Improving your athletic performance

As you participate in a sport, you may work very hard at training your body. Your push it, put it through its paces and work for hours to polish the finer points of your game or manoeuvre. However, all this hard work may not train your mind to be athletic. One sports psychologist for a US Olympic team says that 80 to 90 per cent of an Olympic athletes' performance is in the mind. This involves using your imagination, your thought processes, and your attitudes to provide incentive, support, reinforcement, and refinement of your physical skills. It involves visualisation.

Specifically, you can use visualisation to do the following:

Increase your agility
Improve your coordination
Improve your concentration
Refine your technique
Heighten your awareness of body position
Eliminate inhibiting thoughts in regards to your performance
Increase your capacity for enjoying the sport

Sports psychologists counsel athletes to mentally rehearse the play, making it correct in all details so that it will be a successful execution of the persons' best efforts.

Now let's look at the road blocks that make it more difficult or impossible to achieve your goal. Almost always, the obstacles are conditions that cause anxiety.

Some of the most common are:

Fear of failing
Fear of being humiliated
Fear of competition
Feelings of intimidation

Regardless of the condition or circumstance that restricts you from performing at your peak, you can work to eliminate the obstacles through hypnotic induction. Through hypnotic suggestion you can overcome the obstacles in your mind that are preventing you from reaching your goals.