Mastering your nerves is a very important part of any performance and the way that The Possible mind can help you is best described by Performance Coach Mike Duckett:
What I do with the people who come to see me is encourage them to imagine the future. So, they’ll get right in the moment and they’ll watch a screen of themselves performing the way that they want to — at their very best. They’ll go through difficult scenes, ‘rewind the tape’ and come up with the perfect response. You can do it yourself by sitting quietly in a chair and thinking it through.
Performance Coach Mike Duckett
This article on the website shortlist discusses Rory McIlroy the British golfer Rory who choked at the US Masters. Interestingly some reports at the time of McIlroy’s dramatic collapse wondered if he could ever come back from such a mental barrier as this Channel 4 news report shows.
Matthew Syed, who commented in the channel 4 news section, has first hand experience in choking so has weight to his understanding because as an Olympic Table Tennis player he choked at the Sydney games, now he is an experienced Sports Psychologist and TV commentator who stated his concerns for Rory McIlroy as the Psychological scare could be very deep was lucky unfounded. To Rory’s credit he did come back and won the US open in 2011. A really amazing demonstration of the Power of the mind to do that.
A recent book written by Syed called ‘Bounce‘ explained the science behind ‘bottling it’ my understanding of it goes something like this:
When practicing/learning something complicated in sport or life (i.e learning to drive a car) over and over again, at first it is difficult as it uses the conscious mind and a type of thinking called the “explicit system” which is good for picking up one element of a technique at a time but can not put them altogether. Once every part has come together and you no longer to consciously think to complete an action like driving. This is when it has become unconscious and uses the “implicit system”. Mathhew Syed states in Bounce that once the whole technique is mastered if a person becomes overly focused on part of a particular skill they will get caught in the “explicit system” rendering them unable to complete the whole action or skill.
At the Possible Mind we aim to help you overcome bottling it or choking at the pressure times in your life by using a variety of techniques to support you to be all you can be.
