Sports psychology is becoming increasingly popular in the world of sport. This is for good reason, as athletes search for ways to improve and gain the edge on the competition, they realise that a very significant proportion of sporting success is down to having the right mindset. Psychological skills are not just for the elite, as learning to think positively and effectively will help performance at all levels. Reinforcing and enhancing these skills and a success mindset with hypnosis serves to strengthen the power and focus of your mind.
So, how can you use self-hypnosis and mental skills to enhance your performance as a cyclist, runner or triathlete? By committing time to train your mind, as you do to training your body, you learn skills that will improve your performance in both training and racing. The following skills will prove very effective in providing a starting point, from which you can move forward.
Here are the ideas we will cover in this article, along with exercises and practical advice on how to use the techniques to build your own mental skills and strength.
Attribution refers to how you explain your successes and failures says a lot about you and your approach to your sport. Reviewing this attribution and seeing it in a different way can help you deal with things in more positive and effective ways that help you progress more quickly.
It is best to attribute your successes to internal, stable things, such as having a strong personality, being solution-focused or having an aptitude for you your chosen sport, or aspects of it. Successful people tend to attribute their successes to things they have done or their positive traits.
Conversely, successful people often attribute failures to external factors that were beyond their control. However, perhaps the most effective way to perceive failures is as feedback, rather than failure. This is one of the basic assumptions of NLP, which is another powerful technique that can be applied to sports psychology. The assumption states that
‘all results and behaviours are achievements, whether they are desired outcomes for a given task/context or not. If what you are doing doesn’t work, do something else.’
Spend some time thinking about how your successes are attributed to internal factors such as your efforts in training, effective preparation of your physical and mental talents. Choose things for yourself that resonate with you and spend time to make sure that you believe in them. Write them down and alongside each one, write down the reasons they are true so that you can refer back to them along with the reasons when you have times of self-doubt.
Think about how you can use results you may not have wanted as feedback that you can learn from. Write a list of things you can do that will reduce the likelihood of these things happening again. This exercise is really valuable because often, it is possible to do small things that may only take a few minutes and enhance your results significantly. One example I often quote, although not a particularly small thing, is to get your bike setup for optimal performance; I seem lots of people with very poor bike setups in races and think how they could have spent just an hour or two to think about the setup and significantly improve their performances with no need to even get fitter.
Ego Orientation is based on comparisons with others, winning medals and results in associations of high perceived ability when winning but low perceptions of ability when losing. As you can imagine, the approach can result in rapid swings in perceptions of ability levels and self-worth and is therefore not the most healthy way to set goals or assess performances.
Task Orientated goals are focused on self-improvement, enjoyment and lead to optimal performance, more stability and consistency and higher motivation.
We clearly have a tendency to one or the other and a combination of motivations but the important thing is to set and focus on Task-Oriented goals.
Review your goals based on what you have learned about Ego and Task orientations, categorise each thing you want to get out of your sport or what you want to achieve and think about how you can make them Task-Oriented rather than Ego-Oriented.
Confidence is made up of many factors and can be state-like, meaning that you are confident at a given time in a given place, i.e. in a confident state, or trait-like, meaning that you have a tendency to being confident, i.e. it is one of your traits. Both your state of confidence and your trait towards confidence can vary for many reasons and learning to create a confident, success mindset is an invaluable skill for both sport and life.
Confidence can be quite fragile and loss of confidence can occur for many reasons, such as poor performances, injuries, slumps, under-preparation, poor or negative self-image.
Fortunately, there are things you can do to increase your confidence and your resilience to otherwise negative factors.
Spending some time working on your confidence will be well worth it. If you want some motivation, you can imagine each exercise as building up your ‘fuel tank’ of confidence, the more full your tank, the more successful you will be and the more minor knocks you will be able to take without damaging your confident persona. You are making confidence a personality trait.
Reframing is a common technique in NLP and hypnotherapy, whereby you take either a past or imagined future scenario and reframe it so that you ‘see it’ differently. You can use a combination of visualisation and a variation of the Winning Image to learn this technique and then use your imagination to apply it in different scenarios.
Once you have this Winning Image in place you need to practice it regularly to strengthen it as much as possible. Practice will make it more powerful but not practicing will allow it to weaken.
Self-talk is a term for the way individuals think and talk to themselves about a situation. Self-talk can be positive, for example, “I’m doing well here” or negative “I’m useless”. I have written a separate article on Self-Talk and how to use what is known as the Stop-Clap technique to help move from negative to positive self-talk. If you want to read more detail, you can follow this link.
Learning to control your self-talk is one of the most effective things you can do to give yourself a strong chance of success on race day.
The Stop-Clap technique is summarised in the infographic, which you can download by clicking on the image.
Anxiety is a negative emotional state, linked to high arousal that can lower your performance significantly and in some cases it can be so debilitating that it stops people even getting to the start of their event. As with confidence, you can have State Anxiety, in a specific situation, or Trait Anxiety that is part of an athlete’s personality although this level of trait anxiety may be changed with time.
Arousal is the degree to which a sportsperson is excited about, or motivated for a specific situation. Everyone has a different zone of arousal that suits their best performance but most performances require varying levels of arousal throughout the event.
Fortunately, there are things that you can do to manage your anxiety and arousal to help you perform to your potential.
We have used the term, pre-race routine for this exercise, however, it is a good idea to use all or parts of your pre-race routine as part of your training and particularly before your main harder sessions. The more you practice it the more it becomes a habit and process that you go through to create your perfect state of mind and body for success.
Use some or all of the techniques described above to build a pre-race routine that includes both your physical warm-up as well as your mental preparation. Start your routine from either the evening of before your event or from when you get out of bed on race day and then use this as the basis for your events from now on, improving it and learning as you get successes and feedback.
The ability to concentrate on the task in hand is essential for success in sports. This may be to focus on performing a particular task or manoeuvre or maintaining concentration to work at your optimal level of effort for a sustained period fo time.
A lack of focus can be caused by internal factors such as negative self-talk, or external factors such as crowds, spectators or other competitors. Your focus can be linked to your level of arousal, decreasing as arousal drifts over the optimal level.
There are 4 types of focus:
It is important to understand different types of focus and how to recognise when your focus is incorrect. Learning different focal styles and practising switching between them by visualising different scenarios will improve your skill levels significantly, with consequent improvements in performance.
For example, if you imagine approaching a feed station you need to focus on the broad-external to assess the environment and how the overall feeding system is working, switch to narrow internal-combined with broad-external to decide whether you need a drink and whether slowing down or stopping will negatively impact your position in the event and then switch to narrow-external as you prepare and collect your drink and/or food from the feed station, consume some and maybe save the rest for later.
Motivation can be intrinsic, through internal sources such as participation in your sport for pleasure, self development, etc. or extrinsic such as participating to win trophies, please others, etc.
You may notice a similarity here between our earlier discussions of attribution and goal orientation. It is common to see similarities, you can learn a lot from looking at how your behaviour and thinking in one area is similar in other areas and if you find a technique that works for one thing you can often adapt it very effectively to work elsewhere.
Having read this far, it won’t surprise you to find that intrinsic sources of motivation are more stable, healthy and often more effective than external motivators.
Competition is when it all comes together and you realise your goals. Competition is also the most exciting but potentially the most stressful time and when you can draw on all the psychological skills you have learned to give you the best chance of a successful outcome.
Using all the techniques you have learned, you can create a routine for the day of your event that contains all the elements of preparing your kit, recovery and relaxation before the event, getting to the venue, meals and nutrition, warm-up and getting to the start line ready to perform. Visualise the event and draw on all your past experience to think through things that might happen and how you might deal with them so that you are ready for as many eventualities as you can be.
Set some goals that you know are achievable but challenging. It is often good to have more than one goal, one which is acceptable and one dream goal and think about how you will pace yourself if it is a long event.
A friend of mine often uses the quote: “Fail to prepare, prepare to fail”, which whilst not always true is certainly something to bear in mind so that you make sure you do everything possible to ensure you perform to your potential.
Hypnosis is a powerful tool to enhance the effects of almost any technique in sports psychology and combining hypnotic techniques with those of NLP and sports psychology can be remarkably effective.
You may be asking why hypnosis is helpful to sports psychology, particularly if you associate hypnosis with stage acts where people are made to do unusual things.
According to the General Hypnotherapy Register: at our current level of knowledge, the phenomenon of hypnosis cannot be conclusively defined but perhaps a reasonable interim definition might be that: Hypnosis is a state of mind, enhanced by (although not exclusively) mental and physical relaxation, in which our subconscious is able to communicate with our conscious mind. It may be better to define ‘hypnosis’ by what it does rather than what it is and in this regard it is widely accepted as an excellent method by which we may access our inner potential. The state of mind referred to may be brought about either by oneself, unaided (self-hypnosis) or with the help of another person.
So, as you can see, hypnosis can be a powerful tool to help you reach your goals.
You can learn self-hypnosis quite quickly and with practice you can use it to enhance any of the techniques described as well as develop your own suggestions to your subconscious. People are occasionally concerned about hypnosis but it is perfectly safe and contrary to what you may be led to believe, you cannot be made to do something against your will. Hypnosis is a way of accessing your subconscious and consequently of embedding or changing ideas and feelings that can then modify how you feel in your day to day life. If you want to learn more about hypnosis and hypnotherapy you can do so via the General Hypnotherapy Register website.
It is useful to break hypnosis, or self-hypnosis, into several stages:
Working with sports people I have found that moving away from more conventional inductions and deepeners towards ideas that are more related to a given sport or activity can be very effective.
For example, runners work very well with running themes and a good example of how I helped someone relax, build confidence and move forward from an injury to eventually performing way above her expectations was as follows.
It can be a good idea to make a recording that guides you through these stages, so that you can listen to it and not need to worry about remembering things. If you have trouble sleeping you can use it before bedtime and drift off to sleep afterwards. If you want to get a little more sophisticated, adding some background music can help as well.
I hope you enjoyed this article and find the ideas useful. Hopefully it all makes sense but if you have any questions, please get in touch and we will do our best to explain and help out.
It takes time and practice to train your mind, so work at it and give it time. It is just like physical training in that you get better bit by bit as you learn and accustom to new, more helpful thoughts and feelings. Have fun and good luck!
Can I use sports psychology techniques to help recover from injury? Psychology techniques can be very effective, if not invaluable in dealing with and recovering from sports injuries. Injuries often result in loss of confidence and motivation, anxiety, anger, depression, frustration and further loss of confidence due to post-injury lower performance levels. Spending some time to refocus, set appropriate goals for recovery and reassess attributions, motivations and values can provide a logical and incremental path to recovery that can be combined with relaxation techniques to manage anxiety and stress. These can be further combined with sports, specific visualisations that stimulate motor skills and minimise the damage of time away from the sport.
What other ways could I use sports psychology or sports hypnosis? Modelling is a great way to use visualisation and hypnotic techniques that I have used to great effect with several athletes. Modelling is the practice of taking on features of others, such as sporting idols to model their thoughts, actions, emotions and/or behaviours. In particular, I have used this with athletes coming back from injury, athletes that have been lacking confidence or finding certain activities stressful and debilitating. By modelling, these athletes gained confidence, refocused and immediately improved their performances.