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?
Elion’s take:
“I think elite athletes aren’t afraid to acknowledge what they work on and how good they are and how they love competing and how they just want to improve. They’re usually pretty good at acknowledging what’s true inside themselves.”
That’s the point of the two-list exercise: to find what’s true inside. Elion describes it as “starting to excavate in an honest way with yourself.” I first came across the idea of the two lists in Elion’s book, “Mastering Your Mental Game.”
The good list is important; it reinforces strengths and provides a foundation for mental renovations. But the improvement list is the one from which she works.
She suggests selecting one item from the list and then zooming in to create tools and a plan to improve it.
“It’s really the beginning of knowing yourself and working on it,” she said. “Just like we go to the gym and try to eat better. It’s one thing to state that, and it’s another thing to make a decision that you’re going to do that, and then it’s another thing to have tasks that keep you on track.”
One more example:
She had a golfer once who wrote on his list that he wanted to improve his anxiety on the first tee. He projected what he thought people were thinking as he stood over the ball: I can’t wait to see this swing. He would feel self-conscious and embarrassed.
As a result, his nerves were dreadful.
Sure enough, Elion and the golfer looked at the data and realized he was bogeying most of the first holes on the first day of tournaments.
The question was how they were going to get rid of those first-tee jitters.
Elion’s solution: have the golfer intentionally hit his first tee shot into the water.
It was during a pro-am event, not a major tournament, so the stakes weren’t as high. She had him imagine it: his shaking hands, how he would feel in his body, what he would say.
When he got to the first tee, she wanted him to shake hands with his playing partners that day and look them in the eye. To remind himself: We are all human. We all have parts of ourselves or our game that we struggle with.
Then he smoked the ball into the water.
Afterward, Elion said, “He realized that whatever was flowing up in terms of embarrassment was so much bigger than reality.”
“He reports as of this week that it’s gone,” she told me recently. “It could come back.”
That’s the way it goes with the mental side of sports. But the list is a good place to start.
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