Who is going to let us under the bonnet of the Formula One world? We are very fortunate to get the 'inside track' via Dr Robbie Anderson, Head of Performance Psychology at Hintsa F1 programs as well as Founder and Director of his own company Performing Minds.

Reading out the rest of Robbie’s achievements and experiences could be podcast episode in itself – some of his notable previous positions include first team performance psychologist at QPR, Head of Psychology at INEOS Grenadiers Cycling and Psychology Lead at England rugby – throw in positions with GB Taewknodo and GB canoing as well as positions in the private sector in the world of Hedge Funds and a decades long stint working with Steve Peters at Chimp Management where he was latterly Managing Director – and you have a podcast guest with an awful lot to shine a light on.

And we did cover an awful lot. To the extent that this conversation was enough to fill TWO bumper episodes of Slice of PIE – so this first part will be going out in June, and we’ll try and get the second part of the interview edited and on the channel by the end of the summer. So stayed tuned for part 2 once you extracted all of Robbie’s great insights from this first peak under the hood.

You can follow Robbie here:

Website:

https://www.performingminds.com/about

Linkedin:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbieanderson1/

The first episode of 2026 is a compelling sneak peak behind the curtain of elite European professional football, with the fantastic Dr Peter Schneider.

Peter is a mental performance coach with a PhD in Sport Psychology and dual master’s degrees in Sport & Exercise Psychology and Diagnostics & Intervention, trained at the University of Leipzig and the University of Jyväskylä. Across 4 seasons leading mental performance at RB Leipzig, he helped build high‑performance habits that translated into two DFB‑Cup titles and a Supercup victory.

And in this episode we get to hear some fascinating stories and anecdotes from this world, punctuated by some pearls of wisdom on elite performance, and the lives of elite performers.

You can follow Peter here:

Website:

https://www.peterschneider-mpr.com/

Linkedin:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterschneider85/

This week’s episode is an AASP Special.

Dr. Mustafa Sarkar is Associate Professor of Sport and Performance Psychology at Nottingham Trent University as well as a consultant specialising in individual, team, and organisational resilience across many high performance domains.

The Association for Applied Sport Psychology (or AASP)’s annual conference is coming up this week from the 15th – 18th October in Montreal, where there will be a host of great speakers and content.

Mustafa delivered the opening keynote to last year’s 2024 AASP conference in Las Vegas – titled “Bridging the Research to Practice Gap in Sport and Performance Psychology”. In this episode Mustafa unpacks some of the context behind this keynote, as well as six suggested starting points for how we can bridge this gap as a profession, as an industry and as individuals.

At this week’s AASP conference, we’ll get a complimentary roundtable entitled the “Practice to Research Gap’, chaired by Philadelphia Phillies’ Mental Performance Coordinator Traci Statler - what better time to reflect on Mustafa’s insights, experiences and provocations from 2024.

You can follow Mustafa here:

Social networks:

- LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/mustafa-sarkar-b6370256

NYU Website:

- https://www.ntu.ac.uk/staff-profiles/science-technology/mustafa-sarkar

Our previous podcast episode covering ‘Resilience’..

- https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/1-resilience-in-people-and-organisations-dr-mustafa-sarkar/id1506560750?i=1000470629088

Research:

- Mustafa’s Research Gate profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mustafa-Sarkar-2?ev=hdr_xprf

- Ben Ashdown’s research on resilience behaviours in academy football: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10413200.2024.2361701

- Richard Keegan’s paper in 2017 on bridging the research-practice gap: https://archives.rpd-online.com/article/view/v26-n6-keegan-cotteril-woolway-etal.html

- Dr Marie Winter’s work on evidence-informed decision making (paper 1): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10413200.2023.2286950

- Dr Marie Winter’s work on evidence-informed decision making (paper 2): https://journals.humankinetics.com/view/journals/tsp/39/3/article-p200.xml

- Myths of Sport Coaching by Dr Amy Whitehead and Jenny Coe: https://www.sequoia-books.com/catalog/whiteheadcoe/

- Myths of Sport Performance by Dr Amy Whitehead and Jenny Coe: https://www.sequoia-books.com/catalog/sport/

Videos:

- Richard Keegan: closing the research to practi