When I work with athletes the most important thing I am trying to achieve is for them to shut down the conscious mind and allow the unconscious mind to take over. This is important in playing sports because the conscious mind interferes with the automaticity of our learned movements. When the athlete is unconscious, movements become automatic, and information is processed at super speeds. This allows the athlete to react to situations as if they knew what was going to happen next. This change in perception triggers confidence and flow. Confidence and flow are the holy grail in sports. When athletes get into flow they will perform to their full potential. They will break records, perform personal bests, and achieve inspiring performances. Flow can only occur when the athlete accesses the unconscious mind.
The unconscious mind has all the answers athletes need to perform optimally. It is the place where athletes can find absolute knowledge either through their experiences or intuition. It is the source of the flow state experience athletes call the zone, and it is the place where athletes experience changes in perceptions such as the feeling that you have complete control over the game. In the flow state, what you think will happen does happen, whatever you imagine and WILL, becomes reality.
This is only possible if you use techniques that make you lose some of your conscious awareness. You can lose some of your conscious awareness if you become absorbed into the game and stay present. Your mind cannot get into flow if it is in the past or future, it must be present and focused on what is happening NOW. The unconscious mind can be forced into existence using dissociative imagery. This was Jack Nicklaus’s famous technique. Jack Nicklaus would imagine himself watching himself from the crowd, hitting golf shots. This is one of 3 dissociative visualisation techniques he used in his pre-shot routine. He called his visualisation routine, “going to the movies”. He would “go to the movies” before he hit any shot.
Any type of imagery or visualisation brings the unconscious mind into existence. Visualisations are a feature of right brain dominance. When we visualise something, there is a shift in brain activity from the left side of the brain (the left hemisphere) to the right hemisphere. The resources in our left hemisphere make us conscious our resources in our right hemisphere make us unconscious.
When I’m working with an athlete, I’m trying to create hemispheric shifts all the time. Hemispheric shifts make you lose self-consciousness, change your perceptions, make you feel that you’re in control, and put you into the zone. They also make the brain go quantum. Recent studies in psychology and neuroscience suggest the unconscious mind is governed by the rules of quantum mechanics. In the quantum mind, time and space are not linear. Instead, past present and future coexist which enables the athlete to perform a task with super speeds because the conscious mind is not interfering.
The research behind this approach is explained in my book “The Miracle Mind”. In this book, I give numerous examples of people whose minds have gone quantum and have experienced extraordinary results. In a recent example, a client of mine shot 17 under par using quantum thinking. An interview with my client can be found on my new YouTube channel https://youtu.be/mXex14syE_k.