Canucks' psychologist

So I saw this BC Business magazine article "Mind Games" by Kerry Banks that talked about Saul Miller. I was thinking all throughout the season that the team needed a psychologist and I guess at one point they did have one. Apparently Mattias was an individual client at one point.

Here's a little snippet of the article:

Los Angeles reporters soon became curious about the slim little guy with glasses that the players called ‘Yoda.’ When Rams head coach John Robinson heard of their interest he took Miller aside and told him bluntly, “I don’t want to read in the papers that you’re the cause of our success. If I do, you’re fired.”

Selling your skills without openly broadcasting them when you’re on the job is a delicate tightrope that Miller has learned to walk through during his years as a performance psychologist. Of course, Miller doesn’t presume to take all the credit for the success of his clients. Besides, as he explains, mind tuning is an invisible art. “You really don’t want them to think it’s you. You want them to think it’s them. And the truth is – it is them.”

In Miller’s case, ‘them’ covers a lot of territory. In the last 25 years he has worked with teams in 30 different sports, including the BC Lions, Vancouver Canucks, Vancouver Grizzlies, New York Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers, Florida Panthers and St. Louis Blues. His individual clients have included Tiger Williams, Mattias Ohlund, Cliff Ronning, Eric Dickerson, Richard Zokol, Nancy Lopez and numerous Canadian Olympians.

But the North Vancouver psychologist doesn’t limit his work to the athletic realm. His extensive list of corporate clients includes Canada Life, CIBC, Cominco, IBM, Motorola, Nike, Sony, Telus, ICBC and BC Hydro. “There are several similarities between sports and business,” says Miller, who charges out at $200 an hour. “The bottom line is very evident in both fields. In sport there is a commitment to continuous improvement. It’s exactly the same in business – the status quo is never good enough.”