NLP and Sport

NLP can help you think faster, clear and perform to your best.

Whether you are an Olympic Athlete, a Team Triathlete or just love to challenge yourself with a half marathon or two, it is fair to say that you will act and feel differently from average people. Elite athletes have superior mental strategies in place that help them learn faster and better and perform to their potential more often. NLP (neuro linguistic programming) can play a key role in how they achieve this.

Lets have a look at some of the areas where NLP can help.

• Change negative thinking patterns to positive
• Change negative beliefs that don’t help you
• Increase energy and focus
• Remove mental blocks
• Powerful visualisation techniques
• Drop unwanted habits
• Create instant rapport
• Improve communication
• Remove unwanted, negative emotions

·     Create positive strategies for success

So what’s my story?

5 years ago I decided I wanted to take my fitness and physical challenge up a level, so what better way of doing that than taking up triathlons, obvious really isn’t it? I have always loved swimming, having done it competitively as a teenager. Add to this my love of cycling and what could go wrong, well possibly my total lack of love and dislike of running.

How is this a problem you might ask, well it’s a 33.333% problem when you are doing a triathlon. Add to this that it is the last discipline following swimming and cycling and you can imagine just how much I might have been looking forward to it.

My pattern of behaviour was simple and highly effective, I would worry about having to run throughout my swim and cycle, both of which are my strengths and both of which were impacted by my thinking. I would continuously feed my negative belief that I couldn’t run, this in turn created a fierce mental block whenever I saw my trainers.

My self-talk was fabulous, I would tell myself I couldn’t run and guess what I wouldn’t, I would combine waddling and walking around the course and undo all the good work I had done with my swim and cycle. Having said that, both of those disciplines would be impacted anyway by my negative self-talk that started the moment I placed my bike on the rack.

Now I am by no means an elite athlete, however I knew I could do better and I wanted to improve not stagnate. So what did I do to change my fabulous negative behaviour? This is where NLP comes in.

Through a combination of visualisations, state management and creating new strategies, I found myself in a place where I was looking forward to the run – can you believe it. Not only did my relationship with running change and positively impact this part of the triathlon but so did my cycling and swimming as my thought processes and the story I was telling myself had changed.

There is plenty of science to support the power of the mind/ body connection and how the chemical shift in the brain can power through our body creating a totally different outcome. It is all learnt, we can totally change the way we think ‘if we want to’. What’s not to like about being able to have this level of control and ownership of how you think and therefore your outcomes?

I have taken a full 40 mins off my overall time for a Sprint Triathlon, and I am looking forward to 2021 where I can further improve on this. Whatever sport you enjoy and to whatever level NLP can truly help you develop your performance further.

For further information visit www.edgenlp.co.uk or email [email protected] and Sport