ABSTRACT
If you have yet to work with professional performers as a sport psychology consultant, you likely know, or have heard, about someone who is or who has worked with these clients. As sport psychology becomes a more visible and reputable profession in various action fields in sport and beyond, we are beginning to find sport psychologists and mental training consultants working with many teams and in many performance contexts, regardless of the performance discipline. When thinking of what these contexts might be, they include team sports, such as football, cricket, ice hockey, rugby, and polo. There is also a breadth of individual sport disciplines, such as mixed martial arts, boxing, golf, and sumo wrestling. Though these sport contexts are known to be places where sport and performance psychology professionals engage in their craft, performance contexts also hire our professionals. Ballet and modern dance are two such contexts, and then there are performance environments, such as Cirque de Soleil, and there are also music contexts, such as rock and classical, where people with sport psychology training have found a home and earned a wage. We are only beginning to understand that the breadth of possible environments receptive to this sort of professional practice is as wide and deep as we venture to explore and chart. Common issues and strategies which might be transferable between various action fields can be detected in numerous contributions to this volume, as well as very specific ones which play a key role in an engagement in this sport or action field. It was one of the initial ideas for this kind of compilation of chapters to set the groundwork to reveal commonalities as well as specificities with regard to certain issues, approaches, and strategies or even mental techniques for performance enhancement.
