Parkinson was born in Singapore to an English father and a Japanese mother, and is eligible to represent both nations, as well as Portugal, where she spent most of her playing career.<\/p>\n
She was with Leixoes from the age of 10 and had some involvement with Benfica before breaking into Valadares Gaia’s first team in the 2023-24 season.<\/p>\n
Since the age of 12, Parkinson has been working with a mindset coach, developing skills to handle pressure and expectation off the pitch, and to improve her leadership, decision-making and awareness on it.<\/p>\n
She connected with Martin Fairn, founder of Gazing Performance, who has worked with a number of elite athletes including the New Zealand men’s rugby team and former England cricketer Ashley Giles.<\/p>\n
Fairn was approached by Parkinson’s father, Richard, and quickly began working with Erica and her brother Dennis.<\/p>\n
“I knew straight away that Erica had a determination not everybody has,” Fairn told BBC Sport. <\/p>\n
“I said to Erica: ‘What do you want to do?’ And she said: ‘I’d like to play football for England.’ That was how it all kicked off.<\/p>\n
“It’s relatively rare someone that young seeks out mindset training. Do they need it? There won’t be one person who couldn’t benefit from it. <\/p>\n
“In football particularly, it’s viewed as a problem that needs fixing rather than a skill that needs developing.”<\/p>\n
Parkinson and Fairn have worked together for over five years, catching up in person at the end of each season and holding regular meetings over Zoom.<\/p>\n
In a pre-season session before the 2025-26 campaign – which BBC Sport has seen summary notes of – Parkinson focused on raised expectations and on developing more clarity of her role on the pitch.<\/p>\n
On her flight to her first senior Lionesses camp in March, Parkinson wrote a list of the pressures and emotions she could feel – a common process with Fairn.<\/p>\n
They reflected on how she might react to the challenges, what her ambitions were during those moments and how she could prepare.<\/p>\n
The list included:<\/p>\n
The honour of being called up<\/p>\n
Anticipation of walking into a camp with star-studded names<\/p>\n
Increased intensity of training<\/p>\n
Behaviours off the pitch<\/p>\n
Media attention and increased scrutiny<\/p>\n
Performing in training<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Parkinson was born in Singapore to an English father and a Japanese mother, and is eligible to represent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":536763,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":["post-536762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/536763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}