Improving sport performance

You can achieve and exceed your personal best by tapping into the power of your subconscious mind to get into the zone!

Hypnotherapy  offers the following potential benefits to help athletes handle personal challenges with confidence consistently.

Hypnotherapy can help you get the winning edge by:

•   Improving concentration and focus
  

•  Motivating you to train and play with greater intensity
  
•   Building confidence and belief
  
•   Helping you retain composure in any competitive situation
•   Replacing doubt with positive self-talk
•   Minimising anxiety and stress  to ensure peak performance

Hypnotherapy is an extremely effective means of improving sport performance. It will increase the sports persons ability to concentrate their mind, enabling the individual to stay focused.  Hypnotherapists can teach their clients self-hypnosis techniques and install what are known as “anchors” so that they can enter a focused state of calm concentration quickly and efficiently. Using a light state of relaxed trance similar to day-dreaming the Hypnotherapist can bypass the critical factor of the conscious mind to work with the subconscious on creating positive imagery, clear focus, belief and increased confidence. The counselling portion of the session is used to gather information on the area of improvement required and a detailed description of the optimum execution of the skill to be improved, the skilled therapist will ensure they have a clear understanding of the clients perspective, perception and languages so that the appropriate terminology and emphasis is used to ensure that the subconscious accepts the suggestions readily.

 Hypnotherapy is beneficial in all sports and is used by professionals and amateurs alike. Olympic athletes utilise self-hypnosis techniques to help them achieve world class performance levels. In the US and other nations mental rehearsal is recognized as being equally as powerful and important as physical practice. Russian athletes are taught mental conditioning from the beginning of their sports careers.

You may be familiar with a story reported by Time Magazine on the 1984 Olympics, that on the night before the finals in women’s gymnastics Mary Lou Retton, who was 16 years old at that time, lay in bed in the Olympic Village mentally rehearsing her performance ritual. She had done the same on prior to every other event she was in, visualizing herself performing all her routines perfectly – seeing in her minds eye all the positions and movements and rehearsing them over and over. The result, of course, was perfect performance, culminating in a gold medal. Sports psychologists have claimed that for Olympic teams 80 percent of an athlete’s performance is in the mind. Such belief has been echoed by champions in all form of competition.

“What the mind can conceive, the body can achieve!”

Hypnotherapy can’t turn an average Golfer into Tiger Woods, but it can enable a player to achieve their best by utilizing all of their skills and abilities to their optimum level and by minimizing the impact of nerves in those crucial moments.

In order to achieve the best possible performance in any Sport, training the mind is at least if not more important than training the body, failure to train the mind will result in reduced endurance, compromised mental strength and mediocre results.

How can Hypnotherapy help?

Mental rehearsal, also termed visualisation, can create and lock in the confidence necessary to achieve excellence in any field. The picture visualised in the mind can convince the subconscious that achievement is possible. The automatic nervous system performs in exactly the same manner followed during a physical rehearsal. Neuromuscular co-ordination improves. What your mind can conceive, you can achieve. If you can think it and see it in your mind, you can do it!  Hypnotherapy can train the sportsperson to create vivid visualisations that engage all of the senses and create comprehensive detailed experiences perceived as real by the subconscious.

The confidence and positive attitude accomplished through Hypnotherapy will ensure that the sportsperson will enjoy their sport more than ever before; resilience will increase so that setbacks are taken in their stride rather than being sources of discouragement and emotional turmoil. Hypnotherapy will give you the tools and strategies required to direct your emotions and energies constructively, reducing anxiety and building your confidence so that hesitation and fear of failure is no longer an issue.

Hypnotherapy combined with the self-hypnosis skills taught by the therapist will see Improvement is achieved by focusing on specific goals set by the sportsperson and in some instances their coach as well.  Using specific goals and focusing on the area where improvement is desired will achieve optimum results i.e. playing better tennis or shooting better is not specific enough, the goal should be a SMART(Specific, Measurable, Action Oriented, Realistic and Timely) goal, achievable step by step so that success and execution can be experienced. In the tennis example improving serve or backhand is the type of goal that will reap results.

If you would like to experience the improvements that Hypnotherapy can deliver in your sporting life why not give us a call at Hypfocus Therapies and Training or 0435 923 817.  Georgina Mitchell is an accredited therapist that can work out a program to suit your specific needs and objectives.  In the words of the great Michael Jordan “Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen”

 http://www.hypocus.com.au/

© Copyright Hypfocus Therapies and Training 2015