How EMDR can help you improve your sports performance:

  • Get past the last loss or a big loss.
  • Get over the time you let your team down.
  • Get past an injury that keeps bothering you when you think about it.
  • Help with focus and concentration.
  • Move beyond getting angry in the sport – at the ball, other participants, at yourself.
  • Improve focus and concentration

Sports are a great example of the need for balance between mental focus, physical endurance and using emotions to regulate between the two.  EMDR helps improve focus and concentration by helping you put things behind you and helping thinking to settle down and desensitizing emotions.
If you get angry easily during a game or a match, there is a good chance that negatively charged emotions are getting in your way.  EMDR can help clear those out.

In addition, EMDR helps you deal with distractions that take away from your ability to focus and concentrate.  There are two types of distractions, internal and external.

Manage internal distractions

Internal distractions are the type that go on inside your head.  Thinking too much, worry and getting down on yourself are a few examples.

EMDR helps stop internal distractions because it:

  • Releases the negative emotional patterns that feed into feeling bad;
  • Allows ‘letting go’ of past events without always thinking about them and having them bring you down;
  • Frees you up to allow you to be in the present moment of each event as it is experienced – making success more likely.
  • Teaches you how to deal with failure

Most, if not all sports, have the percentages of successful completion set such that ‘failure’ is an inherent part of the process to achieve success.
In baseball, for example, a good batter bats in the 300s, which means they get hits about 1/3 of the time.  That means that 2/3s of the times batters are not successful – no hits.  To be even an average batter means that you will hit the ball and get on bass way-less than half the time.
Life is like that, too.  It’s not about accepting failure, it’s about learning how to mange yourself when let-downs happen.
You have to learn to manage failure because it can become an internal distraction; for example, you start thinking about it all the time, or at just the wrong times.

Managing ‘Failure’ is an ‘internal’ distraction because it plays on your mind.

Manage external distractions

People yelling at you, trying to harass you and make too much noise are examples of external distractions.

  • EMDR helps manage external distractions because it helps you get perspective on what is important.
  • With EMDR you become desensitized to your own internal emotional ‘triggers’ and, in turn, become less likely to be triggered by others.

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