Meet Tami Matheny

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tami Matheny a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Tami , we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?
If you had seen me in high school, you would have from the outside seen what looked like a very young, confident maybe even board line cocky young lady. But on the inside, I was living on a roller-coaster. My emotions ebbed and flowed as my last game went, even how the last shot went, or last grade, even last comment a teacher or coach said. Basically, I was only as confident as the last result I had gotten. I often settled in college because I didn’t believe in myself. I became so exhausted riding this roller-coaster that I informally embarked on a lifelong mission that year- to find the key to confidence. How could I build and maintain it and it not be based off result and/or other people’s feedback?

I started studying and observing what truly confident people had and did that I didn’t. I learned that results and feedback are outside your control and those things just need to be icing on the cake. We can establish a strong baseline of confidence through 4 areas that we can control.

The glue that holds the 4 pillars together is your why. The bigger picture. Often athletes forget their why and get too zoomed focused on results. Ironically the best way to get results is to focus more on your why and less on results. Being true to your why puts things in perspective and allows you to bounce back quicker when you don’t get the immediate results you want. It can also fuel you with a great purpose.

The 4 pillars of confidence:

1. Talk the Talk.- all the comments we say to ourselves and to others.
2. Walk the Walk- how we carry ourselves, our facial expressions and our body language.
3. See it Be it- how we see ourselves.
4. Preparation- hard to be confident if not prepared. Have to put in the work but that’s mental work as well.

Today that roller-coaster young lady has turned into not so young of a lady but one is confident in herself. She realizes she doesn’t know it all and that she won’t always be successful but she knows she has the tools to bounce back stronger.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I honestly feel that I have the best job in America. I am a mental game coach and I get to work with athletes, coaches, teams, parents of athletes and administrators on the mental aspects of the game. I like to describe it as a strength and conditioning coach for the mind. I work on building confidence, mental toughness, focus, leadership, teamwork, etc. Basically, I get to teach life lessons using sports as the vehicle.

My job allows me to live my why and that is to make a difference in as many people’s lives as possible. I love when I get a call years down the road and a former athlete tells me how a skill, I taught them is now even helping them in their professional or personal life. Also, my “homework” for my job is watching or reading about sports and/or the mental game. This is cool because my career isn’t just a profession but my passion as well as my hobby.

In additional to being a mental game coach, I am also an author and just released my 5th book, “Challenger Deep: Athletes Rising Above Adversity”  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CVRD9HFW. The book shares 30 short stories of elite athletes or teams and how they’ve used challenges they face to elevate their game. Then strategies are given that enables the reader to apply to their sport. My other 4 books deal with confidence and adversity with, “The Confident Athlete” continuing to be a bestseller on helping athletes (and non athletes) learn how to build their confidence from within.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
The most important skill is being able to build relationships. We all need others for success and being able to connect and relate to others to build trust is an important aspect for mental coaching. Additionally relationship building is integral to my why in that I like making a difference whether it’s helping a client or helping a colleague on a new idea or project. I also like to connect like minded people together.

Next would be understand how our mind and body are connected and strategies to try to help them sync. Last but not least is confidence. It’s hard to have success without being confidence in who you are and what you are doing. It doesn’t mean I always have the answers or always have successful outcomes but I’m able to bounce back a lot quicker and not let it effect my over
all why.

It’s important to constantly learn and grow from others. Connect with people. Read new ideas. Be a study of your not only your profession but your people also!

What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?
Balance has always been a challenge for me. Being self employed means there is always something else I can be doing to grow my business. I am trying to make sure I take at least one day for myself where I don’t do anything related to work.

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