TECHNIQUES

The Qualifications I Hold

Master NLP Practitioner & Coach
Master Hypnotherapist
Advanced Applied Psychology Equestrian Coach
Master Empowered Equestrian Coach
Advanced Solution-Focused & Analytical Hypnotherapist

I am also insured with www.holisticinsurance.co.uk

Are all of these techniques you use 'done' to me?

The short answer is no. The techniques I use are done with you, not to you. You are in full control of everything we work on together.

It’s also good to be aware that depending on your needs, the techniques I use may vary. Some people might need more of one area of expertise than another depending on their situation.

About the
techniques I use

I use a mixture of solutions in order to help people overcome their fears and internal challenges. Some of them are absorbed ‘in the moment’, others are techniques I give you to take away and practice.

Some of the techniques I use require regular use (by you) in order to make them most effective.

At first, the techniques you use on yourself might feel like you have to consciously think about them, but it’s good to remember:

There are 4 phases we go through as we learn, think of it in terms of when you first learned to drive.

First, you were unconsciously incompetent. You didn’t know how to drive.

Then you moved to consciously incompetent. You knew you had to learn and practice.

Eventually you moved to consciously competent. You knew what you were doing, you knew which skills you’d learned and you had to practice them.

Finally you become unconsciously competent, in other words, you can drive without having to really concentrate on your technique.

What we’re aiming for with using the techniques I teach you to use on yourself is to help you to become unconsciously competent so you can keep yourself focused and in flow when you ride.

Neuro-Linguistic
Programming

Neuro-Linguistic programming focuses on changing the way we communicate with ourselves.

It helps us to understand our drivers and helps to reprogramme habitual and unwanted behaviours and thoughts.

It helps you to remove negative thoughts and feelings associated with past events (visual or kinaesthetic dissociation), and includes techniques such as reframing, anchoring and mental rehearsal, as well as replacing negative thoughts with positive ones.

Without realising, we focus on the negative. The human brain is wired for survival, so it’s looking out for danger and we recognise that in the form of fear, whether it’s really dangerous or not. You need to be able to differentiate between real danger and perceived danger, especially when riding.

Applied Sports Psychology for Equestrians

Sports psychology is used more in competitive performance. It uses evidence-based techniques which helps equestrian coaches to maximise the psychological potential of their riders.

Sports psychology is used to help you build a calm and focused approach to competitions and eventing. It helps you perform from the inside out, by allowing less of the outside in.

It can help you with motivation and resilience, focus, performance anxiety, confidence, emotional control, performance routines and flow states (the state you need to be in to perform at your best).

I trained under Charlie Unwin, a renowned Sports and Performance Psychologist who’s coaching programmes are endorsed by the British Horse Society. You can find me listed on the Centre 10 website as an Advanced Applied Psychology Equestrian Coach.

Timeline Technique

Timeline Technique is a more recent development in Neuro Linguistic Programming. Developed in 1986 and used by psychiatrists, counsellors and psychologists, it utilises a persons’ own internal ‘timeline’ to work with their unconscious minds in a variety of ways, including healing emotional traumas and eradicating unwanted thoughts, emotions and behaviours.

It’s helpful for removing unnecessary negative emotions which tend to be anger, sadness, fear, hurt and guilt.

You might need to respond to fear in some situations, so we’re talking about removing unnecessary negative emotions, not all of them.

Most of these unwanted emotions are based in childhood experiences. We don’t take you back to the event that forced a negative emotion. We use observational dissociated techniques to take positive learnings from the event. It helps you to be objective about what you’ve experienced, without having to talk about or relive the experience itself.

I’ll help you to look at the negative experiences that may have created fears objectively so you can take positive learnings from your experiences in order to reframe them.

We typically take 3 learnings from each and apply them to events where you might experience them again, so you start to get comfortable learning how to reframe them.

*If you’re not willing to release the fears, this therapy wouldn’t work. Timeline Technique is not used in the early stages of the time we work together, and it’s only with your permission that we can release the fears.

Hypnotherapy

Hypnotherapy is a deep state of relaxation (a trance is a deep state of relaxation). If you can imagine the state you’re in just before you go to sleep, the state between awake and asleep. You’re still aware of what’s going on around you, but not asleep.

I’ll ask you a series of questions beforehand to make sure the language I use is right for and personalised for you.

Something that most people don’t realise is that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. You’re listening to my voice, it will guide you and you will choose what to do, even at an unconscious level. If you don’t want to go into a trance state, you won’t.

The language used in hypnotherapy is called Milton Model language, the language used is vague on purpose, so that your unconscious can interpret it to do the best for you.

Hypnotherapy is good for reinforcing learnings from TimeLine Technique. It’s good for getting you into a relaxed state. It allows you to imagine what it is that you really want to do without the fear holding you back. Our brains can’t tell the difference between real and imagined, so this is a great therapy for helping you to release the fears and focus on what you want to achieve.

If you would like to release the fear and get more focused so you can become a better rider, you can find out more about the packages I offer here.

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