Healing and Hypnotherapy Volume 5, Issue -2, 1 August 2020 | Page 29

HYPNOSIS AND SPORTS PERFORMANCE
Athletes Overcome Fears with Sports Hypnosis
Sports Hypnosis is the mental game every coach, parent, and player
talks about. There’s a quote by Yogi Berra that says: “Think! How the
hell are you gonna think and hit at the same time?” or the classic
“Ninety percent of this game is fifty percent mental”.
What Yogi was trying to say was that we don’t want to think about
how we hit the ball. Imagine all that goes into this; how you stand
with your feet a certain distance apart, how you pivot your foot, turn
your hips, the angle of the bat, where you focus your eyes, the length
of arm extension and the arc of the swing, and finally the moment the
ball makes contact with the bat; now you add in velocity and if you’re
lucky, it will propel the ball over the Green Monster at Fenway. And
guess what? While you thought about all that, the 96-mile per hour
pitch is now in the catcher’s mitt. Want to rethink that again? The pitcher is
already winding up.
The subconscious mind is where we harbor our automated responses.
Hypnosis is the bridge between conditioned mental responses and
physiological outcomes. As such, it can affect the success of these
outcomes. In all of its automated responses the subconscious mind is the