Athletes Can Boost Physical Performance by Upping Mental Game — KATU

PORTLAND, Ore. — It's Mental Health Awareness Month, and feeling good mentally can be a game-changer for athletes.

One Portland woman is making it her mission to help athletes boost their physical performance by harnessing the power of their minds.

Anna Hennings is a mental performance coach for athletes, mainly for indoor volleyball players and beach volleyball players.

She uses her master's in sports psychology to teach athletes mindfulness and attention training.

"What I do is I use that knowledge to coach athletes and teams on how to strengthen their mental game so that their mind can work for them instead of against them," she explains.

Hennings provides one-on-one and team coaching, both in-person and remotely. Though a majority of her clients are from Oregon, she teaches athletes all over the United States.

Before Hennings became a Certified Mental Performance Consultant, she went to the University of California - Davis and studied fashion business. After a decade in the retail world, she decided she wanted to do more impactful work.

That's when she discovered the field of sport psychology.

As a lifelong athlete, sport psychology appealed to both Hennings' love of sports and her desire to help others. She promptly enrolled at John F. Kennedy University to earn her Master of Arts degree in Sport Psychology.

After graduating, Hennings quickly launched her career. She moved to Central Texas with her husband, Garren, and their two cats, Denali and Tux. There, she served as the Lead Resilience Trainer and Mental Performance Expert for the U.S. Army at Ford Hood.

She moved back to the West Coast during the COVID-19 pandemic, where she was offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to coach the women's volleyball team at Pepperdine University. She describes this as one of the most rewarding moments of her career because she got to work with the coaches who led Olympic beach volleyball players Kerri Walsh and April Ross to their respective 2016 bronze medals.

After that 2020-2021 volleyball season, Hennings opened her own private practice, which she has been doing ever since. She's also the exclusive mental performance coach for the Columbia Empire Volleyball Association (CEVA), which is the entity that governs youth volleyball in the Pacific Northwest.

Throughout her career, Hennings has noticed that her clients have had the same struggle, no matter what level they're at.

"So many of the people I work with are highly self-critical," she says. "I think there's this belief if we are hard on ourselves, it'll make ourselves work harder."

Instead, negative self-talk wears athletes down.

"Being highly self-critical actually tanks our self-confidence," Hennings says.

That loss of confidence can push players away from the sport they love. That's what happened to Hennings, who played volleyball both recreationally and competitively until she was 16 years old.

"I left competitive volleyball when I was the age of most of my clients," she says. "I didn't know how to handle the pressure. I wasn't having fun anymore. There was a lot of teammate drama that was really throwing me off from the game."

One of her primary motivations behind being a mental performance coach is to ensure another athlete doesn't have the same experience she did.

"If I had some of these tools, I think I would have stayed in the sport a lot longer," she admits.

The tools she gives her clients don't just make them feel better, they play better as well.

"With an athlete who learned how to speak to themselves more effectively, they learn how to move past mistakes they make more effectively [and] that teammates make more effectively," she explains. "They stay more present in the game. Their anxiety tends to be lower."

At that point, Hennings says "that just creates this cocktail of being able to give yourself the best chance at playing how you want."

KATU and the Women's Foundation of Oregon are proud to support SHE FLIES by sharing the stories of influential girls and women in sports throughout 2024.

The Women's Foundation of Oregon is harnessing the power of teamwork to champion girls in sports. We're a group of people who work together to support and promote gender justice. We believe in being free and fair, working as a team, finding happiness, growing, being honest, showing bravery, and making things right.