Peak newsletter 🧠 | This is an excerpt from The Athletic’s weekly newsletter covering the mental side of sports. Sign up here to receive the Peak newsletter directly in your inbox.When Julie Elion first meets with prospective clients, she gives them two prompts:
Tell me what you’re great at mentally.
Then tell me where you need to improve.
Elion is a mental performance specialist who works with some of the best golfers in the world, including Justin Thomas and Wyndham Clark, the winner of the 2026 U.S. Open.Her goal: help golfers become more conscious of themselves. Those two questions are the starting point.She usually suggests 10 items for each of the two lists, but that number is arbitrary. Take a minute and try it.If you struggled to come up with 10 things you’re great at mentally, then you are like “75 to 90 percent” of Elion’s clients, she said.The “needs improvement” list is usually much easier (and longer). That’s why the wording of the question was important to her: “Don’t tell me what you’re bad at. I want to know what you want to improve.”Here’s the really interesting thing, though: Elion told me she’s never had a golfer who was ranked in the top 50 in the world not be able to tell her 10 things they’re good at mentally.“The ones way below that,” she said, “just go on and on about what they need to improve on.”It’s a bit of a chicken-or-egg question: Are the best golfers able to come up with 10 good things because they’ve been successful? Or did they experience success because they can identify the good parts about themselves?
