Sage Advice: Episode 5 │Katie Lovallo
Presented by: Crum Consulting
Host: Maria Johnson, Junior Consultant in Marketing
Guest: Katie Lovallo, Founder of MindFit Performance
Full Interview: https://youtu.be/idci9pLZN3c?si=UbruLtAz89JXYq_i
Maria: Hi and welcome to the Sage Advice series. I'm Maria Johnson, and our guest today is Katie Lovallo, a mental performance coach and the founder of MindFit Performance. Why don't we start out with you telling me the story behind your profession, and your journey up to MindFit Performance?
Katie: I played sports my whole life growing up, and was fortunate enough to play sports in college. I played soccer and softball, and a little bit of everything growing up, but settled into soccer and softball in high school. I was blessed to be able to keep playing in college. So I always had an understanding and appreciation for sport and what comes with it: commitment, dedication, work ethic, goal setting, all of those things.
I suppose I always recognized there were physical components to sports in addition to mental components. But I'll age myself a little here: back then, sports psychology wasn't a prevalent field. It was never really addressed in any depth. You'd talk about focus, goal setting, confidence, but never with any real understanding of what those things meant or how to achieve them.
Flash forward to my freshman year of college. Two or three months into my first season, I broke my leg.
Maria: Oh no.
Katie: That was my first real, intense injury-related athletic challenge. I'd had bumps and bruises and sprained ankles along the way, but nothing serious until that. It was very challenging, to say the least. I had surgery, was out of school for three weeks, missed the rest of my first year, and had to work hard to rehab and train back to compete again.
In hindsight, that was actually the easy part. The hard part was once I was cleared to play, and the roller coaster of emotions and physical and mental challenges that come with returning to sport after an injury. I was dealing with some pain, but more than that, I was dealing with fear. I was afraid I'd get hurt again. Deep down, I think I had the tools to overcome that, but I didn't know it, and I didn't know how to channel them or what it would take to get through the mental battles I was facing.
The physical battles were hard, but at least I was in the training room getting treatment, working with athletic trainers and physical therapists to address those things. The mental and emotional side was arguably harder.
So that was the starting point for me realizing how essential mental skills, and the mental side of sport and of life, really are. In my senior year of college, our school had two semesters plus a one-month term at the end called "May Term." Students had to take two of the four May Terms offered over four years. My senior year, I took a class called Introduction to Sports Psychology, and that was my lightbulb moment.
I was a psychology major with a physical education minor. I didn't want to go the traditional psychology route of counseling or therapy. I was deeply connected to being an athlete; it was a huge part of my identity. So going into that class thinking it was just another elective, and having it click and feel like home, because it combined everything I was passionate about, sport and psychology, blended together. I thought, "Oh my gosh, this is it. This is what I want to do."
I was so grateful I decided to take that class that I went on to get a master's degree in sports psychology. And that's the birth of MindFit Performance.
Maria: That's really cool. Would you say what resonated with you so much was that personal experience you brought into the class, like the injury?
Katie: Yeah, totally. Injury, and just my experience as an athlete in general. Sports psychology is parallel to performance psychology. Right now they're separate fields, but very related. The way I approach my philosophy of practice is that these are life skills. Whether you're an athlete or not, these skills apply. That's part of why it resonated too. I thought, this could have helped me as a student, in moments where I felt nervous or anxious about tests or projects. I could have applied the skills I've now learned, post-master's degree, to lots of different areas of my life. You kind of need the experience first to have the foresight and retrospect to apply those lessons later.
It was personal experience combined with the eye-opening basics of that class. I just loved it.
Maria: That's awesome. How did you translate your own personal insights early on in your career to your client work?
Katie: Like in any profession, there's a level of professionalism that comes with it, boundaries and ethics. And I think what's helped me is that while I maintain what's professional and ethical, I also just try to be me. I've found that resonates deeply with people, because at the end of the day, my clients are people just like I am. One of the things we as humans strive for is connectedness and understanding.
Because of my athletic experience, and increasingly as I've leaned into personal experience further into my career, I use that to resonate with clients. It's helpful when I work with athletes, because we want to feel understood. I understand what it's like to be injured. I understand what it's like to stand at the plate with runners on first and second, down a run in the ninth inning with two outs, and feel that pressure to perform, to give your team a chance to at least tie the game, if not win it. I understand what it's like to win and to lose, to achieve goals and to fall short of them, and how to work through that. That allows me to resonate with clients.
Early on it was harder to do that than it is now. The hardest part was connecting with clients who weren't that different in age from me. How do I translate life lessons I've had, when age is often what gives credibility, even if someone younger than me has had more intense or powerful life lessons? We don't always give that the same weight as we do to someone older with more perceived wisdom.
So part of it is using my own personal experience with injury, sport, and life to connect with clients. I'm also lucky enough to mentor and teach at the graduate level. One thing I tell my students all the time is that there's the textbook version of what we learn, and there's the real-life version of how we actually talk about it. You're not going to use marketing jargon when you're talking to someone, even though it exists. It's the same in psychology, medicine, any field. It's about how you make it relatable and digestible without talking down to someone.
I could talk to you about transference and countertransference, but really what that means is people sharing commonalities, like when you're in a room with others and you notice a group start to behave the same way. That's a more relatable way to describe a complex term.
I work with a lot of youth, my main client base is late middle school through college. Something I talk to parents about a lot is that the adolescent brain isn't fully developed until we're deep into our 20s, mid to late 20s even. What adults view as rational, youth don't yet have the capacity to think that way. And we expect them to anyway. So in my work, I get to tell parents, "Here's what's actually going on developmentally," and tell youth, "Here's what's happening for you. Let's think about it, let's work through it, let's build our reasoning skills, but let's understand why this feels so emotional for you."
Coming at it from my own experience, I can think back to moments with my parents as a middle schooler or teenager where there were expectations about how I should behave or think, without an understanding that I didn't have the ability to think that way yet, and I didn't understand that about myself either. When you're 12, 13, 14, 15, you don't know what you don't know, so you just exist.
Early on, did I have that awareness or the methodology to teach that? Definitely not. You have to grow and evolve, both personally and professionally. One of my mantras is "ever evolving." I got out of grad school in 2009, and my approach has evolved a lot over the last 16 to 18 years, in how I teach and what I focus on. I also have to stay current on what's happening with youth right now. In the last five to ten years there's been a spike in anxiety and stress that wasn't always there before, so you have to evolve and adapt your methods to meet clients where they are.
Maria: Yeah, absolutely. Something stuck out to me when you were talking about your challenges. I'm curious how you overcame them in the moments you were experiencing them.
Katie: If I get into a situation with a client where I'm not sure where to go next, the beauty of how I work is that clients are typically set up with a package, a certain number of sessions. Some things take time, and you work through them over several sessions. But sometimes in the moment, and this is something I've grown into, I've learned to say, "You know what, I'm not sure. Let me sit with that until we meet again." I don't want to give a quick fix just to give one. This field doesn't really involve quick fixes. It takes time, dedication, and trial and error, because it's not cookie-cutter. I can't, and don't want to, give the same "try A, B, and C" to every client, because everyone is different. There might be several directions we could go, even if the underlying theme, like confidence, stress, or anxiety, is the same across clients, the approach won't look the same, because we're individuals.
So now, I'm more comfortable saying "I'm not sure right now, let's keep exploring it." Here's something you can work on before we meet again, here's what I'll be thinking about too, and we'll come back together and brainstorm, because it's very collaborative.
There are still moments in a session where I genuinely don't know where we should go next, and I'm more comfortable sitting in that uncertainty now than I was starting out. Early on, I felt like I had to give clients something, had to fix it right then. A lot of the mentees I work with in internships take that same approach, because they're trying to accrue hours, so I understand it's a different situation for them. But more experienced practitioners understand that sometimes the growth is just in the conversation. Not every session needs a technique or skill taught. Sometimes awareness itself is the skill. If we're not aware of something, it's very difficult to address or change it. That's always the starting point.
Maria: I like that philosophy. I know you work with more than just athletes, performers too, according to your website. Is there a difference in your approach with athletes versus non-athletes, or do you have more of a global approach?
Katie: Good question. I think in some ways it's global, because performance isn't sport-specific. Whether you're a singer, musician, dancer, or in business, performance concepts apply across the board. I think the differences come in the approach, sometimes the terminology or the examples used. I'm not a musician, I've never played an instrument, so that's an opportunity for me to learn alongside them.
Even with all my athletic experience, my clients are always the experts in whatever they do. Even with softball and soccer, sports I know very deeply, their experience as a player is theirs, not mine. So I help them become the expert on themselves. For non-sport performers, it's the same idea: talk me through what performance feels and looks like for you. What are its components? I want to understand it through your eyes as much as I can, and that helps me understand how you think and approach things. From there we can prioritize skills, techniques, and tactics that resonate and apply best for you.
I might come in with a list of directions we could go, all beneficial, with a sense of where I think we should start. But I also like to hand them the microphone: what feels most relevant to you right now? Focus? Confidence? Nerves? Sometimes those things align with what I'm thinking, sometimes they're different, and that's okay. Mental performance work doesn't have to follow a fixed sequence, because we're all different. Some people already have skills in areas like goal setting and don't need to dig as deep there as someone who doesn't.
We build our own recipe together, and everyone's recipe is a little different, even using the same ingredients. So regardless of whether you're an athlete or a non-sport performer, awareness always comes first. We need to understand ourselves, and exploring that together helps me understand you too. Then we can decide what's most relevant, prioritize, and move forward.
We also need to understand what a "win" means to each of us, in sport, life, and work. What does success mean to you? What does failure mean? Once I understand that, we can work to reshape it if needed. It's interesting: when I ask the youth I work with how they define success, most of them have a growth-minded perspective. Some say winning, but most describe it more broadly, as accomplishing something they set out to do. That sometimes includes winning, but not always, because there's so much within performance itself that can be successful. Those things stack on top of each other and can lead to winning, but they don't guarantee it. Sports are tricky.
Just like in professional life, I might set visions and goals for myself and need to stack small victories to get there. But that doesn't always translate directly into the outcome we want. A lot of us in workplaces are seeking career growth, and we're told certain things put us in position for a promotion. We do those things, and it doesn't always lead to the promotion, which is frustrating. It's similar for athletes: I do everything on the roadmap, and we still didn't win. Is that a failure? So sometimes we're reshaping those definitions. That's how this applies across all performance-based pursuits, because really, everything is performance-based.
Maria: That's really cool. You even connected it to professional life. It's about building that foundation and understanding slowly, like you said, it's a slow process.
Katie: It takes time.
Maria: What's one key mental performance technique you regularly apply to yourself to navigate your own journey?
Katie: Deep breathing. Daily, multiple times a day.
Maria: How do you do it? Do you set aside time for it?
Katie: Let me tell you what life is like with an almost-three-year-old and an almost-one-year-old. "Set aside time."
Maria: Fair enough, understandable.
Katie: The cool thing is you don't need to set aside dedicated time to do it, though it's nice when you can. Breathing in general is an underutilized skill, we're all doing it just to stay alive, but breath work is one of my favorite tools, and probably one of the most common ones I use, personally and with clients.
The reason is, like I mentioned, one of the shifts we've seen with youth is a spike in anxiety, largely because athletic, academic, and social pressures have intensified over the last ten to fifteen years. The way I was raised, in my home and in sports, was very different from how things are today. A lot of youth from a young age aren't allowed to fail or face hardship. So when they do face failure or hardship as pre-teens or teenagers, it feels very overwhelming and anxiety-inducing.
Breath work is a simple but powerful way to re-ground yourself, especially deep breathing. Do you remember learning about the nervous system in school? You have an autonomic nervous system, and within that, your parasympathetic nervous system handles things that happen automatically, like your heart pumping and breathing.
When you do deep breathing, specifically a slow, deep inhale and a slower exhale, you trigger your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your body's natural calming system. It's like giving yourself a tool.
If you ever feel stressed or overwhelmed, even from a positive emotion like excitement, and you need to come back to a steady state, a slow deep breath helps. We often start by teaching it as "box breathing," where you imagine drawing a box, in on a four-count, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. Want to try it together?
Maria: Yeah, okay.
Katie: I'll count, you breathe. It's hard for me to talk and breathe at the same time. Slow, deep breath, on the count of four. Ready? Inhale: two, three, four. Hold: two, three, four. Exhale: two, three, four. Hold: two, three, four.
Maria: That's nice.
Katie: Right? But we don't often dedicate purposeful, present moments to just breathe like that. And that wasn't even a truly deep breath, that was a box breath. As you build the skill, the timing can shift based on your comfort holding your breath or inhaling deeply. Eventually the goal is an inhale of maybe four to six or eight seconds, and an exhale as long as you can manage, because that's what really triggers the parasympathetic response and helps you calm down naturally.
When stress hormones like cortisol spike, that's your body's natural way of preparing for something, it's ingrained in us, dating back to fight-or-flight instincts from our ancestors. Today, when our cortisol spikes, we're usually not actually in a fight-or-flight situation, but our body reacts as if we are. That's why we feel stress: heart rate spikes, breathing gets shallow, our mind races.
Deep breathing is a way to override that, to tell your body, "This isn't a threat, I can handle this, I have the coping skills, let me calm myself down." It's something I do all the time. My stressors have changed a lot in the last two or three years, much less work-related now, much more parenthood-related. But breathing still applies.
Maria: That's awesome. Reflecting on your own journey, what would you say is your "sage advice," or what advice would you give to yourself at the start of your journey?
Katie: Be patient. We talked a little about what success can and can't look like, but success isn't an overnight journey. Be patient, and trust your training. I think early on I dealt with a bit of imposter syndrome: should I do this, can I do this, do I actually know this? Trust your gut. That applies professionally for me, but it applies to life in general too. Your instincts are there for a reason.
Embrace the journey. Embrace the growth, and embrace mottos like "ever evolving." For me that's been a roller coaster of motivation over time, so embrace the ebbs and flows. This field, especially in private practice, is very much what you put into it. Success is a journey, and it looks different for each of us. How successful you are as a professional isn't necessarily tied to the size of your practice.
I think part of the undertone here is using personal experience professionally, continuing to grow, learn, evolve, and yes, mess up. Embrace failure. One of the models I use with clients is reframing success and failure, or winning and losing, as "winning and learning," or "learning and learning." There's something to learn from everything, whether you win or lose. Embrace that deeply.
Maria: That was an awesome talk. Thank you so much for joining me.
Katie: Of course. I appreciate your patience getting this on the books.
Maria: For the end of the video, I usually give guests the chance to share their contact info or a closing message.
Katie: Yeah, I guess I should have said this earlier. My name is Katie, and I own a company called MindFit Performance. You can find the website at mindfit-performance.com, email me at katie@mindfit-performance.com, or find me on Instagram at @mind_fit. I'm also on LinkedIn and Facebook, and Twitter, though I'm less active there. I'd love to hear from anyone watching this. I could talk about this all day, so if you or anyone you know could benefit from mental performance training, reach out. Let's talk.
