Sports psychology often utilises forms of both relaxation-focused and active-alert hypnosis to help maintain focus and deliver performance based on the fullest implementation of your training. Relaxation may be used to help manage stressful situations or anxiety you may have, e.g. about returning to a sport after injury. Elsewhere, the focus of attention may be on activity, energy, determination, motivation etc. Visualisation is used in many sports as part of training, and this involves a form of self-hypnosis - focused attention on a dominant idea, and a responsiveness to suggestion, in this case positive suggestions for confidence and competence and a belief in your own potential.

Mindfulness and attention also form an important bedrock to much of sports psychology - since you can only act in the present moment, reproducing your training in competition, or when doing the sport for fun. You may well get more fun out of doing it as well as you can, since that can open up other possibilities, e.g. to take on more challenging ski runs; improve your marathon times; lower your golf handicap, your tennis first serve percentages; distance you can swim; higher, steeper climbs etc.

Training is a process….

For many sports, training involves going through a set routine, in your mind and in putting it physically into practice. Sports hypnosis has many parallels with mindful learning covered elsewhere on this website and it is that expertise that I draw on in working with you. You have to engage in the learning and the training process of your chosen sport, rather than a singular focus on outcomes, since it is the process that will deliver you the outcomes. But being caught up in thoughts/worry about whether the outcome will be good enough - how good your time will be, how far up the leader board you will be - will mean you are not in the present, your focus of attention is on your thoughts and the future and not your actions, and so it is unlikely that you will be able to reproduce what you did in training. How many times have you made that great shot, jump, time etc in training, but couldn’t in competition or when you were playing at your local club?

Importantly, in working with sports hypnosis you - the athlete, player, sports person - are already the expert in your sport and what you want to achieve from it. You know what you need to do to perform well. But there may be mental blocks to you realising your potential. In utilising hypnosis to support the development of your sport we work collaboratively - you bringing your knowledge and understanding of the sport, with me bringing the cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy expertise to help you help yourself.

I am not a sports coach - you may have had plenty of coaching from experts in your sport already; another sports coach is not what you need! But a way to unblock the mental barriers is what may benefit you the most. I bring a willing patience and curiosity - in you and how you interact with your sport - and the hypnotherapy expertise to help you develop the mindfulness and self-hypnosis skills that will become key parts of your toolkit towards mastery (along with your technical and physical skills), at the level of the sport that suits you.