID affected your business and the landscape of youth sports?
Aaron:
This is a trying time for youth sports and for sports in general. One thing that COVID has done that I believe will end up being a positive takeaway is show us that the things we just take for granted aren’t as stable or mundane as we believed them to be. This is a long conversation, because it incorporates everything in our lives, from relationships to politics to economics and everything in between. In the case of sports, I know that I sometimes measure the seasons by what is being played. When I was an athlete, Fall was water polo season and Winter was basketball and ski season and Spring was baseball or track or more water polo. My identity was very, very wrapped up in being an athlete.
Now, young athletes, whatever sport they play, are having those identities challenged or ripped away entirely. For many athletes, playing their sport is inextricable from who they are. With COVID, all of a sudden that fundamental piece of how they relate to the world, how they organize their schedules and their priorities and their self-image, is just gone. I think a lot of athletes out there have been really struggling with the question of “who am I?” which is one of the most important and hardest questions for each of us to answer.
In addition to the existential level, there’s also the uncontrollability of the loss of a physical season that I think is wreaking some emotional havoc. I’m thinking about some collegiate athletes that I’ve worked with who have had championship opportunities taken away, who were working their way back from an injury only to have the opportunity to express and prove their health taken away, who have lost their senior season. They weren’t prepared for it to end, won’t be given the chance to enjoy one more season with their teammates. This is true at the high school level as and at the youth level as well. Even if you have more seasons coming, or more eligibility, a present and future fraught with uncertainty can cause a lot of anxiety. And we haven’t even talked about the intersection of COVID, a social reckoning on racial injustice, a climate crisis, and election…this is a tough time for young people, and also a time filled with opportunity.
In terms of my business, things have definitely been slow to develop. I moved back to Oregon in the summer of 2019 after finishing graduate school the previous winter, and when COVID hit, I was really just beginning to build my practice. Like the athletes who I thought I would be working with, I wasn’t prepared. The way that I like to work is in person. I like to be in the room with someone, to be able to create a space of empathy and compassion and safety; this is harder to do over a video call, but I’m also learning to navigate the online environment, and to embrace working with athletes and teams and coaches over video chat. Also, while the weather is good, I like to find a place outside where I can work in person from a safe physical distance. Since a lot of mental performance work happens in what I call “real time” - which means while the athlete is on the field or course or court – I’m still able to do some work with athletes that play outside. With sports shut down, that was obviously not possible; now that’s changing a little. Still, things are growing much more slowly than I expected or planned for.
That said, this last 5 months have given me an opportunity to build a foundation for my work in other ways. I finally got around to building a website and a little bit of a social media presence and was able to do both with intention and discernment rather than just throwing something out there. I have been able to read and write, both of which I really enjoy, and both of which have helped me further clarify my vision and purpose. I’ve also discovered some skills I didn’t know I had! Turns out, there was a woodworker inside of me just waiting for an opportunity to get out.
Curito:
What solutions do you think communities around the world can implement to address this issue?
Aaron:
I think this question has a two-part answer. The first is the “return to play” issue, which is being handled in various ways by different leagues and different nations. In Europe and parts of Asia, where COVID hit earlier and was mostly handled well from the beginning, sports are slowly starting to come back (at least at the professional level). Soccer and baseball games are being played without fans in attendance, which I imagine is a strange environment for the players.
In the United States, the pandemic response was irresponsible and impatient and short-sighted to the point of catastrophe at the federal level and varied widely at the state and local levels. The return to play has therefore been attempted in a lot of different ways. Some professional leagues have taken the “bubble” route, with great success. Others have not, and it remains to be seen how that plays out. Some collegiate conferences have cancelled their Fall seasons; others are moving forward. At the youth level, some sports are still waiting to see what’s safe while others have slowly gotten back to it, and still others never totally stopped. This depends a lot on whether the sport is played indoors or outdoors, how many people are involved, and the part of the country where it’s taking place.
At the professional level, economics are obviously a consideration. However, I think that we have to put the safety of the athletes at the forefront of every decision that we make. I’m not just talking about physical safety, although that is important, especially as we learn more about the breadth of the potential effects of COVID on a person’s body and the manner in which the virus spreads. In this, we absolutely have to listen to the science.
We also have to take into account the mental health and social-emotional development of our kids and young adults. What is the emotional and social cost of an extended period of time in which young people aren’t learning skills like communication, social support, problem-solving, sharing, compromise, effort, and accountability? What are the mental health implications of so much time spent away from friends, in relative isolation, and without a physical outlet for their energy and emotions? These are the same questions we have to be asking about returning to school, and there are no easy answers.
“It takes a lot of courage to show our true selves to a world that has reduced us to our accomplishments and their expectations of who we should be, and that hangs on our every move - and every mistake. Vulnerability in the face of that paradigm is the bravest action an athlete can take.”
Curito:
In this new decade, what do you hope to achieve personally and with your business?
Aaron:
Ah, the “five-year plan” question. In one of my practicum discussion classes in grad school, we were having a conversation about this question, and one of my good friends and classmates framed the answer in a way I’ll never forget. He said that he wasn’t thinking so much about the specifics of a certain job or place or picture of how things were going to look. Instead, he was focusing on what kind of lifestyle he wanted to have. (As an aside, THIS is what grad school is really about. The level of intellectual discourse, the hands-on work, and the inspiration that we find in our peers). Ok, so this is how I look at things now: What kind of life do I want to be living?
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t specific things I want, because I definitely have a list! What it does mean is that my goals have more to do with living a life of fulfillment, working at being the best person I can be, being of service, cherishing being near my family, taking total responsibility for myself and my problems, staying grounded in gratitude and appreciation for the good stuff and the challenges, finding inspiration in the things that are truly important (and letting go of the things that aren’t), and staying deeply connected with Nature. I want to not just teach people how to live better and feel better and perform better, I want to show them what those things look like by working at them myself every day.
That doesn’t mean things will be all sunshine and roses all the time, or that I’m some superhuman lifestyle master. In fact, it’s the opposite. It means showing that I’m a human being, that being vulnerable and making mistakes and failing are important parts of growth. It means learning to face up to the immense challenges that we face, and also recognizing that we don’t have to do it alone. It means finding what we’re willing to fight for, take risks for, get fired over (so to speak). I guess that what I want for myself and my business is to help people figure out a little bit about who they are and embrace it. These are the things I’m grappling with myself.
Curito:
How can people reach you to learn more about your offerings, services and collaborate with you both domestically and internationally.
Aaron:
Instagram is a good way to connect because it’s easy. To really learn more about PLAYfree, my website is the best way to do it. I love collaborating with other people! Not just in mental performance or psychology; I love the world of kinesiology and the possibilities in mind-body work. I want to talk to trauma experts, doctors, educators, social justice activists, people who make policy…
I saw something recently that said, “we’re not all in the same boat; we are in different boats in the same storm.” This was referring to the United States specifically, but it’s a great way to look at the world right now. Some people are in yachts, and some are clinging to a piece of driftwood. It’s an apt description of privilege, and I think that collaborating with other passionate and compassionate people across disciplines is one way we can use the privilege we have, whatever it is, to bring people together in better boats, so to speak, and begin to row together towards change.
Curito:
Thanks for taking the time to share your journey and what mental & emotional performance coaching is all about! If you want to also listen to Aaron speak, check out the following podcast that he has been a guest speaker for by clicking the photos below. We also asked Aaron to share some of his favorite books that have been impactful to him (list below).
We definitely believe that the need for mental & emotional performance coaching will continue to grow as we become more aware of the relationship between mental health and sports among many other disciplines too! Look forward to seeing how PLAYfree continues to grow and how we can collaborate in the near future!
AARON’S READING LIST
I read a lot, and not just about mental performance or psychology. I like books that make me think or feel, and that challenge or expand my perspective. I would say that most of the non-fiction I read has to do with history, whether we’re talking about sport or otherwise, and I like things that are written in a narrative format. So, the book list I’m going to give you is a little diverse.
Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. A historical and scientific account of the evolution of human societies and social contracts told in a narrative format. Approachably written, brilliant and thought-provoking, and incredibly relevant to the times in which we’re living.
A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn. U.S. history from the colonies to the Clinton administration told through the eyes of workers, women, and oppressed groups. An absolute must for people who want to understand the roots and depths of inequality and the foundations of the systems we’re trying to change now and the movements that came before this one. Especially if you want to gain a much deeper and more truthful understanding of the United States, it’s a hefty read, but absolutely worth it.
The Mindful Athlete, by George Mumford. An important perspective on the practice of mindfulness for performance, and not just in sport. George has worked with some of the most accomplished champions in the history of sport, yet he is humble, grounded, kind, and in this book shares some of his own powerful life story. It’s not the only approach to mindfulness, but it’s an important one.
The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, by Dr. Bruce Perry. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough for everyone who wants to understand childhood trauma. Some of Dr. Perry’s firsthand accounts are heart wrenching, but the book is powerful and, in the end, uplifting. It taught me a huge amount about child development and about the need for us to meet people where they are if we truly intend to help.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, by Mark Manson. Without a doubt one of the most useful, funny, deep, and relevant books I’ve ever read. Forced me to really examine some of my behaviors and beliefs about myself and the world. This book truly changed my perspective in a very powerful way. I recommend it to everyone.
First published on September 11, 2020
