NLP Part 1: Think yourself towards a better performance

August 10, 2011

There's much talk about sports psychology and coaching as a vital ingredient for athletes. Success in sport obviously depends on many factors. Take a cyclist, for example. The bike and equipment need to be in perfect running order. A puncture at a critical point in competition could spell disaster. Physical training is also very important so that the cyclist can achieve the most that their own body is capable of. But what about the cyclist’s mindset during training or a race? Many people often overlook how to train an athlete’s thinking to improve performance.

It’s easy to miss what you are not looking for. Using the tools of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) can help. There are a few working definitions of NLP.

A short explanation is:

Neuro stands for the nervous system (the mind). It is through this system that we experience the world, as we process information through the five senses: visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory (smell) and gustatory (taste).

Linguistic represents language and other nonverbal communication systems through which our neural representations are coded, ordered, and assigned meaning. These include: pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes, smells and words, including self-talk.

Programming is the ability to discover and use the programmes that we run in our neurological systems to achieve our specific and desired outcomes. These programmes include our communication to ourselves and other people. In other words, NLP is HOW to use the language of the mind to consistently achieve our specific and desired outcomes.

Understanding how we do what we do, and realising that our language creates the world we live in, can be helpful towards developing optimum performance in sport. To give 100 per cent in competition, an athlete must be able to focus and get in the flow of the event. Elite level competitors are able to channel their thinking in conjunction with the physical efforts that bring the results they want.

It’s not only professional athletes that need to think in this way. In sport, business, or life, if you want to achieve results, there needs to be a strong sense of purpose that coordinates mind, language and behavior so that all of the body’s systems are working towards the same goals. NLP allows us to use the language of the mind to consistently achieve our desired outcomes, thinking our way towards better performances.

Sometimes we can unknowingly sabotage our performances with unhelpful thinking.

* Find out in the next blog to see how this happens and the ways to avoid it.