From years as a sports therapist, international athlete and Master Hypnotherapist and NLP Practitioner, I understood early on in my career that the connection between the mind, body and ultimate performance was stronger than any of my books, lecturers of colleagues were telling me.

From competing at international level myself for over 15 years and overcoming many of the most common problems that an athlete faces, I knew that mental preparation and the performance of the body, is at least 60% dependant on the state of mind at the time.

Lengthy experience in coaching, rehabilitating athletes back to competiiton and further education, the understanding of the neural pathways and nervous system responsiveness to brain stimulus and "signalling" became clearer and I began to implement new strategies into the
coaching and training regimes of my clients.

You may recognise from your own training or competing a pattern you have
developed or a routine you have that is unique to you. Something you believe
that gets you into the right state of mind to recreate your performance as well
as it had done before and you still do it??

This is the very basis of optimising your performance. You already began
 to do it yourself without even realising it.

What NLP and hypnotherapy does is to work out your personality type, your response to certain situations in training or competition, the way you think and react and harness that to create your optimum mental state to give you your best physical results. The other benefits are being able to to show you how to read the competition by their actions and also from information you can gain from them in conversation, by observing certain physiological markers and by the phrasing and terminology they use.

On percentage, pre competition build up, stress and pressure towards peak begin to create a negative component within that training. This can then start to have a negative effect on results. One of the assets of NLP and hypnotherapy now is that it equips the athlete with resources to recreate the positive state they have experienced in the past and engage that to override any problems indluding more complex difficulties that can occur at that time and also during competition.

Many sports people have fundemental problems like a low self esteem or lack of self confidence plus many more varied issues which we deal with before implementing any work in training. Frequently this on its own enhances performance drastically and some clients in fact don't need any further assistance at all as their results have improved so much. Again, the use of hypnotherapy and NLP techniques in this instance, are used purely on a personal therapeutic basis rather than in relation to their sport, that comes later.

Motivation can also be a problem, especially with sports people who have competed for some time or have reached a very high level of competiton and can't see what challenges they have left or even a fear of failure (for those of us lucky enough to have never lost at anything!). Creating motivation is again based on state elicitation and detailed personalitly profiling which gives the keys to that persons motivation and what stimulates them. The implementation of a specifically designed strategy is then easily done so the "triggers" to create motivation are fired at the correct times instead of possibly different or not relevant ones.

Team motivation is treated in a significantly different way. Identification of the different personalilty types within the team must be assessed to understand the dynamics of the team and how each member of the team reacts to the others. This must be done at the beginning of the assessment to find any of the components within the team that may not be communicating as optimally as it could be. With a number of other steps an in-depth analysis can be made and a motivation technique can be devised plus any individual work with team members can be done. NLP is used on the individual personality and overall team functionality assessment and hypnotherapy can be used in group motivational techniques as well as advanced NLP linguistic techniques.

To work with a team takes a little initial time to assess all the personalities and then perform individual work to bring all the players up to the same communication speed. Some personality types find it hard to work with others which can be disruptive within a team and "break the chain" occasionally and with these players, some time is spent giving them skills to use to be able to understand the other team mates better and therefore perform within the team dynamic much more effectively. It's wonderful to have indivually gifted players, but if they do not operate as team or their performance is erratic, then their talent is wasted for them and the team as a whole.

A real key in sports where you need to be able to real your competitor or competitors. I can show you the inside information in how to read people by understanding and recognising key words and the way they verbally communicate. Physical signs that show you what they naturally best respond to which gives you an insight into what strategy they are most likely to use during competition. There are patterns everyone uses and all we have to do is to understand them and recognise them in others.