A therapy room may be Kathleen Everson’s primary location for meeting clients, but the licensed psychologist and director of performance psychology also finds herself on athletic courts and fields teaching kids mental skills that help them excel in sports.
“Recently, for basketball, I had a team practice visualization together on the court,” says Everson, a member of Bryant’s Class of 2018 who majored in Applied Psychology. “Visualization uses the same parts of the brain that are used when you're doing the behavior, so you can get more reps in mentally without having the physical component.”
Everson’s work as a psychologist and director of performance psychology at North Coast Psychological Services in New York has two components: the clinical aspect, where she specializes in obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, and anxiety-related disorders, and provides cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and exposure and response prevention therapy; and the performance-focused aspect, where she conducts mental skills trainings, either one-on-one in her office or through workshops with teams, coaches, and parents.
“I love working with athletes because they always do their homework. Whenever you ask them to try, they do it because they're willing to do anything to improve their performance,” Everson says, noting that areas of concern may include health (sleep, hydration, nutrition), social (pressure from coaches or parents, comparing themselves to others), or personal (perfectionism, negative self-talk) issues.
“One of the most rewarding things is seeing the skills pay off. For instance, when they come in and tell me, ‘I had a great game last night,’ or even if they didn’t, that they aren’t feeling as upset or anxious about it,” she says.
While at Bryant, Everson was a member of the women’s basketball team — serving as captain her senior year — and volunteered with the university’s Special Olympics chapter all four years.
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A summer research opportunity with Psychology Professor and Department Chair Heather Lacey, Ph.D., that looked at how risk impacts decision making, and the chance to shadow a local neuropsychologist, arranged by another Bryant professor, prepared her for grad school, she says.
In addition to her day job, Everson teaches a performance psychology course at St. John's University, where she earned her master’s and doctoral degrees. She is also writing a book chapter for trainees and early career psychologists on how and when to use cognitive restructuring — a method used for improving mental health by changing the way we think — in a CBT model.
“It’s great to see people getting better, enjoying their life more, and having success,” Everson says.