Every athlete, every coach and every team moves within a story. Pressure does not arise solely from the situation – but from the meaning we assign to it.
Pressure is not only the situation. It’s the meaning you give it.
New
Perspectives
Push
Boundaries
Coaching
Under
Pressure
Gordon Herbert is a qualified sports psychologist and Germany’s Coach of the Year 2023. The former head coach of the German national basketball team led his team to the bronze medal at the 2022 European Championship on home soil and, one year later, to the first-ever gold medal in the history of the German Basketball Federation (DBB) at the World Championship in Manila. As a player, he won the World Student Games in 1983 with Canada and finished 4th at the 1984 Olympic Games. The Canadian is a father of three and a passionate ice hockey fan.
Ulf Häfelinger is a coach, trainer, and sports psychology expert with many years of experience in elite and professional sports. He combines approaches from positive psychology and logotherapy with practical sports psychology work. For over a decade, he supported players and teams in professional football and worked, among others, for FC Red Bull Salzburg. Today, he works as a trainer in logotherapy, positive psychology, coaching, and communication, supporting executives, coaches, and athletes in effectively developing mental strength, self-leadership, and personal development even under pressure.
Julia Buchner is a sports psychologist based in Salzburg and has been working with elite athletes as well as professional performing artists since 2011. Her focus is on competition and performance preparation, individual and team support, and “Coach the Coach” work.
As a sports psychologist, she has worked with, among others, the Austrian national pistol shooting team (ÖSB) and the U17 women’s national football team (ÖFB, over 45 international matches), and currently supports the ÖFB Women’s Academy, the women’s fistball team (ÖFBB), and elite orienteering athletes (ÖFOL).
Since 2024, a further focus of her work has been Female Empowerment – particularly topics such as setting boundaries, self-confidence, and self-advocacy.
Dunja Lang is a sports psychology expert (ASP), mental and performance coach for elite athletes, coaches, and executives.
She is a former professional athlete and equestrian coach (show jumping). The topic of “comeback” and processing falls, injuries, and pain is also a personal concern for her based on her own experience. She primarily works with equestrian athletes, martial artists, as well as alpine skiing and biathlon athletes – including those in Olympic squads.
She has completed several multi-year certified coaching and therapeutic trainings, including systemic counseling and therapy, hypnosystemic coaching and organizational consulting (DBVC, Dr. Gunther Schmidt M.E.G.), hypnotherapy/clinical hypnosis (M.E.G.), EMDR, PEP / tapping techniques / embodiment-oriented approaches (Dr. Michael Bohne), and is a certified systemic supervisor (DGSF) and licensed alternative practitioner for psychotherapy.
She published her book “Mental Grand Prix,” featuring a specialized hypnotherapeutic approach, and is regularly a speaker at conferences such as “Mental Strength,” ASP Conference, “Parts Conference,” and the M.E.G. Congress (Milton Erickson Society).
Sports psychologist for the German Football Association (DFB) U20 national team, the professional squad of FC St. Pauli, and the Olympic Training Center Lower Saxony. She is a qualified psychologist with additional training in systemic coaching and process- and embodiment-focused psychology.
Her core competencies in sports psychology:
Profile:
Dr. Dr. Christopher Willis is one of the most renowned sports psychologists and performance coaches in the German-speaking world. He completed his education in the USA, Germany, and England. From 1998 to 2014, he developed and led the Tyrolean Model of Sports Psychology as well as the Sports Psychology Competence Center of the Province of Tyrol. A central focus of his work in elite sports is the individual support of young athletes and their families as well as decision-makers in elite sport – with the aim of sustainably improving quality of life, well-being, and performance capability.
Since 1999, he has been significantly involved in the design and implementation of education and training programs for sports psychologists and mental coaches in Austria. In cooperation with the Working Group for Sports Psychology (ASP) and in coordination with members of the training board from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, he has also been coordinating the training of sports psychology experts in Germany since 2013.
Dr. Dr. Willis is Managing Director of the Center of Mental Excellence GmbH, which specializes in performance coaching in high-performance domains such as sport, police special units, music, and medicine. As a sought-after speaker, he works with well-known institutions such as UEFA, the DFB, and various Olympic training centers.
Association work:
Christopher Willis is co-founder of the Sports Psychology Section within the Austrian Professional Association of Psychologists (BÖP, 1998) as well as the Austrian Federal Network for Sports Psychology (ÖBS, 2006). He also chaired the European Task Force for Sports Psychology within the umbrella organization of psychologists (EFPA). In 2024, he served as congress president of the FEPSAC Congress in Innsbruck, which was attended by over 1,000 participants from around the world.
Chris Willis is the father of three children.
