HYPNOTHERAPY LOS ANGELES - THERAPEUTIC HYPNOSIS AND COACHING FOR PERFORMANCE ANXIETY

When you want to perform at your very best in a particular upcoming event, it is perfectly natural to feel some extra energy and alertness in your body as adrenaline is released into your bloodstream. This means that your body knows that something important is about to happen, so it’s doing its best to prepare you for action. And in moderation, this is not a bad thing at all. Whether it’s a sports competition, a public speaking situation, an artistic performance, or some other kind of event, having a degree of enhanced energy and focus in your mind and body is actually very valuable because it sharpens your senses, makes you pay full attention to what is going on, and can help you perform at your best.

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So, getting into an optimal state for top performance means being willing to tolerate a degree of nervous energy about performing and ultimately come to enjoy those pre-event nerves as you begin to see them as a sign of genuine excitement and a readiness within you to get going.

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However, an excessive amount of adrenaline and nerves can definitely get in the way of optimal performance. Excessive performance anxiety can occur when you worry about making mistakes or when you are preoccupied with the audience, the score, or the other competitors instead of just focusing on the single thing you need to be doing right now.

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Learning to block out distractions is a vital skill for top performance. When the psychiatrist Milton Erickson worked with the US Olympic rifle team, he got them to hypnotically imagine that each shot was the very first one. This made them focus on the shot they were actually ring at the moment rather than on the one they had just completed. The same approach can be used in any performance situation. Forget what you’ve just done. Forget whether it went well or not. Now is all that matters.

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Trying too hard to control things can also result in performance anxiety. For example, if you’ve memorized a speech, it is close to impossible to consciously hold every word of that speech in your mind at the same time. If you tried, it would just be a jumble of senseless noise. Giving a speech is like going on a walk you’ve been on many times, where each part of the speech naturally leads you on to the next part, and it’s important to learn to trust in that process. Optimal performance in any situation requires that you trust all the skills, intuitions, and muscle memory you’ve developed in your chosen activity.

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A tennis champion once described how, during important matches, she actually forgets – or loses awareness of – all external reality except the immediate experience of playing the game. She is so immersed in the experience, it’s like her body is reacting and responding to each shot before she's consciously aware of what she’s about to do. At the end of the match, she experiences a kind of awakening where she suddenly remembers, so to speak, the tournament, the crowd, and the prize money. These external things are only considered after the match. It is also only after the match that she actually thinks about the quality of her performance in depth.

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Hypnotherapy helps you develop an incredible, laser-like focus so you can naturally tune out any distractions. And it’s going to help you calmly trust in your subconscious mind so that as you perform, it becomes like watching your own mastery in action as you go into flow and perform at your very best whenever you want to or need to.