Therapist And Writer Obsessed With Cognitive And Physical Excellence – Interview With Mark Wilkes

Mark Wilkes is a therapist and writer obsessed with space where cognitive and physical performance intersect. In clinical practice, Mark works with athletes, musicians, and business professionals to overcome the psychological impediments stopping them from reaching their potential. Outside of clinical work, Mark can be found in the mountains near his home in the Salt Lake City, UT area, trail running, mountain biking, or backcountry skiing.

Mark Wilkes, Psychotherapist and Consultant

Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.

I’m a 43-year-old father of six. I’ve been married to my wife, Jenny, for almost seventeen years. We live outside of Salt Lake City, UT. Working in the mental health and performance space was a career that I happened into almost by chance, if you ascribe any value to the idea of chance. Maybe inevitability is more the right word.

Outside of my clinical practice, I’m fairly obsessed with skiing. Living in Utah, on the Wasatch Front allows me to have pretty much unlimited access to some of the greatest skiing in the world. And I’d be lying if I told you that didn’t play a significant part in deciding where to live. In the summer, I trade skis for bikes and running shoes. This summer most of my athletic time is dedicated to preparing for a 100-mile ultramarathon that takes place in November.

I’m also an avid amateur pianist and a very middling musician on a few other instruments. Playing and recording music brings a lot of satisfaction and enjoyment to my life. My other big creative pursuit is writing. Whether it's writing on the topic of performance psychology and related fields, or doing my best Dostoevsky imitation, the written word is something that has and continues to fascinate me.

Tell us about your greatest career achievement so far.

As a clinician, you get these opportunities to experience what I’d call micro-achievements almost daily. Those moments might look like a client having a breakthrough, or it could be the feeling of being totally absorbed in the session's content along with the client, something that I’d consider a flow-state experience. Recently, after a session of clinical hypnosis, a client described the experience along the lines of being one of the most unique experiences they had ever had and that the ability they had to experience a version of reality within their mind that felt as real as our conscious reality was extremely rewarding. This is a great example of what I’d consider a micro-achievement, both for me as the clinician and, I think, also for the client.

What inspired you to practice in this niche of cognitive performance?

There are three experiences I can point to. One as a child, one as an adolescent, and one as an adult. As a child, my parents put me in piano lessons. And while I love the piano now, I was an ambivalent student as a nine or ten-year-old. Part of piano lessons is, of course, the recital. I played in maybe three or four of these that I can remember. My teacher had access to a large room with a piano in what I remember as a local Presbyterian church. It was in California and had this Spanish-style architecture with stucco walls and red tile roof and all the rest of it. I remember getting up to play my piece, a short Schumann piece called “The Wild Horseman.” I memorized this piece and could play it backward and forward in my living room at home. But of course, when I sit down for the recital, my mind goes blank. I kind of just hope that my fingers will do what they’ve always done, but they don’t I freeze up, and my piano teacher eventually has to bring the sheet music up, where I then hack my way through the rest of the performance. I felt like it was an unfair representation of my ability and my preparation. I felt like my brain had cheated me. This is an experience I can still remember in vivid, horrific detail.

The second experience occurred when I was maybe seventeen or so. I was playing in a basketball game. I’m a pretty decent basketball player and had played what I recall as a decent game. And then, as the clock wound down, I found myself in one of these cliche sports stories. My team was behind by one point with only a few seconds remaining in regulation. The ball came to me, and I was fouled. It's the dream scenario but also the nightmare scenario. I had the opportunity to shoot free throws to win the game. I had made hundreds of free throws in my life at that point and felt confident as I stood at the line. I got the ball in my hands, and as I prepared to shoot, it was another version of the piano recital. The ball felt like a foreign object. Had I ever shot one of these before? I missed the first free throw. I could still tie the game if I made the second. My mental space did not improve, and, as in my childhood piano recital, I vacantly hoped that my body would just get the ball into the basket. It didn’t. We lost the game.

The last experience came in adulthood. I was in law school and had a conversation with a friend who was two years ahead of me. He had taken the California Bar exam (the professional proficiency exam for lawyers in the USA) two times and failed both times. For his third try, he mentioned that he had been to see a hypnotist. At the time, this sounded foreign and a bit fringe to me. He talked about the experience of hypnosis and how he thought it affected his study and his psychological approach to the exam. Ultimately, he passed comfortably, and he would admonish me, “when you take the bar, you gotta get hypnotized!” In the end, I never did get hypnotized, and, maybe coincidentally, I didn’t pass the Bar either!

What sets your practice apart from competitors in the industry?

I think I’ve settled into a professional identity or focus where a few elements intersect. I’m passionate about performance psychology. I’ve worked with athletes, doctors, attorneys, musicians and other professionals who feel held back by some element of their own minds. A lot of the time there is a version of anxiety that ties into this. I think of anxiety as kind of this tree that has a lot of different branches. Some branches might look like OCD, some might look like specific phobias, and some may be straight-down-the-line Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I enjoy working with clients to overcome whatever psychological elements are getting in the way of them doing their best, most fulfilling work.

As I studied these topics in grad school, I came across a journal article that focused on hypnosis as a tool to help a professional golfer on the European Tour. (The study found that hypnosis was able to shave multiple strokes off his average score over the course of several rounds played.) This study made me think back to my friend, who credited clinical hypnosis with getting him over the bar, on the Bar. The idea that there are protocols that can help people get out of their own way to overcome anxieties related to performance or just improve some aspect of their life really piqued my curiosity, and I’ve kept it as a large piece of my practice.

Could you share some success stories or notable achievements related to your practice?

I’ll always remember this one – relatively early in my clinical career, I worked with a client who had dealt with anxiety for several years. This client was in their late 20s and had never had a driver’s license. They indicated that anxiety was the hurdle. The fear of what might happen if something when wrong when behind the wheel was debilitating. We worked together for probably six months, culminating in this client passing the driving test and getting their license, which was life-changing for them, not just because they had increased mobility and autonomy, but because this was a massive hurdle. Its something that they can always look back on if they encounter other difficulties in the future and think, “well, if I could do that, then I can probably do this.”

Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.

People sometimes talk about this idea that there is something that you’re on the earth to do. Some task you’re meant to accomplish or some other thing that you’re meant for. I don’t really put much stock in this, but in a way I feel like that’s where I’ve ended up. For the first decade of my professional life I worked in compliance in a couple of commercial real estate investment firms. It was not a great fit and I had kind of this existential dread each night, knowing the next day I’d have to go back to work. And these were not bad jobs at all. Objectively they were pretty good! But they were not doing much on the personal fulfillment front. This changed with a bizarre set of circumstances led to me talking with a therapist for the first time in my life. In that one conversation, I mentioned my job was OK, but I didn’t love it. She suggested I take one of these career surveys that assess your personality and suggest career matches. I figured it wouldn’t hurt, and, in the ended the career that was my highest match (besides “novelist”) was clinical psychology. The wheels started turning, and I took the dive back into grad school, which led me to the place I’m at now. A place with exactly zero existential dread.

How can people get in touch with you?

The best way to get in touch would be through the contact form on my website – I do my best to get responses back promptly.

Visit my website for more info!

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