Hi, Anne Corbin, your Mind Body Spirit Mentor. I'm here with this week's episode of the mind body spirit connection. You are a complex being composed of 3 parts, mind, body, and spirit. Just get those 3 parts working together in harmony Anne upscale your life. I'm here to show you how. Welcome to another interview style cars today. My guest is Anne Kelleher, but we'll call her Joe, because Jo is a friend. But Jo is, qualified high performance psychologist, hypnotherapist, and business mentor.
Her mission is to help high achievers overcome their fears, anxieties, and mental blocks so that they can take success to the next level. Specifically in sport, but also in business Anne education. And Joe is absolutely a soul after my own heart, because mind, body, and spirit is what she's all about. So, Joan, lovely to have you here. Thank you very much for agreeing to speak. Anne thank you very much for inviting me. I feel real honored that you've, let me come and speak on your podcast.
It's an absolute pleasure. So I suppose the first thing I Anne ask you to talk about is what made you want to be a high performance psychologist? So when I was, quite young and I was at school, I got bullied a lot, so I didn't do very much, study to be fair. So my qualifications quite low, but I was always passionate about sport and high performance. And I think when we're at school, we don't always think that we can work and have that education that we do when we get older.
So I think I had that more motivation to be able to learn as I got older. And it was in 2002 when my life changed, when my mom passed away, And for years, I've been wanting to work and be a sports psychologist, be a performance psychologist. So I thought, no, this is the time I need to do that. So I took that time where I went to to the university to study psychology, but I felt at that point that still wasn't making that difference. I wanted to get across to people.
I wanted to help people to develop themselves because I know that we can. Everyone has that ability to have success. So I took a year out, and I trained to be a hypotherapist life coach, Anne that's where I started my journey to help people. And eventually, in 2017, I finally got that dream of being a sports psychologist, and a performance psychologist that I had when I was eighteen. So it shows that you can do what you want. You don't have to do it. When you first leave school.
So I was really proud of myself, but due to the jobs that I've done, I felt that I need to do that, not just in sport, but also in business and education to enable people to know that they can get and create success in their lives. If they connect that mind, that body, in that spirit. You are so right. Just for people who can't see the background behind you. I just want to describe it. It says focus on how far you've come.
Not how far you have to go, which says it all really, because most of us are held back by what we feel we ought to be doing or where we ought to be rather than enjoying the moment. And also looking back, one of the things I told my clients is, We're so busy chasing the idea or chasing that next goal that we forget how far we've come. And if we can measure success backwards by looking at how we've progressed, then that makes us happier. We get more confident We get better self esteem.
We improve on our resilience because we realized that actually we're we're stronger and braver than we thought we were. But we forget those key moments of success because if we're looking towards where we need to go, that success disappears, and we're concentrating on that next thing that we want to achieve.
So by looking at our 4, we've come, then creates that happiness Anne that make you feel successful because we are successful, not a lot of people, many people think they're not because they're chasing the ideal all the time. You're right. You know, my students, I always tell them, celebrate, even if it's a small win, celebrate because it's important. Anne you need to give yourself credit. And we're our own worst enemies. It's something that we just don't sorry, not enemies.
Critics, that's what I meant to say. We're our own worst critics, and we're never satisfied. At least people like me are never satisfied. There's always something else to to reach for and strive for. And it's like that perfect perfectionist, isn't it? That we always want to be perfect. We never want to celebrate imperfect action. Anne, really, that's where the learning comes from. That's where we can see that we're human because we need to live life. We need to enjoy life.
And when we're chasing every single goal and we're not taking in our our progression, sort of journey, I suppose. We forget. We forget that in the moment, This is special. This is special. We'll never get it back. It will always be gone. We can't cut her back time. We can't go forward in time. So we really need to understand that what we're doing now is okay Anne that we can achieve great things. We don't have to do it all in one go. We we're doing it right now.
Everybody is at the best version of themselves. Right now, we just stay on the realize it sometimes. Anne we need to enjoy the journey because time is massively more important than money. You can borrow money, can't you? But you can't borrow time. Anne I always say that to, the athletes that I work with, concentrate on the process, not the outcome. And I remember there was Emma Radhikarnu that won the US Open last year. And what happens is when she was in Wimbledon, she froze.
She's what we call in this sporting industry. She choked. Yes. I saw that. I saw that happen. I was so sorry for her because I knew exactly where she was in her mind. Anne she was thinking of the outcome. She she built up Wimbledon as this huge event, whereas she concentrated on her mindset to work up on the process. And then only a few months later, she goes Anne she takes one match at a time and then when the US open.
And as ethics, we can look at how they work on using the process rather than performance and transfer that into whether it's your career, your business, in education or in life in general that we concentrate on the process and the outcome will come. We just have to trust it. We have to believe it that we don't need to know the whole journey.
We just need to believe that we will get to the outcome if we take it one step at a time and use that process, believing the universe will guide us to the right direction. We don't need to have it all figured out every single step of the way. Lovely. So now let's talk about mind, body, and spirit Anne how do you use that within your practice?
So being a hypnotherapist and a sports psychologist and performance psychologist, that in itself could be a little bit of a conflict because the traditional performance psychologist is very much working on the research of what has been proven and that they base it and underpin their practice on everything that they do. And they do a lot of what's called mental skills, which is a lot of CBT where you you tell somebody what they need to do in order to improve themselves.
However, we know that it doesn't always work that way. We can tell somebody what they need to do. It doesn't necessarily mean that they will do it. Because we know, and I call them my our Anne. We have automatically negative thoughts in our brain that fill this part of our brain matter, which is where we create high performance.
And when we fill it up with these negative thoughts, if we get a blockage, Anne this blockage stops us from allowing that natural pathway between our mind and our body to work together in order to create new skills. And we have to allow to challenge those negative thoughts in order to a cleared up pathway. A great believer in using the spiritual side and using the spirit. In order to help us clear those. We don't necessarily need to use the whole scientific because you and I know they work.
We might not have research on these processes, but they work. And we just have to trust that it that the process happens. So I yeah. Anne I don't know how to drive a car. I certainly couldn't. Sorry. I I couldn't put a car together, but that doesn't stop me from driving it. Anne that's the same argument I use when I'm at the computer. I have no idea what's going on inside, but I can use it.
And to me, it's about clearing that pathway so that you so that the mind, the body, and the spirit can work together, and that's when we create those flow moments, those high performance moments where we know that wearing flow and everything's going smoothly.
And that's when we feel that self actualization that we know we're on the right path Anne I think by linking all three of them together means that I can work holistically as a high performance psychologist using the skills that I've had over the years to get the best results because Some people are very, very different. They they just need to be told what the the strategies are. We also need to do a little bit of mind work Anne work together. So Oh, yes. Let's talk about mental fitness.
Yes. Yeah. So how do you develop that? So the mental fitness when I work with athletes and with performers is we have the performance triangle Anne so many people in performance concentrate on their physical fitness. They concentrate on the techniques and the skills, but, actually, if we haven't got the mental fitness, you're not going to get the edge. In whether it's sport education or in business.
So I work with the mental fitness, which is helping you develop that vision, that focus, but also to work within getting your, you know, the thoughts in our head that we're talking to ourselves rather than listening to the thoughts in our head. We always say to people, we've got 2 ears, one mouth. So therefore, we should listen. Anne we should then less speaking. But actually, when we're talking about ourselves, we should do a little less to ourselves and talk more to ourselves.
In order to develop that mental fitness so that when we go out in performance, we've got that edge because when you think physically or technically, there's so many people at the same level, and it's their mental fitness that takes them to the next level of their success and be ahead of the game. Absolutely. Yes. I, really, I'm only interested in tennis, but you can totally see the difference mental fitness makes with the really top players Yeah. Because yeah.
I I remember seeing a a federal match once. I think it was the final Wimbledon about 5 years ago. Anne the opponent just fell apart because he didn't have the mental strength. To take on federer, I suppose, Anne also, I think I've seen it with Jacobovich as well, where you look at the mental fitness of, some of these opponents at the beginning, they can really take on, the skill level. But, actually, when it gets towards 5 sets, they They they struggle. They can't hold it. Yeah. Absolutely.
So tell me, what, what qualifies you to be a mentor? In developing mental fitness, sports business, yeah, education. Anne not only being qualified as sports, like, former psychologist, that's just a little bit small part of it because I think believe it's all about life experiences too. So I've been an athlete I've worked in business. I've shown the education. You can do what it takes in order to get to being professional doctor's qualification, and I got very little qualifications at school.
And I had an English teacher that told me that I never get anywhere in life because I couldn't speak all comprehend English because I couldn't pass the exam. I failed one of the exams, but I passed another. So I actually did get that exam. But I'm not done too badly to get to, a professional doctorate qualification, but also I've worked within welfare to work. I've worked in education. I've got my own successful business working as a hypnotherapist.
As well as then coming on and qualified in sports Anne high performance psychologists. And I've been able to mentor people in different areas in sport, business, and education, and got those results because it doesn't matter in what modality where you are, what industry it is, if you develop your mindset and your mental fitness, you will have a more fulfilling life and a more fulfilling career, business, education, or your athletic ability. Absolutely.
And you have a starter kit, special offer for my listeners? Yes. So I have the ultimate mental fitness starter kit. I set this up because there's so many people want to know where they want to get started, hence the starter kit. And I have put a link in the show notes to give a gift, really, to your to your audience so they can receive that for only £29, and that offer will be available for your podcast business. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you so much.
So I think we've, we've kind of we've covered everything that I wanted to discuss today, Anything I've lived out? No. I think it's just really my mission is to allow everyone to have, like, mental fitness are not just for b for the elite athletes, and I think that's what my mission is is to ensure that performance psychology is available to everyone and not just the elite. But thank you very for allowing me to speak on the podcast. It's been a pleasure. It's been wonderful having you.
I just love the way you talk about mental fitness Anne the combination of mind, body, and spirit, because that's that's where it's all at, as far as I'm concerned. Yes. Thanks again. Thank you. So friends, if you enjoyed this content and would rather not wait until next week, for more of the same, you are warmly invited to check out my new membership program. It's called Awaken Dot Plus Anne the Enquirer level is open now. If you join as a founder member, the price for you will never rise.
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