Archive for the ‘performance’ Category

Golf's Secret Weapon – Hypnosis

Saturday, August 16th, 2008

As seen on Searcharticles.com

Michelle Beaudry

Golfers make me grin. It’s fun helping them get the edge on their competition. Lucky for me, my practice is in Orlando, Florida where golfers abound. And whenever I meet one, that grin just pops right up.

A case in point: some time back, I noticed a married couple walking arm and arm into an event, and he sported a golf shirt bearing the name of a prominent golf magazine. So I said, “Hi. Do you work for that magazine, or are you just wearing the shirt?”

“I’m one of the editors,” he puffed.

“Good. I’m hypnotist Michelle Beaudry, and would you like to know why we hypnotists chuckle at you golfers when we get together?”

Of course he did, and said so. Smilingly I began, “You golfers always show up on time, you already know it works, you happily pay the fee, you follow instructions to the letter, but…”

He eyed me narrowly as I raised my voice in a flourish, “But, you golfers never refer.”

He burst out laughing, nodding and bobbing his head. The woman on his arm looked aghast. “Oh, yeah, he said, “I went to a hypnotist for golf…”

Her jaw dropped. “You went to a hypnotist? And you didn’t tell me? I’m your wife!”

“Oh, yeah, I went. Loved it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she pleaded.

I interjected, “Because they never do. Golfers never tell anyone about their secret weapon.”

“That’s what it is, “he agreed, “a secret weapon. And I never told a soul.”

See? Golfers dont even tell their wives.

Why? Because the word “hypnosis” bears creepy connotations born of bad Hollywood films and ill-informed tv writers. There has never been a single film or tv show that accurately portrays what hypnosis is or why it works so well. Golfers don’t care about the movies, they care about their game. And they whisper in low voices, spreading rumors on the links…

“Did you hear that Tiger Woods uses a hypnotist?”

“All the pros do.”

“Really?”

Most golf pros do indeed hire “sports consultants” who use “visualization” to help them conquer the mental game of golf. Be not fooled. These sports consultants are hypnotists, use hypnosis, and someday when the general public wakes up to the truth, we all all be able to use the “H Word” loudly and proudly. It is not mind control, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the occult. It has everything to do with improving your game. Or your life.

In one simple two hour session, all the improvement areas golfers typically need can be covered. These include setting a peak performance trigger, implanting a clean slate for every new tee-up, processing self-forgiveness of all past golf mistakes, raising their ceiling of excellence, creating permission to excel, installing a shield against distractions, and so much more. It can even be done over the phone.

You’ve seen pros use their peak performance triggers many times on tv, like when one of them always taps his or her cap or presses a thumb and finger together before every shot. We hypnotists attach an excellent golf shot of the past to the trigger, so that same quality of excellence is accessed time and time again. It works consistently and well. Surprisingly, golfers often plateau at a too-low level of competence because it can feel risky to excel. Yet once in hypnosis, they process old emotional programming and raise their ceiling of excellence. And voila: better golf.

All hypnosis does is set your conscious mind aside and access your stronger, more powerful subconscious. And there are lots of ways this happens to you every day. When you read a book, for instance, you are actually just looking at ink on a piece of paper; yet, in your mind’s eye, you see all the action in bright living color. Yes, reading a novel does indeed automatically put you into a light trance state (provided you like the book). Falling in love puts you into a deep trance state. Yes, all of us have been in hypnosis over and over again without even knowing it.

Hypnotists operate under the same federal laws as doctors and psychologists. We may not disclose to any third party the name of any client. Our clients, on the other hand, may of course disclose our names, and they do, happily referring us to their friends and family. I get referrals from clients all the time.

Except golfers. I’m their secret weapon, and they ain’t tellin’ nobody.

 

 

About The Author

Michelle Beaudry, board certified hypnotist near Orlando, Florida, takes clients in person and by phone from all over the world. Contact 407 862-9144 or hypnofemme@aol.com.

Beaudry Hypnosis

'Mind's Eye' Influences Visual Perception

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

This was posted on ScienceDaily, showing scientific proof of what NLP has known for about 25 years.

ScienceDaily (July 4, 2008) — Letting your imagination run away with you may actually influence how you see the world. New research from Vanderbilt University has found that mental imagery—what we see with the “mind’s eye”—directly impacts our visual perception.

“We found that imagery leads to a short-term memory trace that can bias future perception,” says Joel Pearson, research associate in the Vanderbilt Department of Psychology. and lead author of the study. “This is the first research to definitively show that imagining something changes vision both while you are imagining it and later on.”

“These findings are important because they suggest a potential mechanism by which top-down expectations or recollections of previous experiences might shape perception itself,” Pearson and his co-authors write.

It is well known that a powerful perceptual experience can change the way a person sees things later. Just think of what can happen if you discover an unwanted pest in your kitchen, such as a mouse. Suddenly you see mice in every dust ball and dark corner—or think you do. Is it possible that imagining something, just once, might also change how you perceive things?

“You might think you need to imagine something 10 times or 100 times before it has an impact,” says Frank Tong, associate professor of psychology and co-author of the study. “Our results show that even a single instance of imagery can tilt how you see the world one way or another, dramatically, if the conditions are right.”

To test how imagery affects perception, Pearson, Tong and co-author Colin Clifford of the University of Sydney had subjects imagine simple patterns of vertical or horizontal stripes, which are strongly represented in the primary visual areas of the brain. They then presented a green horizontal grated pattern to one eye and a red vertical grated pattern to the other to induce what is called binocular rivalry. During binocular rivalry, an individual will often alternately perceive each stimulus, with the images appearing to switch back and forth before their eyes. The subjects generally reported they had seen the image they had been imagining, proving the researcher’s hypothesis that imagery would influence the binocular rivalry battle.

Additional experiments found that the effect of imagery on perception was approximately the same as showing the research subject a faint representation of one of the patterns between trials. Stronger shifts in perception were found if subjects either viewed or imagined a particular pattern for longer periods of time. They found that both imagery and perception can lead to a build-up of a “perceptual trace” that influences subsequent perception.

Pearson, Clifford and Tong also discovered that changing the orientation of the image from what had been imagined greatly reduced the impact of imagery on perception. Because orientation is processed in early visual areas, this suggests that imagery’s interaction with perception may occur at early stages of visual processing.

The new findings offer an objective tool to assess the often-slippery concept of imagination.

“It has been very hard to pin down in the laboratory what exactly someone is experiencing when it comes to imagery, because it is so subjective,” Tong says. “We found that the imagery effect, while found in all of our subjects, could differ a lot in strength across subjects. So this might give us a metric to measure the strength of mental imagery in individuals and how that imagery may influence perception.”

The findings may also help settle a longstanding debate in the research community over whether mental imagery is visual—that one imagines something just as one sees it—or more abstract.

“More recently, with advances in human brain imaging, we now know that when you imagine something parts of the visual brain do light up and you see activity there,” Pearson says. “So there’s more and more evidence suggesting that there is a huge overlap between mental imagery and seeing the same thing. Our work shows that not only are imagery and vision related, but imagery directly influences what we see.”

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant and an Australia National Health and Mental Research Council Martin Fellowship. Pearson is a member of the Vanderbilt Vision Research Center. Tong is a member of the Vanderbilt Vision Research Center and the Vanderbilt Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience.


Journal reference:
  1. Pearson et al. The Functional Impact of Mental Imagery on Conscious Perception. Current Biology, 2008; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2008.05.048
Adapted from materials provided by Vanderbilt University.