The Nob Hill Wellness Center - Sports Performance Coaching

Golfer

Home

About Dr. Kristin Roush

What is Life Coaching?

Energy Psychology

Relief from Anxiety,
Panic and Phobias

Sports Performance

tennis player

Sports Performance Coaching

“Every sport has a mental game component;
golf is a mental game with a sport component.”

Kristin L. Roush, Ph.D.
Sports Performance Specialist

Have you ever noticed the eternity of time that exists from addressing the ball, securing your grip, taking that last visual of the fairway or putting green, the backswing, the stroke, making contact with the ball, and then finally, the follow through? Those several seconds provide plenty of time for all your emotional vulnerabilities to be expressed through your automatic thoughts and then played out in your physical performance. What thoughts run through your mind? “I better not blow it.” “I’ll probably just hook it again.” “’Gotta impress the people I’m playing with.” “Oh, I’ll bet I didn’t read the green right.” “I’m having an off day today.” And then, you take a swing. Of course, you’re going to hook it. And if your last thought was, “Don’t hit it into trees,” of course you will hit it into the trees, because that’s what your last image/thought was. Your physical performance will be aligned with your mental/emotional state. Energy Psychology techniques (for example, EFT) have produced remarkable, immediate, and lasting improvements in confidence, range of motion, pain relief, and mental focus for elite athletes and weekend warriors alike. Very briefly, the premise of EFT is that “the cause of all negative emotions is a disruption in the body’s energy system.” If you can clear the energy, you clear the emotion, which means you clear the way for optimum sports performance. Read several success articles about using EFT to improve sports performance here (www.emofree.com/sports).

I’ll never forget a college tennis tournament that I played in Oklahoma. Our team was most concerned about the team from the University of Oklahoma. Several schools were represented and this was the team to beat. I arrived at the Tournament Desk, was introduced to my opponent from Central Oklahoma, and we went to our assigned court and played our match. I won the match fairly easily. When I went to report our scores, imagine my surprise and relief to discover that my opponent was actually from the University of Oklahoma and I had just won my most challenging match of the tournament! I have no doubt that my expectation that this would be an easy match played a huge role in my win. Just two weeks prior, my coach insisted that I “challenge” the number one player on our team to see if I could take her spot on the Ladder, and she would drop down one. I was a freshman on the team; she was a senior. I was number four on the Ladder; again, she was number one. I won the first set, 6 – 3. I was winning the second set 3 – 1. Somehow, I managed to lose the next couple of games, and then it was all downhill from there. I struggled with all my conscious intention to beat her on every single point, and yet, I couldn’t pull it off. My unconscious beliefs “You can’t beat her, she’s the Number One player; and you’re just a freshman.” “She’s so much better than you, she’s earned that spot and you haven’t” etc…totally overpowered my conscious desire. I was exasperated with myself, incredulous that I had given away that match when I was so close to winning. Obviously, for that match, she didn’t beat me; I beat me.

I know you understand these concepts, and I’ll bet you’ve got a few “mental game” stories of your own. But, I’ll bet you don’t realize that the power of positive thinking, cognitive restructuring, and affirmations is pretty anemic if you don’t also address the “energetic signatures” that correspond with those negative fears and beliefs. And that doesn’t even address the unconscious (beneath your awareness) issues that are sabotaging you in spite of all your hard work and preparation in practice.

Back to the top of the page...

Your Comfort Zone
The Comfort Zone is a critical component within all performance pursuits. It is the level of performance where an athlete unconsciously believes she/he “belongs.” I think of it like the body’s “set point,” which is thought to be the weight that a body naturally navigates to and stays at because it’s just right somehow. While the set point is your default physical limitation, your Comfort Zone is your default psychological performance limitation. What determines your Comfort Zone? Your beliefs and emotional states based on past experiences and their corresponding energetic signatures. The good news is there is no need to sit through hours of emotionally draining therapy to dredge up and re-live all the traumatic memories that explain your Comfort Zone. With a little bit of investigative insight and some well-placed finger tapping along some meridian points on the body, you can completely dis-empower those old artifacts from your past, and free yourself to blast past your previous Comfort Zone into what I call your “Ecstasy Zone!” AND, you can do it while walking from the last green to the next fairway!

Sports Performance Coaching
As your Sports Performance Coach, I can collaborate with you to recognize all the different factors that play a part in your performance. You bring to the process your innate God-given talents, your drive, your love of the game, your willingness and ability to practice, the quality of your practice, your physical assets, your nutrition, your intelligence, and even the quality of your equipment. There are also factors that you have no control over that will affect the outcome of your competition: the weather, the playing conditions, and the offensive and defensive ability level of your opponents. I can help you to evaluate your psychological/emotional strengths and weaknesses and then design interventions that will maximize the positive power of the mental game so that it works optimally in your favor. The mental game is the edge that elite athletes need to push past a good or even very good performance day into an exquisite experience of your whole body/mind/spirit that reminds you of why you love to compete in this sport.

If you would like more information about how we can work together, contact me by e-mail: NobHillWellnessCenter@gmail.com or phone 505.463.8628. We can talk on the phone for a free 15-minute session and then set up a time to meet. We can do phone sessions, office sessions, and even “in vivo” sessions on the golf course or the tennis court, or wherever you enjoy your sport of choice.
Back to the top of the page...