Giving yourself the psychological edge
In an recent article about NLP in sport, I mentioned the amazing power of visualisation. To recap shortly the main principle – your body will follow the behaviours just run through consciously .
To give you an example of this you can experiment with right now , you first need to find a pendulum (not a huge one like in a grandfather clock! ). If you can’t find a pendulum, them get hold of a plumbline and put a yarn through it. This is an amazing exercise I use frequently when I am running my NLP training in North London and it really can shock people!
Now, hold the chain or thread mildly between your thumb and index finger, relax your arm and imagine creating a circle with your hand holding the pendulum or plumbline . Don’t move your hand – just imagine drawing the circle in your mind.
Now for most people , what you will find is that as you mentally draw the circle in your mind, the pendulum starts to move in a circle also. In case you are thinking it is due to pulse movement in your arms, now imagine drawing the circle the other direction and be shocked when the pendulum starts going in the other direction !
Let me stress , it is not some spirit moving the pendulum! Through mentally drawing the circle in your mind, you are sending communication through your central nervous system to your muscles in your arm you are imagining using to draw the circle. You cannot see your arm moving, however the micro-muscle movements (a great bit of jargon that basically means tiny movements in the muscle!) are increased by means of the pendulum and you thus see the pendulum moving in a circle .
The same thing would happen if you imagine doing any behavior. Eg, if you imagine doing a sprint along a track perfectly and visualise what you would hear, see and feel whilst you do it, you will actually be activating the neural networks and muscles involved in the performance .
Perhaps you are imagining ‘hey does that mean I don’t need to go to the gym to train any more?!’, I’m afraid its not going to develop muscle or make you shed pounds only by your mental imagery, however it will make doing the activity easier the next time you do it – because you are now going to train your neurology in the movement .
I often train sports people using NLP for success and also hypnosis to help raise performance and take sports people through amazing psychological methods to help them improve their performance and they discover great results.
The key is really that you run a movie of outstanding results . If you run through in your mind incorrect performance , then you’ll just be mastering the neural pathways for and rubbish performance. There is an old legend – ‘practice makes perfect’. It should really be written – perfect practice makes perfect!
So don’t just do physical practice, make sure you often make yourself do mental practice. Run through perfect performance and keep doing it until you get it just right now ! It doesn’t matter whether it is in sport, public speaking or even improving your social techniques where in life you do it , this is going to help you.
get the best , learn some NLP or hypnotherapy.
