First – Identify Your Stressors

Most people lead fast hectic lifestyles, with the result that multiple sources of potential stress can occur in the workplace, family and social life. My clients often report their tipping point comes when ‘that something extra occurs’, such as unexpected demands at work or experiencing the emotional changes of a death, divorce, redundancy.  Emotionally resilient people have the tools to manage pressure and therefore do not suffer the negative effects of prolonged stress. Without resilience, a person may find that prolonged bouts of stress can harm confidence and self-esteem and may even lead to worse mental and physical conditions.

Second – Identify Your Beliefs and Behaviours

A person’s belief structure is important. Emotionally resilient people retain a positive outlook on life, and they have a belief in their own ability to return to a normal state of wellbeing.

So, the next time pressure starts to build up and you experience the negative effects, note the changes in your perception. For example, stress can manifest itself in varied forms, through physical, psychological and social dysfunction.  In other words, people with stress may experience symptoms of increased respiration, palpitations, headaches and they may present changed and negative behaviours to other people, suffer self doubt, and even withdraw from social activity.

Third – Just How Balanced is Your Mindset and Lifestyle?

Emotionally resilient people bounce back quickly. Some have good defences against adversity –  they have a history  that has formed a narrative for coping mechanisms; others, have learnt the tools, gained through having a  better understanding of themselves.

In learning the tools, it is very important to set realistic goals in our daily life and not to over face ourselves.  Different personality profiles adopt different behaviours – and behaviours can be modified. People with absolutist mindsets who are unable to compromise increase their own expectations with deadlines and self-pressure.  Whereas, people who seek to please tend to lack assertiveness and take on too much work.  Many people procrastinate endlessly over decisions – and this increases pressure. The result is that when goals are not met, negative behaviours can arise and self belief can become affected.

So, when we have a narrative or the tools to cope, we move in a balanced zone of wellbeing.

Regular exercise and a support network are very important to a balanced life, along with the knowledge that we have other skills and abilities we can be proud of outside the workplace – such as a hobby, and thus creating the idea of ‘work-life balance.’

How to Work Towards Resilience

It is key that we recognise the importance of enabling behaviours

• Maintain our self belief and feel a sense of control
• Have motivation during difficult times
• Set ourselves realistic goals we can achieve
• Be empathetic and caring towards other people
• Communicate well and feel good about ourselves
• Accept our own mistakes as part of our learning framework

If you would like a more in-depth discussion on the subject of Resilience and how you can learn the tools to increase your well-being to enable you to become more effective contact Executive Coach and Hypno-psychotherapist, Sara Howard for a free phone consultation. Tel: 07827 505389 or email sara-howard@sky.com

Many successful Sports Personalities improve their Sports Performance using techniques from both talking therapies and Sports Performance Coaching. The benefits from coaching, psychology and therapy have been widely documented by people in the world of equestrianism, tennis, golf – to name but a few.  Sporting success requires many elements including focus, concentration, self belief and motivation.

You can improve your concentration and perform at your best. 

I see many people who express concerns about rising levels of anxiety spoiling their focus and concentration and ultimately their physical ability, due to the spiral of tension that anxiety creates.  We all know that loss of concentration spoils our ability to perform at our best.  The object of Neuro Linguistic Programming  (NLP) and visualisation techniques in sports performance is to free up your motivation from negative emotions and restraints and to help you construct an enabling way forward and therefore increase your personal confidence; this way you can perform at you best and develop self belief.

Coaching techniques can help you towards confidence and self belief

Coaching and therapeutic techniques are successful in helping with emotional and psychological problems that may be holding a person back. There are different methods available to help change unwanted strategies and behaviours which are actually disabling us and causing anxiety.  For example, have you ever wished away the old states of anxiety or caution that regular creep back into your thoughts,  such states that may well be linked to past events and that actually really have no bearing whatsoever on your present situation?

When we function in our normal everyday behaviour, we do so without even thinking about it.  So, having asked yourself this question, “am I running old strategies that are disabling me? ” Now ask,” “what would I like to change?”  Start now to make notes and to become more aware of any negative behaviour patterns you could change.

The benefit in controlling unwanted anxiety and emotions to increase your focus

We’ve discussed that first it’s about recognising negative emotions and sometimes we don’t know what’s going wrong.  Remember, you’re not alone!   So now the question is, what would you like to achieve?  Perhaps there’s a sportsperson you admire. Most of us have read various media stories of top athletes who have used therapies or sports psychology and we admire those with the most mental control.  Whilst few of us will reach the Olympics, most of us want the pleasure in setting ourselves certain achievable goals and feeling the pleasure of success.   And success increases our confidence and our sense of well being.

Improve Sports Performance – model successful  behaviours with NLP

NLP is an  effective constructive tool in helping a person to move away from limiting behaviours and to re-frame an enabling position.  From this enabling position of growth we can use our motivation to set up states of confidence towards achievable goals .  NLP provides the tools to model the selected behaviours of successful people and in so doing you can construct new conscious processes which include re-framing your position by the following: –

• Recognising and disabling negative states and fears thereby …
• Enabling yourself to remove mental obstacles to your success
• Replacing disabling states with new enabling strategies
• Freeing up your emotions by future pacing your realistic new goals

Improve Sports Performance with Tailored  Coaching for Confidence With an experienced coach who has the training and the knowledge to use an integrative tool set to achieve maximum success.

Please contact Sara Howard for a free phone consultation to discuss how coaching and therapy may benefit you.

Improve Sports Performance, Contact Sara. Tel – 07827 505389