Our bodies can do the most amazing things, yet very few of us ever realize the full potential of the machine that we have at our disposal. The elite athlete who dedicates themselves to being the very best within their chosen discipline – from football, baseball or lacrosse to mixed martial arts, all have certain qualities in common: talent, determination, focus and the right mental attitude. In fact, whether you are an elite Olympian, Pro Athlete or Weekend Warrior, the role that the mind plays in any physical achievement is paramount.
For those participating at the highest level of competition such as at the Olympics, Pro Sports or College Athletics, it is the power and strength of their mental focus that makes the difference between winning and losing.
An Individual Response
As a certified hypnotherapist, sports hypnotist and NLP Practitioner, I deal in the realities that the mind creates in response to a range of situations. In simple terms, I help individuals understand why one person acts a particular way in a specific situation, while another responds in a completely different way. In sporting terms, what enables a world class sprinter to storm away from the blocks – and have the luxury of a self congratulatory chest slap – while others are slow off the mark? When we are able to uncover the pattern behind the behavior, it is only then that we are able to effect real change – and improvement.
Missing The Shot
Sport is full of examples of highly skilled people who are let down by their mental processes – think of any number of great basketball players who step up to the free throw line with only seconds left on the game clock. It seems inconceivable that someone earning what a professional basketball player does would miss a shot like this. So, what goes wrong? What turns a superb athlete into a choker? And what can be done about it?
In these instances, it is the mind, not the eyes, feet or lack of skill that causes the problem. In any situation, your mind (in simplistic terms your unconscious thought) is working out the likely consequences of the actions you are about to take. It then selects the one most likely to bring you the result it believes is most beneficial to you. If the calculation your brain makes is negative, it releases chemicals into your body that were originally intended to protect you from predators of old. These chemicals increase your heart rate, your respiration, stop digestion and, if strong enough, they also shut down those parts of your brain responsible for logical, considered thinking.
This puts you into a state best described as a trance. Not one that will make you bark like a dog, but which may cause you to hit the rim of the basket and miss the free throw, or forget your name in an interview – truly, strong emotions make us stupid. It's this fight, flight or freeze response that causes someone to shake in front of an interview panel, or fluff a shot at match point, or just stand there looking dumbfounded, all because the brain looks at the present situation and calculates the likely consequence. As you stand ready to make your shot, do you foresee a swish or the sighs of the crowd as the ball hits the rim and bounces away?
Putting It All In Context
The context is highly significant: you may be cool as a cucumber playing in a division playoff game, but a nervous wreck at the prospect of speaking at the press conference afterwards. This is because the meaning of the present situation you're in (whether it's good or bad), and its anticipated outcome is determined by calculations the brain makes based on your past.
So if your mind creates a version of reality that makes you underperform, what you can do about it? Most people try to take control back from the brain by repeatedly practicing that skill – consciously performing an action that is so practiced it's almost completely unconscious. Unfortunately, all we are often achieving is repeating, and thereby reinforcing, the same mistakes when we should actually allow our unconscious to perform the actions we've practiced and give reign to the power of imagination.
After discovering the limiting and underlying values and beliefs (which is an entirely whole other subject), there are three main techniques that I use when working with athletes to improve their performance. Having used these myself, I can attest to their success from personal experience!
1. Visualization
Visualization is one of the most powerful tools for change, and there is plenty of evidence around to support this theory. In one example, researchers found that when a group of elderly people visualized doing bench presses every day, they actually got stronger – and even put on muscle. The idea that you can change your body shape just by thinking is further supported by an experiment in which basketball players of equal ability were separated into three groups. One group practiced shooting free throws, one imagined shooting free throws, and one did not practice free throws at all.
When their ability was reassessed, those who actually practiced free throws improved (as expected). Those that did not practice, had no improvement (as expected). But when the group that practiced only in their minds was tested…they showed the same amount of improvement as the group that physically practiced the free throws!
This is because as they rehearsed shooting perfect baskets, their mirror neurons created and stored a 'map' of shooting a prefect free throw in their minds.
Physical practice doesn't make perfect; it makes permanent. The best way to make “permanent prefect” is to combine the two. In addition to your physical practice, set aside 10 minutes a day to mentally rehearse the key aspects of your game. The best way is to visualize yourself in “first person”, that is, as if you are looking through your own eyes. Really focus for no more than 10 minutes – any longer and you won't be able to sustain the necessary concentration.
2. Anchoring
Music is a powerful emotive stimulus – just hearing a song can take you back to a past event and stir strong emotions. These are called anchors and work on the stimulus-response mechanism first identified by Pavlov. Basically, the principle works by pairing a stimulus with a strong emotion as you are experiencing it. This way, the two become wired together in your neurology, and one will trigger the other in you. By pairing a powerful stimulus or trigger such as smell with a positive emotion relevant to your performance, you can actually enhance it.
Many top athletes use this technique. During training, whenever they get into a good performance state, they focus on that feeling and sometimes inhale a smell that's impregnated on a wrist band or jersey. The smell itself is usually just something they like, although some natural products have been shown to have particular effects. They continue to 'stack' these states over a period of time, so the smell becomes strongly evocative of the emotional state that accompanies a good performance. On the big day, before serving, settling into the blocks or approaching the high jump, they take a deep breath and re-access the positive state.
Music is also a great trigger and doesn’t look so weird when you're anchoring. The key with any anchor is to relive the peak experience in vivid detail through visualization and then anchor. The absolute best way would be to anchor exactly at the time of achievement. One easy way to “set a physical anchor” is to press your forefinger and thumb together.
3. Self-Talk
As your own most important critic, it is crucial to your success that you teach yourself to recognize unfair self-criticism and turn it into empowering self-talk. Practicing empowering self-talk and working on your mindset is actually just as important as practicing the technical aspects of your sport. The same way that the technical aspects of your sport need practice, the mental aspects of your sport also need practice.
Self-talk is exactly what it sounds like. It's your internal dialogue - the words you use when you talk to yourself either in your own mind or out loud.
Neuroscientists and psychologists have calculated that most people carry an ongoing dialogue, or self talk, about between 150 and 300 words per minute. Most of the self-talk consists of mundane, routine, and harmless thoughts we all have such as “I am hungry” or “I need to get my haircut soon.”
The danger for athletes is when this internal dialogue takes on negative connotations such as “I'll never be as good as he is” or “I don't even belong competing at this level.” When this kind of self-talk becomes ongoing, you create limiting beliefs about yourself and your abilities, and if left unchecked, can go on to become self-fulfilling prophecies.
There are many self-talk mistakes that athletes commonly make when preparing for competition and all of them are easily dealt with. Among them are:
- Focusing on the past or future
- Thinking only of the outcome
- Focusing on outside factors beyond your control
- Focusing on weakness during competition
- Demanding perfection
Chances are you've experienced a few of the above the self-talk mistakes in the past. But how do you actually change your self-talk to be more positive? You really can't control the thoughts that come into your heads, right?
Wrong!
There are two major ways to eliminate negative self-talk. One is through a process, referred to as ‘thought stopping’, which involves four steps:
- Become aware of self-talk
- Stop the negative thought
- Replace the negative thought with a positive thought (create positive self-talk)
- Practice the above steps a few times a day
Although this procedure does work, it takes concentration, effort, and dedication.
The second method is to use the power of your unconscious mind via hypnosis and NLP techniques. By accessing the unconscious mind via hypnosis and NLP, thoughts and ideas can be “planted” that will take root and then become realized in the athlete’s performance. This again…is an entirely whole other subject.
Very few of us will ever play in the Super Bowl or throw a pitch with the bases loaded in the World Series, but we can all use our minds to reach our peak performance.
There are many things that modern psychology can teach us about how our mindset can impact on our body and its performance.
So, open your mind to what your thoughts can do for you and aim higher – you may surprise everybody – even yourself.
