About Sports Psychology
Sports Psychology involves the study of how psychological factors affect performance and how participation in sport and exercise affect psychological and physical factors.
Sports psychology deals with the psychological factors associated with participation and performance in sports, exercise, and other types of physical activity. A sports psychologist may work with the individual athlete, coach, trainer or parent regarding enhancing performance, improving communication and team building skills, motivation, and sports injury and rehabilitation.
How Dr. Diane® Can Help Increase Your or Your Team’s Performance
Dr. Diane® is a neuropsychologist, board certified sports psychologist, board certified health psychologist and is published in the field of hypnosis, neurofeedback and brain injury. Dr. Diane® was trained in sports psychology at Boston University by the world famous Pan (Am) American coach, Dr. John Cheffers. Dr. Cheffers also was on Dr. Diane®‘s dissertation committee. She has worked extensively with athletes at all levels of ability in all physical competitions including the Olympics, football, basketball, golf, gymnastics, running, cycling, swimming and skiing to name but a few.
From the extensive personal training with Dr. Cheffers, Dr. Diane® incorporates this experience and modifies it to assist individual athletes and sports teams with performance enhancement and clinical (injury) issues. She helps understand what drives an athlete – what motivates them, what makes them perform better or what inhibits their performance. She helps individual athletes and teams deal with the pressure and challenges they face and overcome hurdles inhibiting peak performance.
Sports Psychology Has Three Main Objectives
Anxiety
In sports your mind needs to be relaxed, while your body is alert. In dealing with anticipatory anxiety, teaching internal methods to control the autonomic nervous system through such internal methods as hypnosis, HRV breathing, and TFT (Thought Field Therapy) a form of Energy Psychology. In conjunction CBT (Cognitive Behavior Therapy) helps to re-educate how you think about the event.
Concentration and Focus
You’ve heard the expression, don’t take your eye off the ball. This is correct. Whether it is keeping your mind focus on the rhythm of the wheels turning in a cycling event, or keeping your eye on the tennis ball that was just hit to you. One of the major keys to success is learning how to sustain focus. There are various methods that can enhance focus including hypnosis, neurofeedback and visual imagery. A basketball game or as we know in Boston, a world series can be lost, because someone didn’t keep their eye on a ball.
Behavioral Changes
The third key area is behavioral changes. For example, if you are skiing, you need to modify your methods based on the conditions of the slope. If there are icy patches you need to instantaneously be able to adjust. This includes adapting to different equipment, such as tennis rackets or weather conditions.
A perfect example of all three is in the Olympic biathlon event, where the athlete has to cross country ski, and then stop, calm and settle their body, and then shoot a gun. Once this is done, the athlete has to get themselves moving very rapidly to get to the next shooting event.
Other Focus Areas Are:
- Peak performance programs
- Imagery skills training
- Emotional energy management
- Attentional skills and concentration training
- Self-confidence and motivation enhancement
- Improving mental toughness
- Goal-setting skills
- Strategy selection
- Biofeedback training
- Stress management
- Hypnosis for pain control and healing
- Counseling for acute performance anxiety
- Training to overcome performance slumps
- Neurofeedback to help with concentration and being in the ‘Zone’
- QiGong to help with inner balance and mental awareness and protection
- HRV (Heart Rate Variability) helps gain inner control, focus and concentration.
Achieving Peak Performance
You, as an Athlete condition your body in a variety of ways, but always with the common goal of achieving the greatest performance possible. Often you’ll properly train your muscles but are still unable to reach your goals. There is some hurdle, some barrier keeping you from achieving the success you desire, keeping you from reaching Peak Performance.
Dr. Diane® can help you teach you or your athletes to overcome these hurdles! In many cases, the hurdle that is stopping you from achieving the desired level of success involves the activities of the brain. Using a technique known as Neurofeedback, Dr. Diane® can teach you how to effectively and efficiently strengthen your brain to maintain and enhance your or your athletes conditioning.
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