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You Can Reach
Your Personal Best!
What the Mind Can Conceive, the Body Can Achieve.
For the average person, hypnotherapy cannot turn a golfing duffer into an
international champion. Factors, skills and abilities other than mental are
obviously involved. But, hypnosis can be used to enable a player to achieve
his or her personal best!
In a cover story on the 1984 Olympics, Time Magazine reported that on the
night before the finals in women's gymnastics Mary Lou Retton, then 16
years old, lay in bed at the Olympic Village mentally rehearsing her
performance ritual. She had done the same on hundreds of previous nights,
visualizing herself performing all her routines perfectly - imagining in
her mind all the moves and rehearsing them again and again. The result was
a performance of perfection, presented with charm, poise and confidence,
culminating in a gold medal.
"What the mind can conceive, the body can achieve!" Proof of that
statement has been provided countless times. Mary Lou pictured a perfect
performance in her mind. Her body produced it. The same capability is
available to any sports enthusiast. If the skills and coordination
abilities do not equal Olympic levels, they can carry the player to the
heights of personal best, providing new levels of achievement and
satisfaction.
To train the body to the limits of its capabilities without simultaneously
training the mind is to invite mediocrity. Sports psychologists have
claimed that for Olympic caliber athletes, 80 percent of that athlete's
performance is in the mind.
What the Mind Can Do
Mental rehearsal, or visualization, can create and reaffirm the confidence
necessary to achieve top performance. The picture visualized 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 coordination improves. What your mind can
conceive, you can achieve. If you can think it and see it in your mind, you
can do it.
What can be accomplished through the powers of the mind? Perhaps most
important is the development of positive attitudes. Negative thoughts
pertaining to performance skills can be changed or eliminated. Enjoyment of
the sport will be enhanced to a major degree as skills improve to the point
where intermittent incidents of poor performance no longer arouse
irritation, anger, discouragement or detrimental emotional reactions.
Concentration, coordination, technique all can improve as well as awareness
of proper form and posture.
Sports enthusiasts face the same stumbling blocks that people have to deal
with in all other areas of life - the biggest of all is fear, and fear
comes in many forms. Fear of failure is always restrictive. Its hidden
partner, fear of success is experienced as an apprehension that success can
create the expectation of further improvement. Fear of humiliation concerns
many who perform in front of others. Competition can produce sensations of
intimidation resulting in deterioration of skills.
Hypnotherapy, or properly learned and applied self-hypnosis, can work to
reduce or eliminate the mental obstacles to peak performance in sport
activities.
The Steps to Achievement
The goal of hypnosis is not the learning or acquisition of the basic skills
involved, though these could be helped through hypnosis (as in enhancing
learning skills). The goal is to enable the athlete to achieve the best
personal level, performing at peak. As with virtually all hypnosis, the
first step must be relaxation. Relaxation to a level appropriate for the
implanting of hypnotic suggestion is not resting, but a form of trance in
which the subconscious is readily able to receive appropriate suggestions.
Goal setting is essential. These goals may be set by the athlete, coach or
therapist or a combination thereof. It is important for the goals to be
specific and focused on the area in which improvement is desired. Such as:
playing better tennis is not an appropriate goal, developing a better
backhand is a valid goal. Goals must be achievable in the short-term step
by step so that success and completion are experienced.
Concentration is vitally important, and sometimes difficult to develop.
Hypnotherapy has long been an effective means of improving concentration
capabilities. Distractions need to be eliminated. Post-hypnotic cues may
prove useful in stimulating both concentration and developing specific
skills. Visualization at the moment of performance can produce dramatic
results.
Finally, mental rehearsal is the ultimate key to superlative performance.
It can prove more productive than physical practice. Imagery is not merely
visual in nature; it can include all the senses. Perfection truly requires
the use of all senses.
Portions
of this brochure were adapted from one developed by the National Guild of
Hypnotists educational faculty and copyrighted in 1991. It has been adapted
by The Labyrinth Center in 1999.
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