Elite performers don’t have “a trainer.” They have a team. A nutritionist, a strength coach, a mindset specialist, and a medical lead. At Coya, we believe you deserve the same architecture.
We want to introduce you to one of the key minds behind our method: Kaelene Curry.
What is your professional background?
I hold a Master’s in Sport and Performance Psychology from the University of Denver and am both a Certified Mental Performance Consultant (CMPC) and Licensed Professional Counselor.
My background spans counseling centers, university classrooms, and elite sport — including a tenure as Director of Mental Performance for Vanderbilt Football and adjunct professor at Regis University — before founding Mile High Performance Consulting in 2021. I now serve as VP of Coaching Development and Director of Mental Performance at Coya, and as Director of Mental Performance for VisionX Sports. Across all of it, my work has always come back to the same thing: helping people understand the mental side of performance before it becomes the thing quietly holding them back.
What’s one piece of popular advice in your field that you completely disagree with?
I wish this one were a newer trend, but it’s a stigma that’s been around long enough to need a full PR overhaul: the idea that psychological skills training — anything touching the world of psychology — is “soft.”
Here’s what I know to be true: the mind is always in the driver’s seat. Always. If you aren’t actively training it, it will default to what’s familiar and comfortable. And honestly? That sounds a lot more like “soft” to me than doing the hard work of actually developing it.
Training your mind is difficult, rewarding, and genuinely life-changing work. It builds the capacity for self-regulation, emotional intelligence, and attention control. It creates alignment between how you’re living and what you actually value. It deepens your relationships, sharpens your sense of agency, and sustains your motivation toward something bigger than the current moment. The outcomes are vast — and none of them are soft.
What is one non-negotiable in your personal daily routine?
Tech-free walks with my dog, Tundra, a three-year-old black English lab who takes her walk schedule very seriously. We go out at least once a day, usually two or three times, and those walks are genuinely sacred to me. I use the time to practice active meditation — mindfulness of my surroundings, open monitoring, the five senses, or just focusing on a single object of attention — alongside breathwork like resonance-frequency breathing or a physiological sigh. Meanwhile, I’m moving my body, outside, in natural light, with zero notifications. It’s simple on paper and non-negotiable in practice.
What is a personal health or performance hurdle you’ve had to overcome recently?
I’ve been navigating a years-long battle with plantar fasciitis — and if you know me, you know that sitting still does not come naturally. I’m someone who’s always moving, whether that’s exercise, long days on my feet, or being out in the mountains. Having to consistently limit those activities has been one of the harder mental challenges I’ve faced.
Physical recovery requires patience and consistency: staying the course with PT, making smarter decisions for long-term benefit, and resisting the pull toward doing things I’d genuinely love to be doing. That last part is where the mental performance work really shows up. Chronic pain has a way of testing your relationship with discipline — not the “push through it” kind, but the quieter, more honest kind that knows when protecting yourself is the performance decision.
What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Life is all about relationships.
It sounds simple (almost too simple) but I come back to it constantly. At the end of the day, and really at the end of our lives, what we have are our memories and the people we’ve made them with. The moments that stay with us longest are almost always the ones built inside our communities and support circles. That truth shapes how I show up in my work, and honestly, how I try to show up everywhere else.
When you aren’t working or coaching, how do you unplug?
My husband and I live in Colorado on purpose, so we take full advantage of it. Skiing, camping, rafting, hiking, fishing, backpacking — if it involves the mountains and some amount of suffering-in-the-best-way, we’re in.
I also love sports. Whether I’m watching from home or attending, I’ll find genuine investment in just about any game. My husband jokes that he never expected to marry someone who follows sports more enthusiastically than he does. And live music. I lived in Nashville for a few years and never quite got enough of that scene. There’s something about a room full of people listening to the same thing at the same time that I’ve always found hard to replicate.
Connect with Kaelene on LinkedIn or Instagram
You can also check out her website at: www.mhperform.coach
