I’m excited to be speaking with Dr Jamie Barker in this episode. Jamie is a senior lecturer in sport psychology at Loughborough University. He has worked in sport psychology for the past 20 years, mostly in elite sport and predominantly in professional cricket and the Paralympics. Jamie also coordinates sport psychology provision across all the FA disability squads. In addition, he works in other performance domains such as business, the military, law and medical, relating sport psychology concepts to areas such as well-being and stress in the workplace; organisational change and leadership.

Jamie has co-authored a research paper that examines the relationship between challenge and threat states and performance. And it’s the fascinating findings of this paper we focus on during our conversation, specifically we take a deep dive into challenge and threat states and the impact these states have on performance.