A funny thing happened to me in 1996. I was on a platform at
World championships in South Africa, fighting for a gold Medal
and about to lift a rather large amount of weight. When I pulled
that bar I miraculously blew 3 discs in back which was in fact
the beginning of a complete revelation.
Coming form a competitive background and having had a wise old
Yoda type coach I had learnt a number of techniques which vastly
enhanced my competitive capabilities and had sent me soaring
past anything I had ever expected to do. The strange thing is
that until I studied NLP, everyone thought I was loony and I was
considered "off the wall" in my sports rehabilitation practice.
Little did I realize that over those years I was learning the
mind body connection.
In NLP we learn about the connection but I would like to show
you to immense cavern of possibilities this actually presents us
with.
As you know, we have our trusty neuro transmitters who are the
runners and message carriers to the various parts of the body
which we wish to use on a conscious and unconscious level. For
the conscious, all the decisions we make to perform any tasks
and on an unconscious level, all the necessary functions our
body needs to continually perform for us to live and that we are
very rarely ever aware of.
So, if we could tap into our unconscious that controls the
automatic functions like heart rate and blood flow, breathing
etc we could in fact optimize our bodies and therefore create
better results on an everyday basis. The only real barriers that
we have are those enforced on us by our perception of our
reality and what we believe to be our limitations. Like a man
who would believe he could not long jump over 17 meters or
another man who believed that his back pain would never go away.
I remember sitting on the floor of the warm up room at my first
European Powerlifting Championships in Italy. Shaking and
feeling sick I was terrified. Mr. Yoda Coach came over and told
me stand up, close my eyes, breath deeply and see in my mind
through my own eyes the complete lift I was about to perform.
Except this time, play it from the start, as I breathe in feel
the strength streaming into all the tissues of my body and do
the lift so strong that I amaze myself and act it out if I have
to. This was the first time I tapped into my unconscious
controls and the first into visualization techniques, oh, and I
won my first European Championships.
I now have the pleasure of teaching others how to use their
unconscious to change physical processes like speeding up
metabolism, increasing heart rate to produce adrenaline and then
step into what is commonly called "the Zone" - that hallowed
place of ultimate focus and many other ways to assist us in our
normal or competitive lives.
Another technique I didn't realize I was doing was the pain
control. This is where I relate to the back injury I had in 1996
and then developed a rather rudimentary process for my sports
rehabilitation clients until I became an NLP practitioner and
hypnotherapist and completely understood what I was doing and
perfected it.
The pain that occurred with that back injury was so bad I
couldn't sleep for weeks. Eventually one night I used the
visualization technique my old coach had taught me but this time
I pictured my vertebrae, the popped discs in-between them and
the tissue damage plus all the inflammation around it. The
picture was crystal clear.
Then I saw the picture of how I wanted it to look, imagined the
inflammation draining away through the tissues, the split discs
hardening, all the tissues that had been damaged healing and the
pain fading. The image was so clear I can still see it to this
day. Then I fell asleep for the first time in weeks. In the
morning the pain was reduced and I actually more motion.
This technique I started to use with sports therapy clients and
I was getting results. Finally when I qualified as an NLP
practitioner I used what we call "sub modality shifts" to do
this which is a far more effective technique, another technique
called a fast phobia model to reduce trauma from the affected
area and also from the incident when it occurred and then
finally the visualization techniques within a hypnosis session
to get the body to physically change what it was doing and to
heal faster.
From these results then it was possible to implement new
strategies into producing better results for athletes by
optimizing the bodies performance and also altering the way the
athlete perceived the training and event they were about the
compete in.
Each step of the actual event is carefully broken down and the
automatic thought processes that occurs at each step is then
changed or optimized to produced a better result or a better
part of the chain to produce an optimum result.
For instance - a boxer who will always drop his left guard after
or during a certain shot or move we can then break down the
sequence and perform a strategy technique to change the bodies
reaction so he no longer does that. A powerlifter, who at
competition, always feels that the bar is very heavy when he
takes it out of the racks and is about to perform his lift we
can take that process apart up the point when he is about to
take the bar and change the though process so that he feels so
strong the bar feels light. The runner who perceives he has
chronic lactic acid buildup that always hits him at the 10 mile
mark we can use hypnosis to alter the mechanisms of the lactic
acid so they dissipate through the tissue and don't build up.
The bodybuilder who has been dieting for competition for so long
that his metabolism has slowed down and he can't lose any more
body fat. He can use hypnosis and sub modality shifts to get him
to unconsciously speed up his metabolism and burn the fat again
faster.
The amazing possibilities of our bodies capabilities are endless
and the further we progress in our understanding of the
connection between mind and body the better results we will get
and relieve so many problems we perceive we have.
world Champion and practitioner in hypnotherapy and NLP runs
clinics in Manchester for sports assocaited injury and
performance optimisation. Respected long time athlete and Sports
Injury Therapist and rehabilitation expert she is one the
authorities in sports related injuries and treatment.
Written by: Emma James
Hypnosis and NLP
Article Sitemap
These hypnosis and NLP articles are written by various authors and provided for your informational purposes only. Magicalhypnotist.com makes no claims and takes no responsibility for the validity of the content.
