I found the true value of using visualisation as a practised and honed mental skill towards the end of my 12 year professional cricket playing career.
Accessing deep relaxation states regularly on training and match days became embedded in the way I prepared to be at my best. I worked closely with a sports hypnotist at the time and we created bespoke hypnotic scripts to support my preparation for some of the most important, and highly pressurized, matches of my career. Following a particularly challenging period of my life, these new levels of awareness helped mitigate stress and anxiety and, over time, promoted a sense of calm and control, which translated over into my cricketing performances.
Picturing myself performing at my peak created personal performance highlights in my final 2 years as a professional cricketer. Developing and evolving these techniques, with constant practice, my mental approach to the game, both for my batting and slip fielding, brought higher levels of consistency to my performances not accessed in previous years.
All this hard work culminated in succeeding in the most pressurized circumstances you can have in the game. Needing to win a Super Over in the T20 Semi Final for Leicestershire v Lancashire at Edgbaston Cricket Ground 2011. With 15 runs required from 6 balls, and then 5 runs required from 2 balls, I hit a 6 in front of 30,000 spectators and a live TV audience. That season I was voted the Club’s Player of the season and also the Player’s Player of the season.
The lessons I took forward from this experience helped inform the thinking behind setting up our business, Performance Catalyst. 15 years on from my cricket career ending, I still regularly engage with a variety of mental techniques to help bring consistency to my working life as a business facilitator, speaker and leadership coach.
Ever since this period in my life, I have been purposeful in my practice to keep developing my visualisation skills and I use these skills to help me prepare for different situations in my life where I want to perform at my best and achieve specific outcomes, such as:
Giving keynote speeches for corporate clients
Facilitating training and development workshops for corporate clients
Motivational speech to children at a prep-school summer speech day awards ceremony
Chairing and hosting Q&A’s with a comedy improvisation group in front of 250 people
Delivering workshops to young sportspeople on the psychology of performing under pressure
Jack Nickalus quote:
“I never hit a shot, not even in practice, without having a very sharp, in-focus picture of it in my head first”
As this quote reveals, visualisation and mental techniques will vary across different sports and also how you prepare yourself for different situations in business and life. I am very mindful of the skills I have learnt and take them forward with me and will continue to finesse them to endeavour to bring the best of me to all areas of my life. If you desire to be a consistent performer in whatever it is you do, become someone who commits daily practice to enhance and perfect your visualisation skills. It really will be a game changer.