NLP in Sports
-Jerry Barber, 1961
Claybrook NLP has had the honour of working with several Footbal professionals from players to Sports Coaches. They have used NLP to enhance their own performance, and to share their knowledge with the team. Coaching others individually and as a team, means players often recieve "Most Liked Team Player" etc. at the end of the season from their fellow team players!
One such player is Richard Lee, who has since written a book "Graduation: Life Lessons of A Footballer". He shares his experience of how his anxiety, nerves and failures almost broke him, but getting his mind in the right place has turned around his career.
To see BBC Late Kick Off interview with him click here 
A major element of NLP is modelling - the process of precise observation of Excellent Behaviour, installing those behaviours in oneself and reproducing that Excellent Behaviour. The most important observations are a persons:
- physiology,
- beliefs & values,
- strategies.
And we all know sports is about strategies. NLP provides the techniques to work on all these areas and easily ilicit someone's strategy for excellent play. But as the NLP approach shows, strategies on their own are not enough. It has to be supported with physiology, beliefs and values. These provide the foundations that support the strategies.
What's even better is that if a player gets blocks and hits a barrier or certain limit, NLP quickly erradicates any negative thinking or misdirected negative emotion such as fear, that can ruin a game. We have the ability to really listen to the players problem and pinpoint precisely the potential problem.
Many Sports Psychologists understand the important of NLP and having embraced this amazing technology, now produce even better results than before. Whether working with an individual or teams, NLP transforms results for the client and the Coach.
It's amazing how little strategies can make or break players and teams. How often do you seen people with idiosyncratic behaviours that work for one person, but not another? Wouldn't it be great to understand the difference between what IS the strategy and what's idiosyncratic? That way, you can observe someone's excellent strategy and cleanly deliver it to others. The quickest way to achieve excellent behaviour patterns is to 'model' existing excellence. This is a skill and you will learn how to do it. You will learn the art of observation without judgement and subjective interpretation - which can ruin a perfectly successful strategy.
This skill on it's own, though valuable, is useless without understanding the attitudes and beliefs of the player. If they have emotional blocks within them, self doubt, negative self talk, internal conflict about their ability, then these issues take up energy and concentration. Recognising these issues and, even more importantly, being able to help your client overcome and let go of them, means you've just taken your skills to another level as a Sports Coach.
NLP is now widely considered a must have for all serious Sports coaches and psychologists. This knowledge transfer across all sports and complements current models of performance training.
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NLP in Coaching
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