Lee Psychology

Performance Psychology Services

We are specialists in performance psychology and offer a range of coaching, mentoring and training services to help both people and organisations develop optimal psychological performance across various contexts.

The paths that our lives follow are frequently strewn with obstacles and challenges that we either get over or that prevent us from achieving what we want.

Some of these obstacles can seem to be insurmountable while others may present less of a challenge.

Contemporary psychology indicates that many of these obstacles exist within our own minds and are governed by internal working models, subjective understandings and self-limiting beliefs.

It is these governing factors that Lee Psychology can help you to identify and change in order to improve your psychological performance no matter how challenging your journey may be or has been.

Performance Psychology

Performance psychology is a branch of applied psychology that aims to help people develop optimal psychological performance within different areas of their lives.

It is designed to illucidate the different meanings that people may have attributed to their early life experiences and how the interpretation of those events may have led to self-limiting beliefs or maladaptive coping strategies.

The training programmes used at Lee Psychology are designed to take into account the social, cultural and economic contexts in which people live their lives and uses the British Psychological Society’s Power Threat Meaning Framework to produce context-specific perspectives for any psychological challenges they face today.

By combining the non-deficit modelling of the PTMF with contemporary research in Attribution Theory, Self-Determination Theory, Social Constructivism and cognitive behavioural approaches, our performance psychology programmes can help to facilitate real and lasting change.

Performance Psychology banner - a new life written on a road

Paul Lee BSc. MSc.

Paul is an expert psychologist and holds both Bachelors and Masters degree in applied psychology.

He has been working to help people overcome the obstacles in their lives since 1988, the last 13 years dedicated to mental health challenges.

2022 marks a shift for Lee Psychology away from deficit amelioration to aspirational realisation.

Joan Lee Hypnotherapist at Lee Psychology

Joan Lee D. Hyp. MIABP

Joan trained in analytical hypnotherapy in 2011 and has subsequently gone on to study over 20 other psychological training courses including conversational hypnosis, BWRT and Coaching.

She is currently a BSc. undergraduate with the O.U. studying a BPS accredited psychology with counselling degree.

Our Story

3 cre concepts in performance psychology

Internal Working Models in Performance Psychology

Human beings makes sense of their experiences by applying their own internal working models (IWM) which are built around:

Beliefs about the exterior context – World.
Beliefs about the social relationships with other human beings – Others.
Beliefs about one’s own life, identity and experiences – Self.

The almost infinitely variable understandings that can exist within these internal working models combine to provide the subjective logic which each individual uses to create meanings about their experiences.

Performance psychology depends critically on the configuration of these core beliefs and we aim to help clients develop the necessary insights into their IWM’s so that they can be changed in order to help overcome the obstacles frequently encountered on life’s journey.

Life Performance Psychology

Life Performance Psychology focuses on developing the skills, atitudes and strategies necessary to live a full, meaningful and happy life.

The journey of life almost never follows a smooth, problem-free path.

We all lose the ones we love, experience adversities that we never planned for, couldn’t have all the things that we wanted to have and had to cope with things that sometimes threatened to overwhelm us.

Whilst some people are highly resilient to life adversities, others may experience greater difficulty in coping.

Fortunately, as human beings, we are highly adaptable and can, if sufficiently motivated, implement fundamental shifts to our thinking that have a direct bearing on the quality of our experiences.

More about Life Performance Psychology.

Life Performance Psychology Banner - montage of happy people

Personal Performance Psychology

Personal performance psychology is designed for people wanting to achieve specific goals and achievements who may currently feel unable to do so.

Thos who do perform well and reach their goals tend to exhibit similar skills and psychological characteristics, including:

A high degree of Agency.
High levels of motivation and self-determination.
High Self-Esteem.
Well developed resilience to stressors.
Low to medium social conformance.

Our personal performance psychology services can help you to develop these key characteristics usng empirically established applied psychological principles.

More about Personal Performance Psychology.

Workplace Performance Psychology

The workplace is a unique context in which employees are subject to the power of the owners or managerial structures.

Whilst it is widely recognised that meaningful employment and the sense of achievement that often accompanies productive work is a positive factor in wellbeing, it is also the place where abuses of power are most likely to occur.

Unlike the social network of friends and family that we might choose for ourselves, social relationships within the workplace are rarely chosen and can often be quite difficult or strained.

There are many potential obstacles present within the workplace including a lack of job satisfaction, a lack of control over how work is performed, badly managed change, a lack of support, unsustainable levels of demand and so on.

We have been delivering our workplace psychology programmes to the management and staff of the Black Country NHS ICB and the Birmingham & Solihull NHS ICB since 2018.

More about Workplace Performance Psychology.

Workplace Performance Psychology Banner - woman making a group presentation

Executive Performance Psychology

Senior executives, business leaders and Captains of industry face a range of psychological performance related challenges, not least of which are due to generally being held responsible for pretty much everything good or bad that happens within the organisations that they lead.

Chief amongst the obstacles facing female executives are the continuing gender-based pay gaps and the seemingly insurmountable ‘glass ceiling’ limiting the degree of progress that can be achieved, particularly within those settings in which traditional male dominance persists.

Our executive performance psychology service focuses exclusively on the psychological factors associated with executive type roles and not the industry or sector-specific skills.

More about Executive Performance Psychology.

6 Principle Obstacles to Performance

There are many different factors that prevent people and organisations from performing as well as they would like to.

You can read an overview about the different types of obstacles here.

One of the aims of performance psychology is to find solutions to overcoming, or in the case of fixed obstacles, to circumventing them.

Psychological Obstacles

Psychological obstacles are what might be more commonly described as mental health problems that prevent people from achieving what they want to achieve.

View a list of psychological problems here.

Behavioural Obstacles

Behavioural obstacles are the things that people do to solve problems that frequently end up reinforcing the problems and actually making matters worse.

Find out more about behavioural obstacles here.

Biological Obstacles

Biological obstacles are those factors which are imposed by physiological constraints or are claimed to have biological pathology as their root cause.

Read more about biological obstacles here.

Cognitive Obstacles

Cognitive obstacles are those imposed by the neural architecture and functioning of the brain and include such concepts as cognitive tunnelling due to finite attentional resources.

Read more about cognitive obstacles here.

Sociocultural Obstacles

Sociocultural obstacles are those limitations imposed by the social and cultural contexts. Gender inequalities in senior business roles are common in Westernised countries.

Read more about sociocultural obstacles here.

Physical Obstacles

There are, of course, many physical obstacles that get in the way of progress. Where these do exist it is important to develop the ability to accept them and learn to work around them.

Read more about physical obstacles here.

Performance Enhancement

We offer a number of solutions to help people enhance their performance in whichever contextual setting they target.

We follow a standardised applied psychology ‘route map’ which is integrated with the individual or team of individuals and the specific performance area of interest.

This involves a number of incremental stages designed to enhance performance from the ground up:

Stage one: Exploration of personal history and perfomance goals (formulation).

Stage two: Psychometric measurement of core beliefs (World, self & others).

Stage three: Selection and use of psychological coaching and training methods (CORE Programme, CBT, Psychosocial Counselling, CBH).

Stage four: Re-assessment of core beliefs, review of goals and objectives.

Core Performance psychology programme on PC screen

The CORE Programme

The CORE programme builds on the fundamental principles of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and an appreciation of how human beings attribute unique meanings to different experiences and then use those meanings to develop strategies for any future occurrences.

It is an applied psychology approach that focuses on Core Beliefs, Core Values and Core psychological strengths such as Resilience.

Created as an online learning platform incorporating 10 in-depth modules, this programme is one of the tools we use to help people identify and change any internal obstacles to their performance goals.

It can also be used as a ‘Teach Yourself CBT’ course.

You can find out more about the Core CBT Programme here.

A New Way of Thinking About Distress

The Power Threat Meaning Framework was devised by the clinical psychology division of the British Psychological Society (BPS) as a direct challenge to the pathologisation and medicalisation of human distress by the psychiatric community and its continuously expanding classification of normal human emotions as biological illnesses, particularly in the latest DSM V (2022) publication.

The framework is intended to help sufferers, and those helping them with recovery, to conceptualise their current distress in terms of their own life experiences and, in particular, in relation to how power has been used, what types of threats they experienced and how they have attributed meaning or made sense of those experiences in order to devise appropriate threat responses.

Understanding the inter-play between these three concepts can help both the sufferer and the CBT therapist in the formulation of an effective recovery programme.

Power

Power, in psychosocial contexts, is the ability to direct or influence the actions of others. Power can be institutional, legal, economic, social, cultural, emotional or physical and have both positive and negative effects.

Threats

Threats also come in many forms including existential (threats to life), emotional (withdrawal of love), social and cultural (exclusion), legal (incarceration) and psychological (distress).

Meanings

The meanings that we attribute to any given experience are highly subjective and congruent with our core beliefs and values. These meanings determine how we make sense of and react to situations.