My name is Nuno Matos and I am a coach that works mainly in elite sports, but also in the corporate coaching world (I am a coach for Amazon), and in life coaching contexts. I work with any topics ranging from anxiety, to panic attacks, relationship issues, body and mental tensions, mental resilience, emotional management, flow state and more. My coaching programmes consistently lead to an improvement in performance and in the inner growth of the human being that works with me, athlete or non-athlete!

I have a very strong sporting background: swam internationally, I was a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competitor, I did Capoeira, I surf, I run marathons and I go to the gym! Although sport (namely swimming) brought me a huge amount of baggage and experience, the most difficult for me was having to go through tough times and low performances without having someone capable of understanding what I was going through and, essentially, what I needed to work on. I used to be a nervous wreck before jumping off the blocks; I was under enormous pressure from my father and coach; I was very insecure and lacked confidence as an athlete, and as a person and human being; and as much as I wanted to, I didn't really believe I could get there. I ended up developing overtraining when I was 16 – a condition that got worse until I stopped swimming and these days is named burnout. Despite the extreme fatigue, I continued to train and did not “listen” to my body, worsening the vicious cycle I was under. I became a hothouse flower for I couldn't get any cold drafts without getting sick. Still, the only thing I seemed to be sure of was that I had to keep training and couldn't stop; around the age of 21 I gave up swimming.

Being fascinated by sports performance I wanted to understand what had happened to me during my competitive years. In addition, I also wanted to understand what limits performance, both physically and mentally. That curiosity led me to embark on a PhD to study sports performance and burnout. And although my PhD answered many questions, there weer many left unanswered – I felt I had completed the PhD without a concrete method to work with athletes (parents and coaches, or any human being for that matter) to enhance their performance and contribute to better results in sport and in life in general. Following my discontent, in 2012 I kicked-off a 2 year training programme to become a coach, from which I graduated in June 2014. From here, I just had to combine the coaching method to all of my past experience as a swimmer, and to my scientific knowledge and work. I understand that sports performance is a phenomenon dependent on numerous factors and this leads me to work for developing awareness and capacities in the athlete and all other human beings that come and work with me (both in the corporate context, or in a “life coaching” context).

In this way, not only do I witness an increase in sports performance (performance at work or “life performance”), but I also witness an improvement in the actual lived experience of each human being that sits to work with me. My mission is not only to improve performance in sports and other areas of life, but to help humans grow and in that process, relieve their suffering.