Techniques To Alleviate Performance Anxiety & Trigger A Success Mindset

I have worked with many sportsmen and women over the years helping them visualise their success, believe in their success, and to go on to make that success a reality. Hypnotherapy for sports performance is nothing new. It’s been around for a long time. It was first studied in the 1920s and documented in the 1950s, and the reason it’s been used for such a long time is that it works wonders. Serious athletes will be determined to do almost anything that will give them the edge. To be the winner. To be the best in their field.

Hypnosis and guided imagery have been used by many athletes to improve their game and while some may regard this as trickery or mind control, it is a legitimate form of treatment that has been proven to be highly effective in bringing about positive change, developing new habits and behaviours and new ways of thinking both logically and creatively.

Sports hypnosis works on the principle of the mind-body connection, and as advances in neuroscience and psychology have been made and the science studied, we know now that the two are unequivocally linked. Our minds and our bodies are in constant communication with a flow of neurotransmitters from the brain to the cells of the body and back again. The mind tells the body how to behave, and the body tells the mind how to feel and how to behave.

And as you can imagine, this has profound implications for sports performance.

Hypnosis can be used to encourage the right sort of messages to be transmitted from the mind to the body, for instance, a more relaxed stance when taking a golf swing, or an extra degree of determination that helps you overcome physical resistance in a sporting event.

The objective of sports hypnosis is to bring the mind and body into balance, the physical body connecting to the unconscious mind.

This is why hypnosis is so well suited to the sport, which is all about unconscious and instinctive reactions. When athletes are in ‘the zone’ they are in fact in a hypnotic trance as the athlete's attention is fixed and the unconscious mind takes control.

Hypnosis provides sportsmen and women with an invaluable “secret weapon” that can dramatically improve overall performance.

Many well-known athletes have worked with qualified hypnotherapists to achieve significant gains in their performance regardless of their discipline. After all, the unconscious mind is the driving force behind most of our beliefs and behaviours so it makes sense that a technique aimed at changing thoughts at an unconscious level will prove highly effective.

Hypnotherapy can help an athlete perfect their skills, finely tune their technique, improve their self-confidence and overcome self-doubt or performance anxiety. Hypnotherapy also improves focus, a key component for any athlete to win.

Tiger Woods is a fine example of a top sportsman who has used hypnosis to achieve a phenomenal level of success in golf. He has reportedly been using self-hypnosis techniques since his early teens. He not only to visualise each swing and stroke but he also uses it to get in the zone – to focus.