How to Overcome Mental Blocks and Unlock Your True Performance Potential

I recently had one of those conversations that makes me want to share everything I learned as quickly as possible. My guest was Dr. Tom Rohrer, director of the Brain and Body Performance Center in Colorado Springs, and a mental performance coach, psychotherapist, and trainer who works primarily with athletes and public performers. What he shared about why we get stuck and how to get unstuck is directly applicable to coaches and entrepreneurs, and it is far more accessible than most people expect.

Tom opened with something that I think a lot of coaches need to hear: almost no one makes it to adulthood without some version of what he calls small-t trauma. Not necessarily dramatic events, but the everyday experiences that leave a mark. A relationship betrayal. A public failure. A moment where something important got taken away. These experiences do not disappear. They go underground and quietly shape what we avoid, how we show up, and what we believe is possible for us.

What Brain Spotting Is and How It Works

Tom introduced me to a tool called brain spotting, which has been around for over 20 years and grew out of an earlier approach called EMDR. The core principle is surprisingly elegant: where you look in your visual field is connected to where an experience is being held in your brain. When you locate and hold your gaze at that specific point while staying with whatever you are processing, your brain and body naturally begin to work through it.

Tom described this as evolving an issue rather than talking it out. If the experience is a negative one, a trauma or a fear or a stuck belief, holding the gaze tends to neutralize the emotional charge around it. If it is something positive, like a strength you want to deepen or a quality you want to embody more fully, the same process helps integrate it more fully into how you operate. He described working with clients who walked in not wanting to discuss their issue at all, went through the brain spotting process in silence, and left resolved. He genuinely did not know what they had worked on.

What I found equally compelling was the self-spotting version Tom described. You do not need a practitioner to try this. If you find yourself lying awake at 3am with your mind stuck on something, notice where your gaze is naturally resting in the dark. Hold it. Stay with whatever is coming up. Your system already knows how to process. It just needs a little space and permission to do it.

The Nervous System Connection

Tom also introduced me to polyvagal theory, the idea that the vagus nerve, which runs from your brain all the way down through your major organs, is the body's primary system for regulating safety. When you stimulate the vagus nerve, your body moves out of threat response and into a calmer, more resourced state. This matters enormously for coaches because so much of what we interpret as resistance, avoidance, or lack of motivation is actually a nervous system in protection mode.

I connected this to something I notice with my own clients. When someone is operating from a place of chronic low-grade stress, no amount of strategy or mindset work seems to stick. The nervous system is offline. Once it feels safe, everything changes. Tom is giving his clients practical tools to shift that state, and the results he describes are not incremental. They are significant and they happen quickly.

Your Potential Is Higher Than You Think

The part of Tom's message that I want to close with is the most hopeful. He believes, and his work supports, that every person he talks to has more potential than they are currently accessing. Not a little more. Significantly more. And the thing most often standing between them and that potential is not lack of skill or lack of effort. It is an old story, often one they did not consciously choose to adopt, about what they are capable of.

Tom shared a story from his own life about a betrayal at age 15 that ended his basketball career. He carried that unresolved experience for decades before he finally connected it to the performance block it had created. Processing it did not get him back on the court. But it gave him something equally valuable: the freedom to stop being defined by what happened and the clarity to see how it had shaped him.

That is what this work makes possible. Not a return to the past, but a release from it.

About Dr. Tom Rohrer

Directs the Brain & Body Performance Center, in Colorado Springs. He’s a mental performance coach and consultant, psychotherapist, and trainer. Tom assists athletes and public performers to neutralize their mental blocks and achieve their best performances. He offers webinars including: “The Big 10+ Peak Performance Traits.” Tom is authoring the upcoming book, Beyond Peak Performance.

🔗 Learn more about Dr. Tom Rohrer and his programs: https://tomrohrer.com/

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