Achieving Excellence

Colleen Hacker has served as a mental skills coach on six U.S. Olympic coaching staffs — that credential is not background noise, it's the whole point of picking up this book. She and co-author Mallory Mann cover eighteen chapters of practical mental performance tools: confidence, self-talk, imagery, energy management, focus, pre-performance routines, and resilience. Each chapter includes step-by-step checklists and real elite-athlete stories, published in 2022 by Human Kinetics, a press that knows this territory well. The tools are applicable beyond elite sport to coaches, performers, and competitive students. There's no faith integration, but nothing in conflict with faith values either. If you want sport psychology that has actually been tested at the Olympic level, this delivers.