Creating focus

Hypnosis can be used to focus the attention to make you succeed.

Confidence-building through ego-strengthening messages are used to programme people with winning attitudes. Trigger words or small actions ( like squeezing their middle finger and thumb together) can be implanted as post-hypnotic suggestions, and when the athlete repeats the words or squeezes their finger and thumb in competition they will provide a surge of energy and confidence.

This method is widely used in the training of Olympic athletes and professional sportspeople.

Before a sporting event, the thought of failing can be enough to trigger feelings of fear, causing the athlete to lose focus, and even leading to physical symptoms such as feeling weak at the knees, butterflies in the stomach, and blurred vision.

Visual imagery

Visual imagery is used to enhance a sporting performance so that athletes feel as though they can "watch" themselves.
Visualising specific movements from the inside creates neural pathways in the brain, improving neuromuscular co-ordination. The brain tells the muscles when and how to move so the stronger the patterns, the more perfect the movement is likely to be.

Running mental "films" of your own success helps to convince the subconscious mind that it can achieve its desired goal. A study in the US in the 1960s gave basketball players sessions with a hypnotherapist, in which they received suggestions for playing a better game and visualising themselves winning. When their shooting scores were compared with the scores of a control group of players, (not exposed to hypnosis) they were found to be significantly better.

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Updated 28.12.07