HYPNOTIC EXERCISE Peak performance
1 Find a restful place where you won’t be disturbed for at least 15 minutes. Switch off all computer devices and phones.
2 Let your eyes close. Spend a minute or two just noticing your breathing, without trying to change anything.
3 Now take a few moments to think about nature. Allow yourself to connect and become one, in a sense, with the natural beauty of the planet. Picture deep green forests, sun kissed lakes, snow capped mountain peaks, and green valleys, wide blue oceans, magnificent cloudscapes in the sky…
Really focus on a sense of being inseparable from these natural elements.
4 Now turn your mind to the particular activity into which you want to invite the flow of the optimal performance state.
This activity can be anything at all – from love making to giving a presentation to making something with your hands or writing or painting. Anything.
5 Holding your sense of connection to nature, recall or imagine the state of effortless flow… of being totally in the zone. Get a strong, vivid, felt sense of what it’s like to be totally effortlessly engaged in that activity, without concern for anything else.
You might notice a specific sensation on entering flow – a feeling of warmth, or maybe a tingling sensation. (I often seem to get an unconscious ‘signal’ in the form of heat in my hands just before I enter flow, particularly when treating clients.
6 As you let this experience ‘flow’ over you, vividly imagine what it would be like if it was even more intense. You might experience this as ‘going deeper’ or ‘rising higher’ or ‘expanding’ or ‘getting brighter’. Your experience of it will be unique to you. Really notice and connect with the way it represents itself to you.
7 When it has intensified as far as it is going to on this occasion, just let yourself be there with it, being in flow, being completely at one with whatever you are doing. Enjoy it to the full. The sense of not even being able to put a foot wrong is entirely delightful. Spend some time in this state – even though it may feel ‘timeless’.
8 When your unconscious mind lets you know that you have drunk deeply of the experience of being in the zone, and felt it to your core, begin to come back to the room, feeling wonderfully refreshed and alive.
