A former Ealing Trailfinders player will present a talk to the British Psychological Society after the success of his performance consulting business.

Sean O’Connell, 27, who also represented Ulster and London Irish, was forced to retire in 2015 due to concussion and returned to education.

He earned a first-class honours in leadership and management at the University of Northumbria before completing a distinction in masters level psychology at University of West London before setting up Perform Ltd in October 2019.

He said: “It’s all well and good knowing wellbeing is important but if you don’t know anything about wellbeing how do you go about addressing it?

“You see signs of wellbeing outside Boots or Tesco and gyms and if you’re an average member of the public without a background knowledge of psychology you might think what is wellbeing?

“You might know it is good but what is it? How does it affect me and more importantly how can I improve it?

“Our wellbeing has so many important life predictors from happiness to success to our ability to mentally perform so our cognitive abilities, things like decision making.

“You see a lot of tweets and articles about it but no one gets into the nitty gritty of what they can do to improve it so for me a personal challenge is what can I do to educate and try to fix the problem and that’s one of the huge benefits of our wellbeing programs.”

Perform Ltd targets all three components of wellbeing: social, physical and psychological to help people and businesses perform better and the company has seen success in a short space of time with a 70-year-old man who took part in public sessions seeing his heart rate drop from 200/100 to 145/79.

After the presentation to British Psychological Society on July 2, O’Connell has revealed that he is planning on delivering the wellbeing talk to businesses and individuals in the future.

He said: “I am presenting to them on the role of wellbeing and how it underpins optimal performance so on a personal level I am hugely excited about that.

“I think it is a great chance to educate people on what wellbeing really is.

“Being able to present there with a variety of clinical psychologists, occupational psychologists and sports psychologists to educate them on a theme which is so central to every person.

“It’s everyone who can benefit and what’s interesting is people can benefit in different way.

“Whether that is more in a cognitive element where people can make better decisions or people’s memories are improved or if it’s a case of saying it’s more about managing my clients emotion or mood or things like that.”

Like companies across the country he had to adapt to lockdown procedures caused by Covid-19.

Ealing Times: ZOOM IN: Perform Ltd is offering online sessionsZOOM IN: Perform Ltd is offering online sessions

He said: “We were having a lot of success with it but when things went into lockdown we had to adapt quite quickly.

“At that point we started trialling zoom, we opened it to the general public and it has been fantastic, so many people have got involved and really enjoyed the sessions and have given great feedback.

“If you think some of the other fitness options out there are videos you watch on YouTube or Instagram live and you’re just following an instructor but there is no engagement or interaction, it’s just a one directional communicational path.

“Whereas ours are a lot more interactive, I take the session myself and engage with members, give them feedback on their technique and within that we build challenges.

“We’re not your average Joe who goes in there and tells you to do a few burpees, everything we do has been designed for a purpose which has been driven by empirical research and has been tested as well so we know it works in practice.”

Details of the services that Perform Ltd provide can be found on the website.