Sports

Welcome to the Ahead For Sport where we help and support professional and amateur sports people to optimise their performance through building a strong and resilient mindset.

Mental performance coach, Debbie Hill has developed her approach from over 30 years experience coaching in the equestrian industry, she is a level 3 coach and NLP Sports Master Practitioner.  No stranger to the pressures of competition herself, she currently competes her own dressage horse ‘Ginger' at Advanced level.

Debbie takes time to find out how her clients are thinking and behaving during competition and training and understand what it is they want to achieve, helping to set goals and create an achievable pathway. Through a variety of exercises and techniques, she shows them how to use their thinking to enhance their performance, control their emotional state and use mental strategies to achieve positive results.

Professional athletes also find business management benefits too.

Sports performance combines three elements:

Technical

Physical

Mental

Each component plays an equal part, yet most sports people train to be physically fit and technically able, but pay little or no attention to how they are thinking.

It is our thinking which causes self-doubt and failure. When faced with competition we allow our minds to think about what will happen if we don’t get a good start, are not fit enough, fast enough, good enough until we are consumed by negativity and essentially we cause our own failure.  Sometimes we allow an opponent to get into our head causing us to believe we cannot win even when the past has shown our ability as better, we talk ourselves into losing, by thinking they are stronger or fitter than us today.

Mental strength also combines three elements:

Will

Concentration

Emotional balance

Each of these elements plays an equal part in contributing to balanced and clear thinking under pressure, sometimes it is a previous experience which has embedded itself leading to an unhelpful belief or lack of confidence or you may have commitments outside your sport which limit your ability to really focus.