Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode Twenty-Seven – How to Use Hypnosis in Sport - Giving Athletes the Edge
Hello and welcome back to Brain In The Game. Brain In The Game is a podcast specifically designed for athletes, coaches and parents who are out there looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. Brain In The Game is a ticking watch of suggestibility, and I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
As you listen to my voice, you become more and more relaxed. Don't worry, I'm not going to hypnotise you, but we are going to talk about the use of hypnotising in sport. I have to start by telling you a quick story – I use hypnosis on many levels within most of my coaching. I was coaching a team quote recently, and I was coaching each individual player. I came out of one of my sessions to a group of players talking amongst themselves.
I heard one say “Have you been hypnotized yet?” The other said “No..” “Well I have, that means I'm further along than you are!” The other one says “Woah woah, I got hypnotized weeks ago!” It was quite funny dynamic to watch these athletes rating how far they are along in the process by whether I had done the hypnosis process with them at any stage.
What they didn't understand was that I always use hypnosis on many different levels. It's not only the 'traditional' direct suggestion hypnosis that I use. What does hypnosis do and why would we use it working with athletes? The whole concept of hypnosis is to bypass our natural filtration system. When someone is talking to us, what our frontal cortex is doing is putting everything through a filter: things we know to be true, things we've experienced, things we've been told. All these different filters take out what we thing is rubbish, or help us justify something.
You know when you go to bed at night and you start to fall asleep and have really vivid dreams, things that go on are bizarre – like pink elephants, flying, or climbing mount Everest. This happens because that same part of the brain falls asleep first. Our imagination can take over. There's no constraints, no boundaries to how we can think. That process telling us “That's not logical” is asleep. This enables us as practitioners to put that into a state of sleep so we can leapfrog it and start embedding direct information we want without it being ripped apart by our own internal filters.
We don't want information to be filtered, we just want that raw information to be embedded so they can call upon it. One understanding of how our brain works under duress is that we revert back to our primal behavior. Things you can just react with that you don't have to think about. If we have to think about doing something, we tend not to do it in stressful situations. By having an ideal system or blueprint embedded into our brain that we call upon, enables us as coaches and athletes to have a more reliable source of blueprint to call on when we need it.
Why would we use it specifically? We can help athletes who are having issues with doubt. By our brain utilizing our natural filtration system, we can create self-doubt and put hurdles in our way that don't necessarily need to be there. There's also overcoming over-thinking. There's a lot of realms in sport and life where people over-analyze or over-think things, and make them far more difficult than they need to be. They add an increased amount of emotion to it, and that emotion then clouds our ability to have clarity of thought.
Then there's the traditional process of overcoming nerves. Our fight or flight process. When we're put into a stressful situation, maybe competing at a major event and our nerves are overtaking our ability to think and perform, we need to to bypass that filtration system of “Oh lordy, I'm standing in front of tens of thousands of people, they're all watching me perform here” straight into “okay, I'm here to perform.”
Hypnosis is a valuable tool we utilize – very carefully – to overcome some of those external filtration issues that are holding them back or causing them confidence issues. Not too long ago I did a TV special with Sports Tonight here in Australia where I worked with an elite Rugby Union player on his fears and his nerves. He would vomit before every single match, and it got to where he was dreading going out and playing because he knew he would get so incredibly nervous that he would vomit.
We had a TV crew follow us, and it highlighted the ease in which we could relax this player, bypass that filtration process, and put a more desirable performance strategy directly into his subconscious. It works with all sports. I worked in the motorsports industry, and we used hypnosis for a driver to work on his focus to embed and rely on under speed. These F1 drivers are at incredible speeds and have to rely heavily on embedded patterns. We put them in a more comfortable and confident position to rely on their natural processes.
I recently worked with a gymnast who had a fear of going backwards, and we enabled her to not necessarily look at what was going on beyond her, but to trust her internal belief system, and she was able to overcome her fears and recently won second in the state championships.
I also worked with one of the Australian bobsled teams, and we were building systems in his brain. When he pushed the sled off the starting block, he had a very precise system of accountable moves he needed to follow to get the most dynamic start and push for the sled – again, we used hypnosis for that.
How do we use it? There are a couple of ways that are the more prevalent ways of using hypnosis and what we'd tend to use as a mind coach. The one I use the most frequently and that I had to explain to these athletes that they'd all been exposed to was conversational hypnosis. The whole concept behind conversation hypnosis is it's a subtle way to lead people in a certain direction, an influence tool, enabling us to not necessarily say “You should be doing this” and have that tussle of “I don't think I should be...”, but bypass that by suggesting a direction to move in and doing so covertly.
We do that with a specific use of targeted language patterns. The master of this and the form of it was Ericssonian hypnosis, and he used metaphors and stories and created through rapport the ability for people to feel comfortable and associated to somebody and trust them. He enabled people to think about things they could process without necessarily filtering them first. Ericsson was an exceptionally talented story teller who used language patterns to let people trust their own internal patterns.
As a coach, I utilize the same philosophy. When I'm working with an athlete, I work on building that sense of rapport. I make sure they understand my approach and trust it. So when I start to describe things, it's in a similar way to what they're going through and they can create an association to what I've done. Just by the suggestibility of “This is what I did”, we can create that option in their brain. The athlete can turn around and say “That's a great idea, I can look into that”, and we create that association to that idea, but also the ownership of it being their idea.
This very subtle form of hypnosis – hypnotic language – enables us to lead and suggest without conflict. One of the modules within my training program for coaches is teaching them this skill: how to create rapport with an athlete. If you don't have rapport, at no stage will they trust you or believe you, or allow that suggestion to be something they'd consider. Rapport is vital if you're trying to suggest an athlete to think in a new way. In that course, we teach coaches how to create that rapport and commonality; and then, recognize where that athlete is, where they want to be, and how to create the path from A to B. Then, how to deliver that: the specific language patterns that will work. Why one story or metaphor will work for one athlete and won't work for the other. The information needs to be tailored to an athlete in a subtle way.
As a coach, it's vital you understand how to lead your athletes. I frequently see coaches leading athletes by saying “Do as you're told and go over there.” You do get the compliant athletes doing that because they've been trained that way, but you also get the athletes who question those directives and start to filter what the coach is telling them. The coach loses efficiency and effectiveness with their athletes. This more subtle form of influencing is a vital skill that I believe every coach should be utilizing within every one of their sessions.
The other more traditional form of hypnosis is direct suggestion – the ticking clock, close your eyes, go into a deep sleep type of hypnosis. The gymnast I worked with last week, her competition was the next day and I didn't have the time to build the more subtle Ericssonian suggestibility process. I had to go for the direct suggestion. I had the athlete sitting in front of me, I sat directly looking at them, and the athlete's parents were behind them. When I went through the process and being that I'd worked with the athlete before and built a good rapport through good results in the past, it was easy for me to snap my finger and say “Sleep.” and have them do so.
This shut down the filtration process in the front of the brain and enabled me to deliver a very crafted pattern of behavior we wanted that athlete to replicate the next day at competition. The parents sitting behind were amazed how quickly the athlete went under. This is because I had done the groundwork and worked up the rapport, understanding key language that had worked with him. Key triggers that I'd built in the past, that when I needed to call upon them, were there.
Hypnosis is a skill that looks very easy or quick, but the groundwork is vital. It's important that a trained hypnotist can utilize very key, embedded triggers when they need them. That allowed me to do, with this athlete, bring them back around with a new sense of confidence and trust. Then to apply that skill, in getting up and doing the routine and it being the first time in weeks they'd done it without issues. Then the next day they went in front of an audience and performed the routine without conflict or filtration and got a phenomenal score. That would've never happened if I hadn't gone for the direct suggestion hypnosis. Embedding the messages would've taken much longer, to have the athlete go “Oh! That's an option – I could do that... that's my idea going forward.”
We need to understand these different uses of styles of hypnosis. There are other styles and strategies we use, but those are the two core ones we use, and we can see they're very important in trying to influence your athletes. I know there are a lot of people that might be shuddering saying “You don't... influence them... do you?” Well, you do. You have coaching philosophies and messages you want to get across to them, and you do that by being very smart with the language you use. If you want your message to be embedded, and want your skill set to be given to the athlete in its most raw format, not being adjusted, then you need to make sure the way you deliver the message is in a conducive way. Building the rapport and delivering the message in a subtle, almost parallel world, allows the athlete to understand it, build on it, and adopt it. That Ericssonian approach is one of the cornerstones of what I do.
In your sport, where do you think you could use hypnosis? Be it as a coach or athlete? What are some things you are over-thinking or have self-doubt or fear with? Some things you say “I do this perfectly in training, but come competition, I don't perform the same.” Is this something we could bypass with hypnosis? A trigger that happens during competition that's different when you train?
Hypnosis in sport is a skill set that's growing in popularity. It's one of the things I get called in to working with people for who say “Can you just fix this?” and we'll use the direct suggestion method; or “I'm having confidence issues and I need a few weeks to work on this”, then great, we'll work on building rapport and work on you owning the outcomes and suggestions.
As you can see, the language we use is more than just the words we use, but how we use them. The way we use them as a craft. Our language is more than just words. Until our next episode, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name's Dave Diggle, and I'm the mind coach.
Copyright 2012-2022 Dave Diggle
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