Are We Measuring Mental Performance or Just How People Feel?
The difference between psychological improvement and measurable performance outcomes.
Mental performance professionals spend considerable time teaching athletes, military personnel, first responders, and other high performers how to manage stress, regulate emotions, maintain attention, and adapt to challenging situations. These are meaningful areas of development, and the scientific literature provides reasons to continue investigating how psychological interventions can support human performance.
However, there is a question I believe deserves more attention within our profession: When we say mental performance training works, what exactly are we measuring to support that conclusion?
Let's look at a hypothetical athlete who completes an eight-week mental performance program. At the conclusion, the athlete reports improved confidence, greater emotional regulation, and an increased ability to remain present during challenging situations. Their post-program psychological assessments also demonstrate favorable changes. Those are really nice findings and the findings suggest that something meaningful may have changed in the athlete's psychological functioning. Now, can we conclude that athletic performance improved?
Did decision-making become more accurate? Did performance become more consistent under pressure? Was the athlete better able to redirect attention following a mistake? Did the psychological changes translate into observable differences during competition? If those outcomes were never measured, we cannot confidently answer those questions.
The purpose of this blog post is not to dismiss psychological assessments or the professionals who use them.
I use them!
It is a discussion about the importance of understanding what our measurements tell us, what they do not tell us, and how we communicate the effectiveness of our work.
The Difference Between Feeling Better and Performing Better
One of the important distinctions within sport and performance psychology is the relationship between psychological functioning and observable performance. An athlete who experiences less performance anxiety may find competition more manageable. A firefighter who develops greater emotional awareness may recognize stress responses earlier. A military professional who improves psychological flexibility may become more willing to reconsider an ineffective response when circumstances change.
Each of these represents a potentially meaningful outcome.
However, psychological functioning and actual task performance are related but distinguishable constructs. Improving one does not automatically establish improvement in the other. An athlete may report greater confidence while continuing to struggle with technical execution. An individual may demonstrate improved emotional regulation without a corresponding change in decision accuracy. Likewise, a performer may execute a task successfully while experiencing considerable anxiety or psychological discomfort. These possibilities matter because performance does not occur independently of the individual's physical preparation, technical competence, tactical knowledge, experience, and environmental demands.
Psychological skills contribute to the broader performance process, but they are not the only variables influencing its outcome. This is also important when considering well-being. Improving an individual's psychological functioning can be valuable even when their competitive or occupational performance remains unchanged. We should not diminish that improvement simply because it does not produce a measurable increase in performance.
The concern begins when we use evidence of psychological improvement to make claims about performance outcomes that were never assessed.
What Are We Actually Measuring?
When evaluating mental performance programming, professionals have several approaches available to them. Standardized psychological assessments can examine constructs such as emotional regulation, psychological flexibility, mindfulness, and perceived confidence. Interviews and self-report measures can provide insight into how individuals experience stress, interpret challenges, and evaluate their ability to respond. These methods offer information that may not be accessible through observation alone.
Yet, the selection of an assessment should be driven by the question we are trying to answer.
If the objective is to improve emotional regulation, an appropriate measure of emotional regulation may help determine whether that psychological construct changed. If the objective is to improve perceived confidence, we should assess confidence. However, if the objective is to improve decision-making under pressure, then we need some way to examine decision-making under relevant conditions. A change in emotional regulation does not establish that decision quality improved. Nor does increased mindfulness necessarily demonstrate that attentional control improved during a complex performance task.
These relationships can be investigated, but they should not be assumed.
Last week, I spoke with a cognitive performance specialist working within a tactical unit about biofeedback and the transfer of psychological skills to actual performance. We can sit service members at a desk, attach physiological sensors and EEG caps, and collect extensive amounts of data. However, those measurements alone do not demonstrate whether the skills being trained will transfer to an operational environment. We can teach service members how to regulate their breathing in a quiet office without ever teaching them how to apply that same skill under the pressure of executing a task. If we then use improvements measured in these controlled environments to demonstrate a return on investment, are we actually measuring the outcomes that matter? Or are we simply presenting favorable data to justify continued funding and another opportunity to remain on the contract?
These concerns extend beyond tactical environments. Whether we are reporting outcomes to coaches, organizational leaders, or program managers, we have a professional responsibility to distinguish between improvements measured during training and improvements demonstrated during actual performance. A report documenting changes in psychological variables is not necessarily a report demonstrating increased operational readiness or athletic performance. Both types of information may be useful, but they answer different questions.
We should be careful not to confuse the construct we intended to influence with the outcome we ultimately hope to improve.
The Value and Limitations of Self-Report Assessments
Self-report assessments have an important place in psychological research and applied practice. They allow us to examine experiences, beliefs, emotions, and perceptions that may not be directly observable. If we want to understand how someone experiences stress, perceives their ability to regulate emotions, or responds internally to challenging situations, asking them about those experiences is not a methodological weakness by itself.
The concern is how we interpret the information collected.
Self-report responses can be influenced by factors such as recall, self-awareness, interpretation of questions, social desirability, and expectations surrounding an intervention. These considerations do not make the data meaningless, but they do influence the conclusions we should draw. For example, an athlete reporting improved attentional control may genuinely perceive greater control over their focus. That perception is worth examining. However, it does not independently demonstrate fewer attentional errors, faster recognition of relevant information, or more accurate decisions during competition. There is also a difference between asking someone how well they believe they performed and directly assessing the performance itself. Subjective performance ratings can contribute useful information, particularly when accompanied by clear criteria, but they are not interchangeable with independent behavioral or task-based measures.
A particularly relevant example comes from a systematic review and meta-analysis published in Sports Medicine. Reinebo and colleagues (2024) reviewed 111 studies investigating psychological interventions and athletic performance. Of those, 25 studies were sufficiently comparable to contribute to five meta-analyses. Initial findings indicated favorable effects for psychological skills training, mindfulness- and acceptance-based interventions, and imagery. However, when the researchers conducted sensitivity analyses excluding nonrandomized studies and subjective performance outcomes, the effects were no longer statistically significant.
This finding does not establish that psychological interventions are ineffective. It demonstrates that the strength of the conclusions depends, in part, on study design and how performance is measured. More recently, Zhao and colleagues (2026) published an umbrella review encompassing 61 reviews and 42,106 participants. The authors identified potential benefits across several psychological skills training approaches, but also reported that much of the available evidence had low certainty, methodological variability, and limitations in credibility. The implication is not that mental performance training lacks value. Rather, the evidence supporting particular outcomes must be examined carefully, and the profession benefits when research methods become more rigorous. For those of us working in applied settings, this should encourage reflection on our own assessment practices.
Are we evaluating whether a psychological intervention changes the construct it was designed to influence? Are we evaluating actual performance or are we treating those two outcomes as though they represent the same thing?
From Psychological Change to Observable Performance
If our stated objective is performance improvement, behavioral and task-based outcomes should become part of the evaluation process whenever they can be measured appropriately. This does not require every practitioner to establish a research laboratory or conduct a randomized controlled trial. It does require us to think critically about how the intended outcomes of our interventions might appear in the environments where people actually perform. For example, suppose an athlete is working on recovering attention following a mistake. We might examine how quickly the athlete resumes task-relevant behavior, whether subsequent decisions remain appropriate, or whether preventable errors become less frequent under comparable conditions.
With a military professional, we might examine decision accuracy, response selection, or adaptation during structured scenarios with changing demands. For a firefighter, meaningful behavioral outcomes might involve detecting relevant environmental changes, maintaining procedural accuracy, or modifying a course of action as new information becomes available. These are examples of potential assessment targets, not universally validated measures. Each would require clear operational definitions, appropriate measurement methods, and consideration of the specific performance environment.
Importantly, collecting more data does not automatically create better evidence. Eye-tracking technology can provide information about visual attention and gaze behavior. Heart rate variability can provide information about aspects of physiological regulation. Reaction-time assessments can quantify response speed under specified conditions. Yet none of these measurements, in isolation, establishes that someone has become a better decision-maker or a more effective performer.
We must understand what each measure represents, its limitations, and whether it meaningfully relates to the performance demands being investigated. This is where combining psychological assessments with behavioral observations, task-based measures, and relevant performance outcomes becomes particularly valuable. If an athlete demonstrates improved psychological flexibility and also shows more effective adaptation during representative performance situations, we have more information about the potential relationship between psychological development and behavior.
Even then, we should remain careful about causation. Changes in physical preparation, technical coaching, experience, or environmental conditions may also influence the outcome. Pre- and post-assessment alone cannot reliably isolate the effects of a psychological intervention. The goal is not simply to collect favorable numbers. It is to develop a more accurate understanding of whether meaningful change occurred, under what conditions it occurred, and how confidently we can attribute that change to the training.
Raising the Standard for Mental Performance Programming
Sport and performance psychology has developed a substantial body of theory and applied practice. The profession has contributed to our understanding of motivation, confidence, attention, emotional regulation, and numerous other factors relevant to human behavior and performance. I do not believe we need to defend the value of those contributions by overstating what individual programs accomplish.
Instead, we should be willing to hold our interventions to the same standards of critical evaluation that we encourage performers to apply to their own development. When working with an athlete, we rarely consider the completion of a training session sufficient evidence that physical or technical performance improved. We evaluate progress according to the intended objective, recognize relevant limitations, and modify training when the available evidence suggests a need for change. Mental performance programming should embrace that same principle.
This begins before an intervention is delivered. Professionals should establish what they are trying to improve, why the selected intervention is appropriate, and how they intend to evaluate change. If we are targeting confidence, we should be clear about what improvement in confidence means. If we are targeting attentional control, we should consider how attention can be assessed beyond the individual's perception of being focused. If our objective is more effective decision-making, we should establish what constitutes a high-quality decision within that particular environment. An important part of this process is recognizing that not every meaningful psychological improvement must produce an immediate performance gain.
Some interventions may primarily improve well-being, perceived coping ability, or the individual's relationship with difficult internal experiences. Others may influence processes that support performance over time, even when short-term task outcomes remain unchanged. Those are legitimate objectives. They deserve to be measured and reported accurately, but when our professional services are presented as improving human performance, it is reasonable to ask what evidence supports that particular claim.
This is especially important in environments where mental performance programming is integrated into larger human performance systems. Coaches, commanders, organizational leaders, and other stakeholders must make decisions about training resources, personnel, and program effectiveness. They deserve a clear explanation of what was assessed, what changed, what remains uncertain, and what the findings mean for the people they serve.
That responsibility belongs to the professionals conducting and evaluating the work.
A Question Worth Asking Ourselves
I believe mental performance professionals should continue examining the relationship between psychological functioning and performance. There is considerable value in understanding how individuals respond to stress, direct attention, regulate emotions, and adapt to uncertainty. However, understanding those psychological processes and demonstrating improved performance are not always the same achievement. Our field should be capable of acknowledging that distinction without viewing it as a criticism of the profession itself.
In fact, I would argue that recognizing the limitations of our evidence is an important part of professional competence. It allows us to make more defensible claims, identify gaps in our methods, and develop interventions that can be evaluated with greater precision. We should be just as interested in learning why an intervention did not produce the anticipated outcome as we are in celebrating when it did. Ultimately, I do not think the question is whether we should measure psychological improvement or observable performance. We should measure both when they are relevant to the objectives of the program, while recognizing that each provides different information.
If we claim to improve mental performance, we should be prepared to demonstrate more than a change in how someone feels.
If the evidence demonstrates improvement in psychological functioning but not yet in observable performance, we should be comfortable saying exactly that. It does not diminish the work. It makes the work more scientifically defensible. Perhaps the most important question we can ask ourselves is not simply whether our participants improved, but whether we have collected the right evidence to understand what actually improved.
Are You Measuring What Matters?
Whether you lead an athletic program, tactical unit, or human performance organization, your mental performance programming should extend beyond teaching psychological skills. It should include a clear strategy for evaluating how those skills translate into meaningful performance outcomes. At Mindful Performance Consulting, we work with organizations and athletic programs to develop practical, evidence-informed mental performance training that connects psychological skill development with the demands of real-world performance.
If your organization is ready to examine how mental performance is being trained, applied, and evaluated, let's have a conversation.
MIND • BODY • MISSION
References
Reinebo, G., Alfonsson, S., Jansson-Fröjmark, M., Rozental, A., & Lundgren, T. (2024). Effects of psychological interventions to enhance athletic performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 54, 347–373. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-023-01931-z
Zhao, S., Zhang, X., Liu, Y., Liang, Z., Liang, T., Du, S., Iao, C. I., Ng, S., & Ning, Z. (2026). Psychological skills training for sport-related outcomes: An umbrella review of evidence credibility and methodological quality. Journal of Sports Sciences, 44(19), 2752–2773. https://doi.org/10.1080/02640414.2026.2715216
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