Steve Hooker, the Olympian who was once so spooked by pole vaulting that he was ready to completely give up on the sport, set an Olympic record and won the gold medal in Beijing. Quite a turn around of events for an athlete who didn’t even qualify for the last Olympic finals. He recalls going through a bad time period that seemed to have no light at the end of the tunnel.
“I was throwing poles, cracking tantrums; I was in a miserable bad mood. Your whole life, it really brings it down when it’s really what you want to do and you can’t do it just because it’s not clicking in your brain. A lot of people’s careers end with this sort of thing, but I just really worked hard. I tried a million different things to try and get around it.” But nothing seemed to work for him until he found hypnosis.
Steve credits hypnotherapy with helping him tremendously in his process. “I would talk to my hypnotherapist at the start of the session and say, ‘I want to talk about lowering the pole in my last couple of steps and jumping off the ground.’ We would talk about the cues I wanted to work on, and what I needed to focus on and visualize and worked them into the hypnosis process.”
“The more you do it the more you realize pole vault is mental. Just having any sort of mental stimulation, where you’re thinking deeply about what you’re doing, helps.” Steve also credits hypnotherapy with helping him relax before and during his competition as well as seeing it happen (clearing the bar), seeing and believing himself to do it before the jump even occurred. “I do like a million jumps in my head every day, and when I get back my body knows how to do it better than I did before. All these things made me realize how important the mental side of the preparation is.”
Steve Hooker tapped into the power of his subconscious to help him achieve his dream of winning the gold medal. Whether you are an athlete trying to realize your full potential and compete at your highest level of focus, energy and concentration or somebody who just wants to reach their fitness or life goals with more ease, like Steve Hooker, hypnotherapy can be a very powerful tool for you.
Virgil F. Vasquez specializes in working with athletes and helping them reach their full potential and empowering people to reach their fitness as well as weight loss goals. For more info please visit www.TherapeuticalHypnosis.com or call 661-607-8355.