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If you care about performance, you should care about psychological safety
Buying into psychological safety for performance
Precision. Resilience. Mental toughness; all expected from athletes. Yet many sporting environments still operate through fear, control, and silence, and then wonder why performance plateaus, athletes burn out, or mistakes repeat.
If we care about sustained excellence, we need to talk seriously about psychological safety. Not as a wellbeing add-on. Not as a safeguarding checklist, but as performance infrastructure.
Recent sport research defined psychological safety as the ‘perception that one is protected from, or unlikely to be at risk of, psychological harm in sport’. Practically this means can athletes raise concerns? Can they ask questions? Can they admit mistakes? Can they talk about injury? Importantly, can they ask these questions without fear of repercussion or consequences?
Psychological Safety and Performance
Psychological safety is often framed around wellbeing and safeguarding which is important, but performance is an equal outcome. High performance requires honest feedback, error correction, adaptation and communication. If athletes are hiding mistakes, staying silent when confused, or avoiding difficult conversations, learning slows.
Psychological safety accelerates learning.
When athletes feel psychologically safe, they also feel more motivated, autonomous, capable and connected, which in turn allows them to train harder, persist longer and better regulate under pressure. Current research supports this and shows that psychological safety actually predicts flourishing in athletes more so than the quality of the coach-athlete relationship. This means that it’s not just about how well an athlete gets on with their coach(s), but whether they feel psychologically safe within the whole environment.
“Isn’t This Just Making Athletes Soft?”
The presence of psychological safety does not mean comfort. It doesn’t mean removing standards and accountability, but instead having high challenge and high support. Psychologically safe environments can be extremely demanding. The difference is that accountability is delivered without humiliation, and standards are enforced without psychological harm.
What does this mean practically?
For coaches:
Respecting athletes as whole individuals, not just performers
Communicating with empathy; provide constructive, specific and supportive feedback
Providing unconditional support regardless of performance
Encouraging open dialogue where athletes feel comfortable raising concerns without fear
Investing in education: take safeguarding and psychological safety training seriously.
For leaders and sport organisations:
Align policies with lived athlete experience, not just compliance.
Measure psychological safety alongside performance metrics.
Educate staff in relational competence.
Reward environments that produce both results and wellbeing.
If we care about performance, we have to care about psychological safety.