Overview

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Power of the Mind

Billion Bit Brain

Thoughts Can Change
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You’ve heard stories of people in terrible accidents being told they could never walk again, going on to beat dire medical predictions. Some even become athletes. One famous athlete is Dan Millman who was a student at UC Berkely training for the Olympics. A motorcycle accident left his legs crushed, and he was told he would never walk again. According to Millman, “that wasn’t the outcome in my mind. I was doing pushups even before I left my hospital bed.” He envisioned himself as whole and took action to ensure it. He went on to help his college team win the nationals.

It’s commonplace to accept the fact that athletes use visualization techniques for achieving success in their sport. Olympic athletes are no different, and even as far back as 1956, the Russian Olympic team had 11 hypnotherapists in tow to ensure that their competitors could visualize success. Let’s also take gymnast Mary Lou Retton, for example. According to a TIME magazine cover story on the 1984 Olympic finals, Retton, then 16, mentally rehearsed her routines to perfection each night before she went to sleep at the Olympic Village. She visualized every move again and again, and her gymnastic performance was one of absolute perfection, resulting in her famous gold medal win.

How about the six NBA Championships the Chicago Bulls received due, in large part, to coach Phil Jackson’s insistence that Michael Jordan and the Bulls practice daily self-hypnosis to train themselves to see performances that lead to success? What about golfer Jack Nicklaus citing visualization as the key to his success? And boxer Ken Norton’s well-known triumph over Mohammed Ali being heralded as a result of visualization and hypnosis training? And Jimmy Connors using hypnosis to visualize winning sets and then going on to win the U.S. Open Championship? Many athletes attest to the fact that visualization with some form of hypnosis has an indisputably positive impact on their performance, and much of the general public doesn’t have an issue with accepting visualization as something athletes do to exceed.