New North Fork-based program, Apex Minds, promises to teach teen and young adult athletes how to excel under pressure, arming them with neuroscientific tools

(Photo Courtesy of Katie Tardiff)

Cutchogue-raised Katie Tardiff is ready to bring a neuroscience-backed mental performance program to North Fork teen and young adult athletes that she wishes she had growing up.

“I want young people to be able to stay in the room, in the game, in the hard conversation, in the moment where everything is on the line, and every instinct says retreat,” shared Katie. “Performance psychology calls this the ability to tolerate uncertainty without defaulting to avoidance. It's one of the strongest predictors of long-term high performance, and it's rarely explicitly taught.”

Targeting teens and young adults, Katie hopes to give them total agency over how they respond to pressure at the neurological level. 

“The research is stark. Young people show significantly higher rates of performance anxiety, self-silencing under pressure, and cortisol dysregulation in high-stakes environments, and the traditional response has been to tell them to relax or be more confident. That's not a skill. The adolescent brain is also in the most neuroplastic period of its entire life. The mental habits forming right now are being literally hardwired into the nervous system,” she said. “Most kids are unconsciously hardwiring anxiety, avoidance, and self-doubt. The world right now is delivering an unprecedented volume of external noise directly at young people; social comparison alone has measurable neurological effects on the developing brain.”

After working for the past decade studying and applying the frameworks that elite performers use under real pressure for the Equinox Hotels brand, and currently completing her master's degree in Sports and Performance Psychology, Katie is armed with the tools needed to teach young athletes mental frameworks unique to how each person shows up physiologically to stress.

“We take the mental frameworks used by Navy SEALs, fighter pilots, and Olympic athletes and teach them to young people before the pressure of life makes them necessary,” Katie explained. “The prefrontal cortex, the seat of decision-making, emotional regulation, and executive function, can be trained to stay online under pressure. Every protocol, every session, every tool in this program is rooted entirely in neuroscience and performance psychology, the same science that powers the world's top 1% of performers.”

Although Katie has spent the past 10 years discovering what high performance actually feels like and how to help people access it, she admits that “the seed” for Apex Minds was planted long before any of that.

“In 2013, I spent time in South Africa photographing townships, and what I witnessed was that people were regulating themselves, finding meaning, pushing through in circumstances that should have broken them,” Katie shared. “I became obsessed with what was actually happening in the brain when someone refuses to quit.”

Apex Minds promises to drive academic performance, leadership, and long-term success by teaching nervous system regulation, attentional control, intrinsic motivation, pre-performance routines, self-talk mastery, and sensory visualization. 

Students can expect to learn the neuroscience behind what's actually happening in their brain and body under stress, then immediately apply tools to change it.

The in-person program, which is hosted at NOFO Wellness Center in Cutchogue,  includes eight 90-minute sessions with two meetings each week for four weeks beginning on July 6, and then repeating in August. The program is priced at $1,500 per student. Year-round one-on-one sessions priced at $150 per hour are also available, as are school and team program installations for groups.

“We train the system underneath the behavior, specifically the connection between the nervous system, the stress response, and executive function, deliberately, systematically, progressively, the same way you'd train a muscle under increasing load. I want calm to be their automatic first response, not their last resort. That's what Apex Minds is here to do. We hardwire performance.”

To learn more about Apex Minds, visit here. 

For any parents or students who want to learn more before committing, Katie is hosting a free virtual webinar on Tuesday, May 12th at 7:00 PM. There, you’ll have the opportunity to hear the science, ask questions, and understand exactly what this program does and why it works. Register here.