All of us who compete want to win; it’s a given, right. Of course, it is. But not everyone is wired to want to win; some people are afraid of it. Some people are not okay with or even comfortable with winning. The majority of sport psychology approaches are directed at people in the opposite camp who fear losing and embarrassment. But being afraid of winning is a real thing that can hinder our performance. If you have experienced success as a young child, you most likely got praise from your family. But what your peer group may have offered up may have been a different story. Sometimes when we are successful, we are excluded and treated in a negative way by our peers. When this happens, we develop stories that winning is painful, and if a stories such as these have been created in a young mind, it may have a damaging and lasting result that holds us back from winning.
But what does this mean exactly? When you were young, mainly before the age of 10-12, your mind is in the data collection mode. In this time, our wide-open, child eyes collect everything in with out judgment. During this time, anything with an emotional component or charge that happens, good or bad, gets locked away in the subconscious. So if you were good in school and the popular crowd didn’t like you because you were an academic super, they may have treated you poorly, excluded you or actively bullied you. This creates a story that achievements are bad, that “winning” is dangerous and something you must be protected from.
This story left unaddressed may sabotage your performance as an adult in sports, work, and many other areas of your life. This happens because one of the main functions of the subconscious is to protect you. So your subconscious will keep you from winning because the program it runs is that winning is painful are leads to the treatment you receive earlier in life.
There are a two main ways this reveals itself in archery. The first is when you are so close to achieving a winning score and something goes wrong or just falls apart for no clear reason. In this case, you shoot really well, and then during the last couple of ends, you have the worst time. The result is losing the competition.
The second is the when the archer struggles during the start of an archery tournament with lots of stress and anxiety until the bad shots outnumber the good ones, and all chance of winning is lost. At that moment, the arrows magically find the middle and the strife associated with shooting disappears. From there forward, you shoot really well.
If this sounds familiar, you may have an underlying story about the danger of winning hiding in your subconscious. Through hypnosis, we can find these stories and change them so you no longer require your subconscious to protect you. You can allow yourself to win, and no longer live with the self-sabotage, becoming the champion you were meant to be.
If you want to know how exactly hypnosis can help you, call us now at 732-406-3498 for a free consultation and a plan tailored to you.