Sometimes you just want to perform something, but if your performance is stuck at a certain level it can be very frustrating. So what can you do to improve your performance? Improving your performance can mean anything. For example, do you want to improve your physical performance while cycling or CrossFit? Or do you want to work smarter and improve your mental performance?
In this blog, I address both of these issues and how hypnosis can play a role in them.
Improve performance in sports
In spring, you often see them suddenly reappearing everywhere, the cyclists. Some people think they are terrible and others understand the sense of freedom that cycling gives. In the Strava app, you can even enter entire competitions with fellow cyclists.
So what can you do to win that battle after all?
Improving your cycling performance is something cyclists actually always want. In fact, many cyclists used to use drugs like EPO for it and recently even neurodoping has been investigated[1], but what is that really and is it as illegal as using EPO to improve cycling? Researchers have already indicated that neurodoping is harmless to the fairness of the sport and this research has also addressed hypnosis as a neurodoping tool.
For example, research in other sports, such as basketball, shows that hypnosis can do much to improve physical athletic performance. The same is true for soccer, athletics and golf.
In addition, in 1993 there was a Danish cyclist named Bjarne Riis who did very well at the Tour de France. According to him, this was because of his healer who combined accupuncture with the hypnotic suggestion of "three extra kilometers." He received accupuncture in the knees and the healer indicated that this would give him three extra kilometers or miles to cycle. So just a little more energy. The needles combined with what was said about the effect can be seen as a kind of hypnotic suggestion that improved the Dane's cycling performance (source 1).
Suggestions can also affect CrossFit performance. For example, changing the idea of how much time is available to do certain exercises improves performance and a greater sense of ability among athletes doing CrossFit[2].
Since hypnosis can help in all kinds of sports, it could make a lot of difference in CrossFit as well.
Hypnosis can also help soccer players improve their sense of ability, mood while playing soccer and improve soccer performance. Hypnosis is then used to strengthen the ego. So you can then get suggestions about how good you are as a soccer player[3].
In addition, you can also practice by visualizing how to perform a particular sport. For example, you often see Dutch speed skaters sitting on a bench in deep concentration before their competition. Sometimes their shoulders move as if they are already skating in their minds. They are then actually mentally practicing how they are going to put down that top performance[4].
If you find it difficult to visualize something in a successful way, a hypnotherapist can help you learn to do so so that you can then apply self-hypnosis for this type of exercise.
Improve Cognitive Performance
Cognitive performance is your thinking performance, such as performance in work that requires a lot of thinking or tests. So for students, engineers and executives, improving cognitive performance can sometimes be helpful.
For example, a test can cause a lot of stress and anxiety, as can having to pass an important assignment for your job. That stress and anxiety, in turn, can have a detrimental effect on your cognitive performance, so it may then be helpful to do something about it.
In a study of medical professionals who had to pass certain tests, they were given two 50-minute hypnotherapy sessions to ensure that they would suffer less anxiety and stress. Until now, the medical professionals had not passed those tests, but after the hypnotherapy, ten of the eleven professionals still passed the test. This just by being mentally different in the test and thus not suffering from forgetfulness[5].
Another problem where physical and mental performance can be improved is in making music. This is often quite a strenuous mental task anyway, and in audiences, anxiety, for example stage fright, can cause you to forget just where to put your fingers, what the timing of the piece of music is or what the lyrics of the piece of music are. In that case, too, hypnosis can help you overcome that fear to still give a great musical performance.
A study in which musicians received hypnotherapy or EMDR found that both worked well to overcome anxiety and improve musical performance. The subjects were about 18 to 26 years old (three over 30).
In both cases, life story played a role in making therapy successful. This story gives people a sense of control and it gives the therapist insight into why certain situations produce certain fears and cognitive problems.
Negative thoughts were made less important with hypnosis. It also used positive visualizations, changing awkward behavior patterns and bringing about positive change. All in order to achieve certain goals you set for yourself.
With EMDR, on the contrary, the main focus was to process the fear differently. You give the fear a kind of number. For example, a ten for severe anxiety, and as the treatment gets better and better the feeling of the anxiety should go away, until you can give the anxiety the number one, no anxiety. Then a positive cognition thought is installed.
EMDR is also sometimes combined with hypnosis, but it was not in this study[6].
Life story can also be used in multiple ways with hypnosis. For example, anxiety and stress are often caused by beliefs. These can be beliefs about what happens when you lose or conversely when you do well. By using your life, you can determine moments when these types of limiting beliefs occurred. With hypnosis, you can then go into regression to find such a moment. Then with hypnosis you can reinterpret this moment, giving the memory a different feel. You now better understand what happened then, because often these are moments from your early childhood.
This alone can help you release a lot of anxiety and stress.
Performance improvement plan
So hypnosis alone can do much to improve performance by reducing stress and anxiety and increasing motivation.
Sometimes, however, you need more than emotional stability and lots of motivation. Running a marathon, for example, is not something you can do on motivation alone. It also requires good preparation. Especially if you want to improve your time compared to a previous marathon.
There are techniques that can help you think out a performance improvement plan. Thus, with progression, you can envision your ideal future. This could be that record time from the marathon, for example, or it could be successfully completing a project at work.
It just depends on what performance you want to improve.
A hypnotherapist helps you set this vision of the future as ideal and complete as possible. Your feelings, your emotions, what you have, what you see and so on.
Next, step back in time from that moment. What did you do before that moment? And then another step back and another. Until the moment you are in the hypnotist's chair. This gives you a plan by which you can improve your performance.
So hypnosis can do a lot for you in terms of physical and mental performance. For mental performance, it is particularly important to eliminate sources of stress and anxiety, and regression can be used for this purpose.
For physical performance, the ego in particular is strengthened and something is done to improve motivation.
In both cases, visualizations can play an important role. On the one hand, to have an image of the goal you want to achieve, which can inspire you to a certain roadmap. On the other hand, this can trigger your muscle memory, making it easier to make certain movements.
Want to learn more about how hypnosis works? Then come to the free online master class.
Or sign up directly for one of the seminars or trainings if you want to learn techniques to make people feel better immediately.
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