Hypnosis in Sport or Other Endeavour s and The Inner Game.
How does one improve in their chosen sport or endeavour? You are keen. You practice for hours. You want to be a winner. But it just isn’t happening for you. What’s going on here?
Not to achieve can develop into a health issue. Depression, Anxiety, and Stress can affect our health.
Mostly I write about Sport, but it can equally as well be an endeavour of any kind that is alluding the client, and I have included a couple of non-sport endeavours at the end as examples.
For simplicity I call it the ‘Inner Game’. A term taken from W. Timothy Gallway and the many books he has written on sport. The below quote of his, I see as the essence of the Inner Game.
“If human beings did not have a tendency to interfere with their own ability to perform and learn, there would be no Inner Game. But the fact is that because of self-interference, few of us perform up to the level of our potential for more than brief moments at a time. Learning to get out of one’s way is the purpose of the Inner Game”. – W. Timothy Gallway
And that of course can relate to any of our endeavours.
Whilst Gallway in his books talks about Self1 and Self2, he is referring to the Conscious and Sub-Conscious minds.
Yet today’s advanced research allows us to become aware of many influences and research knowledge from people like Bruce Lipton6 and Robert Lanza7
- Bruce Lipton, internationally recognised leader in bridging science and spirit, began his scientific career as a cell biologist. In 1982, Dr. Lipton began examining the principles of quantum physics and how they might be integrated into his understanding of the cell’s information processing systems. His discoveries, which ran counter to the established scientific view that life is controlled by the genes, presaged one of today’s most important fields of study, the science of epigenetics. He is regarded as one of the leading voices of the new biology.
- Robert Lanza, an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer and widely acknowledged as one of the fathers of the field of applied stem cell biology has written about the new theory of the Universe – The Biocentric Universe Theory: Stem-cell guru Robert Lanza presents a radical new view of the universe and everything in it. Praise for Robert Lanza’s essay – “A New Theory of the Universe,” on which Biocentrism is based.
Quote ‘Like “A Brief History of Time” it is indeed stimulating and brings biology into the whole. Any short statement does not do justice to such a scholarly work. Almost every society of mankind has explained the mystery of our surroundings and being by invoking a god or group of gods. Scientists work to acquire objective answers from the infinity of space or the inner machinery of the atom. Lanza proposes a biocentrist theory which ascribes the answer to the observer rather than the observed. The work is a scholarly consideration of science and philosophy that brings biology into the central role in unifying the whole. The book will appeal to an audience of many different disciplines because it is a new way of looking at the old problem of our existence. Most importantly, it makes you think.”Unquote —E. Donnall Thomas, 1990 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology and Medicine.
You can see links below if you are interested in pursuing this knowledge further. When you ask the question of a client who is in hypnosis; “Are there any parts inside that are unhappy, and can they please come forward to speak with me?” (Hitherto thought to be parts of the sub-conscious), who are we talking to? No researcher has yet been able to find where ‘consciousness’ is within the body.
It can be very frustrating when you have an inconsistency where one time you are playing at the top of your game, and then even when you didn’t feel you were doing anything different the next time everything seems to go wrong. So, you decide that you need to take more control. You become obsessed with tips and techniques and read more books to improve your game, and instead seem to do worse rather than better.
THE INNER GAME –
We are all very different in our perceptions and our belief systems based on our indoctrination as a child, our own training and our own life events, both positive and negative causing our inner energy and vibration.
There has been much talk about the placebo and its opposite, the nocebo. Research has shown that medication research shows 30% of all healing occurs when the patient doesn’t receive the real medication and is given the inactive placebo like a chalk pill instead of the real medication. This shows that we have our own inner healing ability to create the healing. And, we have also known that if a doctor for example says that you only have about a year to live, and the patient believes that, he brings about the nocebo effect and dies in 12 months.
- Our ‘inner game’ to be a winner requires that the Mind, Emotions, Body and Energy must all be in the one direction. To succeed our mind must see our self as a winner and having won the game. Visualisation – In the hypnosis trance state should be a multi-sensorial. So, as well as seeing yourself winning, the ‘when, who, what, where, why and how, comes into play.
- In the inner game of golf for example, seeing yourself at your next golf game, swinging the golf club easily, feeling how that feels, seeing it go into the golf hole, everything working freely and well. Winning the game and feeling the elation as you realize you can do things that were until recently impossible to complete.
- We could call this the placebo effect. Our expectancy having seen our self-doing what is required to be a winner shows our subconscious what to do and causes our own inner ability to do just that.
- Yet doubt that ability, listen and believe someone, or even yourself telling you that this is impossible for you to do and you are likely to put in the nocebo effect and fail. As a therapist I feel it is my job to point to top sports people that use hypnosis and have become winners through the ‘inner game’, thereby releasing any nocebo effect that might be there.
- To have doubts of the possibility despite any earlier intentional thought of winning will have negated that intention.
- Visualisation is a muscle that needs to be exercised just as much as your ‘intention muscle’. Fortunately, in hypnosis the subconscious mind can be projected forward in time to produce a state from ‘learning to habit’ of the newly learnt ‘inner game’. Questions to the subconscious as to how that feels, does it need to make any adjustments? until it is happy with the result that winning is able to take place. Putting a ‘trigger’ into place whilst in hypnosis allows the conscious mind after it has set everything up, to allow the subconscious to take over inside to complete the game in the manner to be a winner.
CLIENTS
(All client’s names have been changed and any things that seem like someone you know is purely coincidental.)
GOLF1
Client A – Alan, a mature aged client who played golf came to me to see if hypnosis could help him improve his golf game. His friend had told him what he noticed what he was doing wrong; when he was swinging the club back, on its return to hit the ball his body twisted to the left causing the ball to be hit in the wrong direction instead of straight to its destination. I asked him to show me how he should be hitting the ball. There was no twisting in what he showed me, and we used that knowledge of revisiting how that felt to put this into place as a normal way to hit the ball from now on, releasing the anxiety of the previous failures.
Client B – Brian, a professional person had tried for three years to win an open golf tournament. He had been reading the book called the ‘Inner Game of Golf’ by W. Timothy Gallwey which he brought with him to show me. In the book Brian had highlighted every place where he felt he was having problems with his game or what was important for him to do, yet he still had not fulfilled his dream of winning the coveted trophy. What I want you to do, said Brian, is to correct my play that I have highlighted in the book that shows where I am having trouble. And that is what we did. That year the client fulfilled his dream and won the trophy.
SNOOKER2
Client C – Charlie’s dilemma was having a friend who was a professional snooker player, and each time he played with his friend in a friendly game, he would beat his friend. But when entering competitions, he wasn’t winning. We looked at both how he played with his friend in a friendly match, against how he played in the competitions. He noted the differences and we adjusted that in hypnosis that changed his game to win.
[AUSTRALIAN] COMMANDOS TRAINING3
Client D – David advised me that he was undergoing a training course to become a Commando.
“[Australian] Commandos are trained to an exceptionally high level, both physically and mentally and expected to perform accordingly. David had difficulty in one part of the course where he needed supreme endurance with an ability to meet the time allotted and the ability to withstand the pain to complete this segment. We looked at changing breathing, releasing tension and anxiety from earlier failures that caused the ability to succeed.
CLAY PIGEON SHOOTING4
Client E – Eric came to see if hypnosis could help to improve his game. To excel at this sport, he told me his reflexes are required to hit the fast flying target with precision to smash the clay disc. There is no time for aiming, and consciously the flying target goes too fast to have time to make that decision. When the trap projects the clay disc, it is a matter of ‘intuitively knowing’ how to move the gun in the right position and when to pull the trigger to get a hit. We slowed down the target to be able to know where to aim and when to shoot. Through repetition and increasing the speed, knowing when to shoot became automatic.
WAKEBOARDING5
Client F – Freddie came to hypnosis to gain confidence and improve his game in wakeboarding. You can read more about the game by clicking on the bibliography, but as a short explanation it is a dynamic water sport akin to snowboarding evolving from a combination of surfing, snowboarding, skating and water skiing, where a variety of tricks are performed. These can range from skate/snowboard inspired grabs and spins to massive flips and soaring jumps. Freddie loved the sport, even the danger, however, he had seen many accidents in the sport. He came to see me shortly before competing in a contest he had entered. Through seeing himself as winner in the ‘inner game’, Freddie came just 0.3 points away from coming 1st having changed from being mediocre to coming 2nd out of 19 riders after his first hypnosis session.
GENERAL –
Client G – Grace, who had passed a University course and had become a Doctor, (no mean feat, I am sure having to learn all those Latin names; body parts, symptoms, medications and keep up with the numerous changes in the medical world). A few years later she sat for an exam which would have afforded more pay and failed it. She failed the exam 7 times before coming to see me. When looking at the reason for failure it was due to not having studied for the first exam, causing a fear of failing the second time despite knowing the work back to front this time. However, due to the fear of failing, entering the exam room, her mind went blank and she failed again and again. We released that fear and replayed the desired outcome. After her hypnosis session, she passed her exam.
Client H – High School Student Hillary couldn’t get through a PowerPoint presentation at school without crying and messing it up. When she did the presentation, she felt that her peers were judging her work as not good enough, bringing about a feeling of ‘not good enough, anxiety and helplessness’. Getting Hillary to watch the people watching her, she realised that they themselves were anxious about their own performance, seeing also that nobody had laughed at a previous presentation where that person had made mistake. We released the fears and replayed the desired outcome until it felt she was confident in her presentations.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Common blockages needing to be overcome.
- Lack of Confidence and the greatest loss of feeling is self-doubt, usually brought on by past failure.
- Fear of not being good enough and expecting failure or mediocre performance.
- Stress and tenseness when it mattered the most to be relaxed and focussed.
- Lack of that intense concentration upon results, to the absolute exclusion of all thoughts as to the method – the secret of a good game.
- The Inner Game Terminology, this means the player learns to trust the subconscious who through practice in hypnosis in the mind learns what to do automatically.
Suggestions are very powerful in hypnosis. I remember two guys coming to me together to give up the smoking habit. They elected to stay in the room together, but each went through the hypnosis part of the program separately. Number 1 guy on completion of his hypnosis, moved chairs to let his friend take the recliner. As he did so, he said; “We are having a really important football match tomorrow. It’s important that we win. You wouldn’t be able to make me play really well tomorrow, would you?” As I went through the induction of the friend, I noticed the number 1 guy, going back into hypnosis again. I put my hand on his shoulder and told him that he would play the most amazing game in is mind while I was helping his friend to become a non-smoker. And tomorrow when you play that important game you will absolutely amaze yourself and everyone around you at how well you play. You will have lots of stamina and speed to outplay your opponents. You will work that out now so that you will know just what to do tomorrow. And I continued with his friend. He called me the next day, jubilant at the brilliant match he had played to thank me for helping them win the match.
References:
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golf
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snooker
4 http://www.sydneyclaytargetclub.com.au
5 http://www.iwwfwakeboard.com/IWWF/Wakeboard_History.html
6 https://www.brucelipton.com/
So if there is anything that you have problems achieving, consider booking a couple of sessions of hypnotherapy to clear the way for success.
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