You've put in the work.

Let's make sure your mind is keeping pace.

Active Health Psychology works with individual athletes across every sport — helping them perform with clarity, confidence, and a genuine sense of who they are beyond the game.

4+

Years embedded in elite sport

WNBL . WNBA

Athletes and Olympians worked with

2

Clinic locations in Townsville. Douglas + Railway Estate

Australia-wide

Professional sporting partnerships including Townsville Fire & Mendi Blackhawks

the approach

Your coaches cover the game plan.

Active Health Psychology works on something deeper.

The technical side of your sport is well covered — coaches, trainers, and performance staff have that handled. What’s less often addressed is the inner game. Who you are as a person when you compete. How you talk to yourself when things get hard. Whether you’re performing from a place of genuine confidence or holding yourself back.

Performance psychology at this level isn’t about fixing problems or adding pressure to perform. It’s about helping you understand yourself more clearly — your values, your motivations, what genuinely drives you — so that your mental game becomes an asset rather than an afterthought.

The work is humanistic, evidence-based, and built entirely around you — not a templated or generic program. 

what we work on

Five areas that shape

how you perform and who you become.

Every athlete is different. These are the five areas Active Health Psychology works through with individual athletes — not as a checklist, but as a framework that gets shaped around what you actually need.

Explore your purpose

Understanding what genuinely drives you — in your own words, on your own terms. When you're clear on your purpose, training has direction and competition has meaning beyond the result.

Develop a strong inner voice

The way you talk to yourself under pressure shapes everything. Active Health Psychology helps you build an inner voice that is honest, grounded, and on your side — especially when things aren't going your way.

Find joy and play with freedom

The athletes who perform at their ceiling are almost always the ones who've found a way to enjoy what they do. The team help you reconnect with that freedom — and perform from it rather than despite it.

Build genuine confidence and self-belief

Confidence that holds up when form dips, selection doesn't go your way, or the pressure moment arrives. Grounded in who you are — not just in how your last performance went.

Redefine what success looks like

Examining what you're actually measuring yourself against — and whether it's serving you. Building a definition of success that sustains performance and wellbeing over a career, not just a season.

common presentations

Where athletes typically

want to do the work.

These are the three areas individual athletes most commonly bring to Active Health Psychology. Each has a clear, evidence-based approach behind it.

Thinking patterns under pressure

The mental chatter that shows up at the wrong moment — doubt, comparison, overthinking. Learning to recognise those patterns and move through them with clarity rather than being derailed by them.

Competition anxiety

Nerves are part of competing — and they're useful when they're working for you. Reece and his team help athletes build the relationship with pressure that turns anxiety into focus rather than a handbrake.

Motivation and training engagement

Staying genuinely motivated through a long season, a difficult patch, or a period of uncertainty takes more than willpower. Reece and his team help athletes reconnect with their own reasons for competing — and build the mental habits that sustain effort over time.

your performance psychologist

Embedded in elite sport.

Present with every athlete.

Reece Danaher, as lead psychologist, has spent over four years working inside elite sporting environments, embedded alongside coaching staff, medical teams, and athletes in the environments where performance actually happens.

He and his team has worked with WNBL, WNBA athletes, and Olympians — bringing that depth of experience to every individual athlete they work with, regardless of the level they’re competing at.

Based at the NQ Cowboys High Performance Centre and in Douglas, Reece and his team work with Townsville Fire and the Mendi Blackhawks — and take on individual athletes across every sport via in-person sessions and telehealth around the world.

The Active Health Psychology approach is direct, practical, and genuinely humanistic. They’re not there to tell you how to play. They’re there to help you figure out who you are when you’re playing — and what gets in the way of that.

RD

REECE DANAHER

PRINCIPAL PSYCHOLOGIST

Performance Psychology

Active Psychology

Townsville Fire

Mendi Blackhawks

AHPRA Registered

APS Member

getting started

Simple to begin..

No referral needed.

Four steps from decision to your first session — no referral needed, no long waits.

Takes 2 minutes

Send an enquiry

Fill in our short online form or give us a call. No referral needed — just your name and what you’d like to work on.

1 business day

We Call You Back

We’ll reach out within one business day to confirm your appointment and answer any questions before your first session.

50 min

First Session

An open conversation about your sport, where you are, and what you want to build. Relaxed, confidential, and entirely on your terms.

Ongoing

Your Program Begins

A tailored plan built around your schedule, your season, and what matters most to you — not a generic template.

common questions

Straight answers

to the questions athletes ask.

These are the questions athletes most commonly ask before their first session. If yours isn’t here, just call us.

Prefer to speak with someone directly before committing to a booking?

Will my coach or club find out I'm seeing a psychologist?

Everything discussed is completely confidential. We’re bound by the same strict professional and ethical standards as any registered health professional — nothing leaves the session without your explicit written consent. This applies even if you’re working with a team that Active Health Psychology also works with.

Most athletes Active Health Psychology works with are performing well — they want to perform better, more consistently, and with greater enjoyment. This work is as much about building on what’s already working as it is about working through what isn’t. Think of it the same way you think about physical conditioning — you don’t train because something is broken.

The focus is different. Counselling typically addresses mental health and emotional wellbeing in a broad sense. This work is specifically oriented around performance — how you think, feel, and respond in a competitive environment — alongside the deeper questions of identity, purpose, and what genuinely drives you as an athlete and as a person.

Yes. Telehealth sessions are available to athletes anywhere in Australia and around the world and are just as effective as in-person for this kind of work. Many athletes Active Health Psychology works with are regional, travelling for competition, or based interstate.

Session fees are outlined on our fees page. Medicare rebates may apply with a Mental Health Treatment Plan from your GP — covering up to 10 sessions per calendar year. You don’t need a referral to book, but having a plan in place before your first session means rebates apply from day one.

The performance psychology service is broader — it’s relevant to anyone who performs under pressure, including young athletes, professionals, and creatives. This page is specifically for individual athletes competing in sport, where the work is shaped around the specific demands, pressures, and identity questions that come with being a competitive athlete.

ready when you are

You're allowed to want

more from your sport than this.

Whether you’re chasing something specific or simply know that something could shift — this is where that work begins. A first conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.

AHPRA Registered · Medicare Rebates May Apply · No Referral Needed · Douglas & Railway Estate, Townsville · Telehealth available world-wide.