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Achieving Peak Performance in Sports and in Life

By David Quigley

 

What do Tiger Woods, Sylvester Stallone, and hundreds of successful Olympic athletes, performing artists, salesmen, and business executives have in common?  All have used hypnosis and guided imagery to vastly increase their performance in their chosen field. In this article, I will describe the techniques used by hypnotherapists in assisting their clients in achieving peak performance in sports.  I will also show how to extend these amazing results into every field of human accomplishment, including academic and creative achievement, and success in sales, business, politics, and government.

The uses of guided imagery in sports performance began in the communist countries of Eastern Europe in the 1960s.  Many of us remember how the eastern Europeans dominated the Olympics for years in a vast array of Olympic competitions.  Rumors abounded of men disguised as women and uses of steroid drugs. There were even claims that these successes were the inevitable result of the superior communist system.  Then slowly the carefully concealed truth finally emerged:   the communists had started using guided imagery (hypnotic imagery!) as a critical element of their training for Olympic athletes.  Only when western trainers learned these secrets could they begin to match, and later exceed, the accomplishments of their eastern competitors.

 

To understand the importance of hypnosis to peak performance it is critical to understand how it works.  There is nothing mysterious about the state of hypnosis. We enter it all the time when daydreaming, listening to beautiful music, or relaxing on an easy chair half asleep. While people often think of hypnosis as unconsciousness, in fact most hypnotic states do not produce unconsciousness. Instead they help you to turn your consciousness inward, eliminating distractions and improving focus and concentration. All practitioners of guided imagery and meditation base their work on the use of hypnotic states, whether they recognize it or not. Hypnosis is also used to access the enormous powers of the subconscious mind. In this highly suggestible state, we can access old subconscious programming and quickly change it, to easily create new behaviors. It is for this reason that hypnosis has been used successfully to change eating habits, control pain and eliminate disease, and eliminate phobias and anxiety, as well as for achieving peak performance.

In this relaxed but fully conscious state we can help our clients to achieve all of the following objectives in the arena of peak performance:

We help them to visualize and experience in every muscle of their bodies achieving their goal through a mental rehearsal of every step of their performance. This teaches the performer to easily access “the zone”, that state which sportsmen, salesmen, and others define as effortlessly moving in total alignment with the ideal level of performance. It is important that a skilled hypnotherapist who has a deep understanding of the field of creativity you need to access perform these mental rehearsals, combining visual, auditory and kinesthetic (feeling the body’s feelings) imagery. For a pianist seeking peak performance at a concert, for example, this experiential image would include feeling the position of ones wrists, back, and feet for every movement of the concerto, even hearing the quiet rustling of the audience with the sounds of each note. For the golfer, every position of feet, legs, hips, wrists, and back must be carefully described.  Olympic athletes find that combining 50% guided imagery with 50% physical training is the best combination to achieve Olympic gold.

We assist clients in resolving subconscious emotional blocks and negative core beliefs which might sabotage their efforts to achieve success. These blocks are often buried in our subconscious minds by negative childhood experiences.  Many of my clients don’t know why they seem to keep sabotaging their career and personal successes. When we explore these things in hypnosis we may find out that a father’s careless words, “you’ll never be any good”, oft repeated in a drunken rage, have left the client unable to achieve success.  These negative programs can emerge from even the most well meaning parents, or from traumas in the schoolyard or classroom.  Sure, many successful individuals have risen to success from tragic family lives.  But I wonder how much more successful they could have been if they had experienced a truly loving childhood…or the hypnotherapy processes that create a happy childhood in the clients inner world, a process familiar to all alchemical hypnotherapists.  (See our web library at www.alchemyinstitute.com/articles.htm  for more details.)  Tiger Woods ascribes much of his success in golf and in life to a loving father who always believed in him and supported his career 100%.  Celine Dion, the world’s most successful recording artist, attributed her success to her loving parents.   Now, with Alchemical Hypnotherapy, every artist, sportsman, and career athlete can experience the loving parents that help assure success in their chosen field.

             

Hypnotherapists also assist their clients in discovering internal resources in the subconscious mind that can help clients every day to learn how to achieve success. When Hillary Clinton spoke with the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt with her therapist, this scandalized the religious right.  But in my opinion she was simply accessing the resources that Ms. Roosevelt possessed as one of America’s premier first ladies (and one who also endured the challenges of a philandering husband!).  Musicians can be trained to tune in to the energy and skill of a favorite composer as they learn to play his works. One of my clients “becomes” Babe Ruth every time he stands at the plate with bat in hand. Richard Bandler, the famous founder of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, was known to sit in a wheelchair so he could summon into his body the therapeutic skills of Milton Erickson, the wheelchair bound psychiatrist who is often described as the world’s most articulate hypnotherapist.   While the spiritualists of the “New Age” might describe this as “channeling the deceased”, such a profound leap of faith is not necessary for this technique to be successful.  We could just as well view this channeling as the skillful use of hypnotic techniques to access the tremendous creative power of the subconscious mind to access the morphogenetic field, similar to the gravitational field,  that surrounds this individual.  The best part of this method is that this zone of creative success can be turned on automatically every time you pick up a baseball or sit at the piano through the guidance of a skilled hypnotherapist!  This capacity to instantly access the Zone of peak performance takes time, sometimes multiple sessions to learn, and as Tiger teaches us, it is not always available even to the greatest champions, but in time I believe everyone can learn to access the power of these resources in their chosen field.

We can help clients overcome the tendency to fall into self criticism and despair when things aren’t going the way we wish.  Every sportsman, salesman, and creative artist knows what happens when we become discouraged by repeated failures. When we start losing, we often just keep on screwing up until we quit, slinking away in embarrassed silence.  How many times I would start a piano recital, make a couple of small mistakes, then my fingers turn into clumsy nincompoops for the rest of the recital!  In golf, every professional dreads the “bogey train”, in which a few bad holes can lead to a long string of missed putts, sliced drives, and sand traps, a sequence also familiar to golf fans around the world.  Tiger Woods is famous however for his capacity to recover quickly from such a sequence, often going on to capture the title against all odds. Through hypnotic suggestion, and especially the use of inner resources, we can all achieve what a few top athletes like Tiger seem to do so effortlessly…we recover.

We can help augment the clients will, and their performance, by creating or strengthening the meaning of the client’s quest for achievement.  We have all experienced at one time or another that people who are motivated by an intense philosophical, political, or religious conviction will easily outperform someone whose motivations are purely monetary or ego-based. The German soldiers who tried to defend Berlin at the end of World War Two from the Russian armies were mostly sick old men or inexperienced young boys, but they fought with legendary ferocity against overwhelming odds.  They killed over a million seasoned Russian soldiers in the last weeks of the war, because they were deeply convinced, however foolishly, that they fought for a holy cause.  We fight harder for teammates we love than for our own glory.  This has been demonstrated by psychological experiments.  Likewise we are more strongly motivated if our quest for peak performance is about helping our families, our culture, our country, our planet.  A skilled hypnotherapist can help you to find the kind of meaning in your challenge that can help propel you to victory.  It is my belief that part of Tiger’s success in golf can be attributed to his intense desire to help free the entire game of the residual racism and classism  that has dominated a largely elitist white man’s sport for many years.  This purpose, which he has often alluded to in his interviews, provides a passionate fire to his performance that makes his career an inspiration to million of minorities as well.  Olympic athletes are likewise inspired not merely by a personal desire to be the best, but by the longing to win for their country.  When the Iraqi soccer team won a major tournament right after the American invasion, I am convinced their deep desire to save some shred of their county’s sovereign dignity may have spurred them to nearly superhuman achievement.  Most athletes are at least vaguely aware of the transpersonal meaning of their activity. But it is up to the skilled hypnotherapist to explore this meaning and reinforce it to build our performance to match these brave heroes.              

The great philosopher Victor Frankl, who survived the death camps in Germany, said that it was the embracing of a higher purpose than mere survival that helped him and many others to survive the camps.  He went on to propose that it is mans search for meaning which alone can make him fully alive.  When we determine that meaning, embrace that meaning, and add it to the power of the “zone” we have spoken of earlier we can reach extraordinary new heights in any thing we set our minds, and hearts, to achieve.

So how do you choose a hypnotherapist to assist you in achieving peak performance?  For sports performance I recommend that you find a skilled and certified hypnosis practitioner who shares your passion for the sport you are competing in.  No, they don’t have to be a champion, or even a professional.  Indeed, we hope they are professionals at hypnosis.  But your guided imagery facilitator should know and love your creative activity.  If you are working on sales performance, find a hypnotist who has experience in that field.  If they have previous experience with clients in this area, that is also a plus.  Make sure their experience goes beyond guided imagery, and that they are experienced in all of the strategies outlined above.  Also make sure that there is a warm personal rapport between you and your practitioner.  This personal chemistry is hard to quantify or even define, but it is as important to your success as any other factor.  To find a practitioner in your area with these qualities, you can call our office at 800-950-4984.

This article is but the first in a long sequence of articles on peak performance soon to be published on this website.  Look for an article from a golf professional and hypnotherapist, James fish, coming soon, on “The Alchemy of Golf”, and others on sales achievement and eliminating self sabotage.  To get copies of these articles as soon as they are published, join our email newsletter list at www.alchemyinstitute.com .  We are also encouraging hypnotherapists who specialize in peak performance to submit articles on this subject to us at Quigley@alchemyinstitute.com.   Let our extensive readership know about the successes you and they can achieve together!  Please include your contact info and a brief bio so people can find you.             

             

 

 

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