I was interested to read in The Guardian today of another application of NLP in sport. In an article comparing the relative merits of Sam Allardyce and Mark Hughes as managers of Newcastle United is the following comment:
‘Allardyce was big on sports science and so, in a lower-key way, is Hughes who has not been afraid to use psychological aids including neuro-linguistic programming to help players such as Morten Gamst Pedersen with his free-kicks.’
The article doesn’t specify how exactly NLP is used to improve free-kicks. My starting point would be to get the player to recall and see, feel and hear how good it felt when he took a free-kick successfully; go right through all the submodalities (turn up the colours so they’re soooooo vivid, turn up the sound and hear it in super-audio surround sound, feel, really feel, now good it felt to be that successful – double the picture and double it again and make sure the player was in the picture; living it).
Anchor that success so the player can access and visualise himself taking brilliant free-kicks whenever called upon in a match.
And that just scratches the surface of what is possible, of course. Now, naturally success (with free-kicks, penalties, of any other aspect of the game) cannot be guaranteed every time, much less winning every game. NLP processes are a good way of changing the percentages in your favour though.
I’m also interested in the working of the paragraph: ‘… Hughes … has not been afraid to use psychological aids’.
So what’s to be afraid of? There is a culture of beliefs in some sports that winning is all to do with physical skill and nothing to do with the mind. For example, here’s Ian Botham in The Independent:
‘“Sports psychology, what’s that all about? It’s the biggest con of all time, people making a lot of money talking bullshit. In Australia, a sports psychologist came to me and said he was writing a book, could he ask me a few questions? I said: ‘what’s your field?’ ‘Cricket,’ he said. ‘Oh, how many Tests did you play?’ ‘Erm, I never played first-class cricket.’ ‘Well, piss off then… what can you tell me about walking out in front of 100,000 people?’”
Maybe Ian Botham was the complete cricketer in every respect (which raises the question about his failure as England captain – compare and contrast with Mike Brearley).
Clearly it doesn’t make sense for a player of any sport to have the right mind-set if they don’t have the skill. Turn that around – does it make sense to have the skill and not be able to apply it because the mind is wrong? The mind is the body, the body is the mind, we are one.
