Beaux Myers, a SEPP 2022 graduate, sat down with Megan Zander, a current SEPP student to share words of experience and wisdom for students pursuing a graduate degree in sport, exercise and performance psychology. Beaux is Certified Mental Performance Consultant who received his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from St. Norbert College in De Pere, WI, where he was also a member on the Men’s Golf Team. He received his Master’s degree in Sport, Exercise and Performance Psychology from the University of Wisconsin- Green Bay and is currently the Mental Performance Coach for the Colby College Athletic Department. Beaux received the 2025 Early Career Applied Practitioner Award from the Association for Applied Sport Psychology.
What SEPP related jobs have you had? What is your current job?
I completed my SEPP consulting internship with Freedom High School and Aurora BayCare Sports Medicine. After completing the internship, I was offered a position at Aurora BayCare Sports Medicine as their sports training specialist – mental performance consultant. I was the mental performance consultant for their contract with four local high schools and also a few semi-professional teams in the Green Bay area. I was the point person for them for any mental performance training (individual and group sessions, workshops, presentations, working with coaches). I also had individual clinic clients who were coming back from injuries and returning to the workforce. I addressed the mental barriers that could come along with returning to work after an injury. I worked at Aurora BayCare for one year and then got hired at Colby College as the athletic department’s mental performance coach. Colby College is a NCAA DIII school in the New England Small College Athletic Conference. I serve 32 varsity teams, 750 student-athletes, and coaching staff as their mental performance coach. I’m embedded within a transdisciplinary model called “Peak Performance” for student athlete development: mental performance, athletic training, sport science, dietetics, and strength and conditioning. We collaborate with each other to maximize the development in the performance of our student athletes, and lucky for me, that includes the mental performance piece.
How important is setting boundaries in your position, working in athletics?
Yes, setting boundaries is very important. I take the first 5-10 minutes of a session with the athlete to talk about boundaries. A D3 college is small. I’m going to see them across campus. How do you want to act, to talk, to acknowledge each other when I see you other places? Having those conversations early, setting a boundary of social media policies, and fully committing to those boundaries is important. Conversations that I can have with your ATs, with your strength coaches, with your coaches, with administration. Nothing should come as a surprise. Because when it comes as a surprise, you’re already behind. And then that opens the door for ethical concerns which opens the door for a lack of trust or a break in trust, all the things that we need to avoid. Setting those boundaries early and clearly sets the foundation for a good working relationship. You have to know what you’re getting into as well. Sometimes I’m sending emails at 9 o’clock at night because I need to be; maybe there’s a mental health concern or a crisis that I need to be attuned to, that’s part of our job. And some of that needs to be addressed immediately, and if that happens at 9 o’clock at night, all right, we’re addressing it right? So yeah. I try to set boundaries. I try to hold them, but sometimes I also have to be understanding how life happens and situations that happen that need to be addressed, so there are boundaries with flexibility.
Along the lines of flexibility, I’m willing to be flexible with the teams and coaches that show respect. I’m still going show respect to every team, but the ones that respect my time, that respect the work that we do collaboratively, I’m willing to make more sacrifices for. I respect you as long as you respect me; if you respect the work that we do, I’m willing to make those sacrifices. I’m willing to travel across country in the postseason, to maximize the performance of a team. I’m willing to travel five hours for a team to be on a bus and work with the team in the postseason play. This is time away from my loved ones but is something I am willing to do because of the trust and respect that has been established with those teams, student athletes, and coaches.
What were some of your biggest challenges you faced during your time in the SEPP program?
Balancing what was basically three full-time jobs: classes & SEPP internship, working full-time, and coaching collegiate golf.
How did you overcome these challenges?
My wife. She helped. That’s kind of a joke, but not a joke. My wife is very understanding. I’m very fortunate to have her. She knows that I work in athletics. She knows that this is what I want do, so she’s very understanding of those sacrifices that I need to make and that flexibility. If I didn’t have her, I might be saying something completely different. A lot of time management, but also, I think just the work ethic that I kind of abide to; it’s always been kind of ingrained in me, like, you have to work hard to get what you want. I’m a first generation college grad, so I didn’t really have much to pave the way, so I kind of had to pave my own way. I had to make some sacrifices. I tried to get time for myself, but a lot of the stuff that I did, I loved. Yes, obviously its stressful, but also it wasn’t so much that I felt like I was getting burnt out. Working in orthopedics, I worked for a knee surgeon, and he and I had a really strong relationship and honestly, I loved that stuff. I think about it all the time still. And then coaching, you know, you’re not in coaching unless you love it, and that goes with mental coaching as well. And then education, I’ve always loved education. So, if you find at least one thing that you love about it and you really kind of hone in on that, it makes it a lot easier to balance it. I honed in on relationships. That goes into my current consulting and mental performance coaching, the foundation of my work is based upon relationships. If I don’t have a solid relationship with a team, a client, an athlete, a coach, then it’s gonna be hard to implement the techniques and the strategies. Right? So, it really comes down to the relationships for me.
You had the opportunity to conduct research during your time in the SEPP program. What benefits did you experience from this research and how does it inform your applied work?
My research was a mixed methods imagery intervention case study where golfers participated in one of two conditions: traditional imagery and PETTLEP imagery. I compared which type of imagery was more beneficial for golf performance. My takeaways are the amount of dedication that it takes and also the creativity that you need to have to formulate a research question, formulate a plan, for said research, and execute and then reflect. So that’s something I do every time I meet with an athlete, every time that I conduct an intervention with the team. I have to sit down to do an assessment with our coaching staff or with the player to be like, all right, what areas do we need to work on? Then upon that, create a plan, execute that plan, and then we reflect, right? So, essentially what I do is basically applied research without the formality of writing a paper.
What is one golden nugget of advice you would like to share?
Be a passenger, not the driver. What I mean by that is, have a map to a client’s performance, but don’t tell them how to get there. Guide them. Sometimes I have to catch myself not to prescribing them exercises, but working with the student athlete to find what’s working and what maybe we can do differently. Try to personalize your consulting. Mindfulness, for example, is going to look completely different for somebody versus another (hockey player vs golfer). You want to have a solid theoretical foundation, have an understanding of what we’re coaching, and what we’re working on (the research and science), but then there is also the practitioner part: the experience and understanding of how you can modify that based on the environment that you’re in or the person that you’re working with. Get really creative with it, be the passenger. Have an understanding of the goal or the destination, while giving them the keys to drive to the destination.
Questions for Beaux? Contact him at: bmyers@colby.edu
By: Megan Zander, SEPP Graduate Student at UW – Green Bay and Beaux Myers, Mental Performance Coach at Colby College
Co-author: Dr. Joanna Morrissey, Chair of the Sport Exercise & Performance Psychology Program