Sport Versus Everything Else

Why Performance Psychology Needs the Performing Arts

Performance excellence did not begin with sport.

Long before humans organized themselves into competitive athletics, we were singing, dancing, and storytelling. We were performing. These expressive traditions are not peripheral to performance excellence. They are one of its original forms.

But here's what happened: when performance psychology formalized as a field in the mid-20th century, it didn't emerge from ancient, eclectic performance traditions. It emerged from sport. The field was born inside athletic contexts, built to understand competitive excellence, and many of its foundational models and identities grew directly from that origin. This wasn't a problem in itself. Sport is a powerful laboratory for understanding human performance excellence.

The problem is that as the field grew, sport didn't become one lens among many. It became the lens. The default. The center of gravity.

Even as practitioners began working across other performance domains (tactical, medical, artistic, corporate), the architecture remained unchanged. And more than a decade ago, there was an explicit call to change this.

In 2012, Aoyagi and colleagues argued that what defines this field is not sport, but performance excellence itself, and proposed that we organize around that core aim rather than any single domain.

That invitation was clear.

And yet, despite genuine efforts toward inclusion, the architecture of the field has largely remained the same.

Sport is still the gravitational center.

Other performance domains exist (including the performing arts), but they tend to live in parallel rather than in conversation. Each becomes its own application silo. Sport remains the default reference point, while everything else orbits around it.

It's not, "What can we all learn from the performing arts?"

It's, "If you work with performing artists, that's your lane."

This is the difference between inclusion and integration.

Inclusion says, "You're welcome here."

Integration asks, "What does your domain teach us about performance excellence?"

That's the point we keep missing.

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I come to this work from both sides of the performance world. I spent two decades as a professional dancer and Broadway performer before earning my MS in Sport and Performance Psychology. Today, I work with performers across domains: performing artists, athletes, leaders, and professionals whose work demands presence under pressure. Living inside these systems has made something very clear to me: the challenges of performance excellence don't change when you cross domains. Only the language does.

Which raises a deeper question: if performance excellence is the throughline, why are we still organizing ourselves primarily by domain?

Because performance excellence does not belong to sport.

It belongs to humans.

What Performance Psychology Can Learn from the Performing Arts

For centuries, the performing arts have been living laboratories of human performance excellence. Long before we had formal theories of attention or emotion regulation, performing artists were already training these capacities in embodied, relational, and deeply practical ways.

The Art of Sustainable Presence

Perhaps the most striking capacity performing artists intentionally train in is the ability to sustain excellence while remaining emotionally open. They learn to show up fully: to risk vulnerability, to allow authenticity and emotional truth to be part of performance rather than something to suppress.

Emotional presence isn't a liability in artistic performance—it's a gateway to excellence. Performing artists must bring authentic feeling while maintaining technical precision under pressure. They train to stay alive in the work, whether delivering the same show for the hundredth time or stepping into a role for the first time.

This is a performance capacity worth understanding across domains.

Embodied Intelligence

Long before "flow" entered the research lexicon, dancers and musicians were training to refine their internal sensations, learning to detect micro-shifts in timing, rhythm, energy, and alignment.

Performing artists don't just rely on feel. They cultivate it deliberately.

This embodied attunement supports adaptability, precision, and resilience under pressure. Actor training systems, improvisational practices, and somatic traditions train responsiveness, listening, and attention in real time. Not as abstract skills, but as lived capacities inside complex relational environments.

This attunement extends into imagery work. Performing artists use imagery not just to visualize outcomes, but as a lived practice: embodying sensation, character, rhythm, and intention. Imagery and physical sensation aren't separate processes; they're integrated technologies of performance.

Integrative Training Systems

Performing artists have always been cross-trainers, and the culture reflects this openness. Movement systems, imagery, voice work, therapy, contemplative practices: anything that supports performance, wellness, strength, understanding of the body-mind connection, and human relationships is on the table. This eclecticism isn't scattered; it's strategic. Performing artists understand that performance exists within a whole system, and they draw on whatever modalities serve that system.

Pedagogical Lineages

From ballet methodologies to acting systems to musical training traditions, the performing arts hold centuries-old pedagogical lineages that emphasize technique, interpretation, and expression as inseparable. These teaching traditions have been refined across generations, passing down not just what to do, but how to be inside performance.

Ensemble Intelligence

Performing artists train collective attunement from day one—shared timing, trust, and emotional resonance through collaborative practices that build culture as much as skill.

This capacity for ensemble intelligence (reading the room, responsive co-regulation, maintaining individual excellence while holding collective coherence) is fundamental to the performing arts and increasingly essential across performance domains.

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These are performance capacities—modalities for excellence.

And sport doesn't lose anything by integrating this wisdom. It gains deeper models of presence, resilience in repetition, ensemble intelligence, emotional regulation under pressure, and expressive adaptability.

And here's the thing: every performance domain carries its own story. Its own pedagogies. Its own hard-earned insights about what it means to show up under pressure.

This one is mine because I am an artist.

But imagine what becomes possible when we begin listening across domains, when we treat each tradition not as a niche application, but as a contributor to a shared understanding of performance excellence.

That's the opportunity.

The Bigger Picture

And this brings us back to the field itself.

More than a decade after Aoyagi and colleagues called for performance excellence to be the organizing principle of our field, we're still organizing around domain distinctions: athlete versus everything else.

Let me be clear: this isn't advocacy for one domain. It's advocacy for performance psychology itself.

Performance psychology must stop treating non-sport domains as specialty tracks and start recognizing them as central contributors.

If we truly care about sustainable, humane excellence, we should be ravenous for every form of performance wisdom available to us.

Not inclusive.

Not politely curious.

Ravenous.

References

Aoyagi, M. W., Portenga, S. T., Poczwardowski, A., Cohen, A. B., & Statler, T. (2012). Reflections and directions: The profession of sport psychology past, present, and future. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 43(1), 32-38. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025676