Sport Psychology

The Destructive Power of Negative Training

By Laura King, CHt, NLP & Life Coach

In all of my years as a hypnotherapist and coach, and also as a parent, there’s one thing I just don’t understand—why adults continue to use negative training such as hazing, bullying, and reverse psychology with those in their care.

As a trainer, you know that there is a power imbalance with student and teacher or coach. And when you have the upper hand, and essentially have someone vulnerable in your care, you should take that position seriously. Trainers must accept that the psyche—the self-esteem and confidence of their students—is largely in their hands. And because of that, they have a duty to build-up their students, to inspire them, to collaborate with them. Any strategy or behavior that tears down or abuses the student is entirely unethical and needs to be called out. For instance: Hazing. Hazing includes intentional humiliation, ridicule, and other kinds of endangerment to the mental, physical and emotional safety of the student. Hazing is usually couched in the intention of helping the student become part of the in-group. Bullying. Bullying, on the other hand, might involve similar behavior as hazing, but the intention is to single out and exclude the person. This abusive strategy is repetitive and relentless. Reversepsychology. Reverse psychology attempts to get someone to do something by pretending to want the opposite. The premise is an expectation that the person is fairly dedicated to resisting advice, or maybe the advice of a specific person. Reverse psychology is, at its very core, dishonest. It is a strategy designed to provoke the other person to resist your stated recommendation, and do what you really want them to do. For example, you want your student to increase their difficulty level in their jumping and you know that they are full of fear. You might use reverse psychology and say, “I don’t think you should try for anything higher—you might get too scared.” Your student doesn’t like being called a scaredy cat, and will then increase their difficulty just to prove you wrong. This is literally the opposite of straightforward.

What’s more, it doesn’t work. Neither does hazing or bullying. If your goal is the improved mental and athletic performance of your students, you are working at cross purposes when you do it by negative training. Let me explain.

Students come to you at various points in their journey to unconscious competence (i.e., they intuitively do what they need to do for their best performance, and don’t even think about it). You may recall that people begin unconscious of their lack of competence, and then become aware of their incompetence. That’s usually the point when they seek (more) help because they realize they need it. The bulk of training takes place when the student is moving from conscious incompetence to conscious competence, and then to unconscious competence.

Here’s what happens in the brain of the student during this time: • They are creating visualizations of what they want to do (e.g., what their personal best will look like) • They are creating muscle memory, through repetition, of certain movements. • They are attaching emotions and thoughts to their learning environment and the mechanics of their bodies during their training. • They are developing their self-talk.

As the popular social media meme says: “What could go wrong?”

Humans being humans, while their brain is doing all of this stuff with its ultimate goal of peak performance and personal bests, it needs an optimal environment. Optimal means support from the outside world, including encouragement, love, and positive reinforcement from trainers. It needs positive training.

Unfortunately for us humans, our brains are like Teflon for the positive, and Velcro for the negative. This does not bode well

for students who aren’t treated with the utmost respect and concern by their trainers. The brain of the student—the brain of the human—is always on the lookout for threats to its survival. This makes any perceived threat by a trainer far more powerful than anything positive that is happening internally.

In fact, in order to store positive moments in the long-term memory we must work at it. We must savor those moments intentionally, including as many sensory details as possible. However, nobody tells us that we have to do this or helps us learn how.

Meanwhile, negative moments are far quicker stored and recalled. This makes sense in terms of evolution, but it makes the words and actions of the trainer crucial to the development of positive mental and athletic performance. The significance of the behavior of the trainer in this scenario cannot be overstated.

I suppose, at the end of the day, you want to ask yourself: What kind of person/coach/parent/trainer was I today? How did I behave in my relationships? How did I communicate? Did I communicate and behave with integrity? Did I add something positive to the lives of those around me? Did I build them up?

None of us needs help tearing ourselves down. Uplift others. It’s kind, and it works.

As you have probably experienced, behavior change is difficult. And if you’re the type of trainer whose go-to strategy is something negative, there is a way to turn that around. I say this with confidence because plenty of my clients are trainers. In fact, they are the reason I am writing about this. They had a change of heart all by themselves, but realized their impulse to be negative was so strong and deeply ingrained that they couldn’t shift it on their own.

Howdidtheshifthappen? Through hypnosis and Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP). These two life-altering tools can do what you cannot do on your own—reprogram your brain quickly so that your default way of communicating is positive rather than negative. Behavior change doesn’t have to be slow, with one step forward and two steps back, which is what happens when you rely on your willpower and you are constantly, consciously trying to communicate in a positive way rather than in your default, negative way when you train. Hypnosis and NLP allow you to bypass the mechanisms for conscious choice and willpower. They rewire your choices so that the positive one is the one that naturally rises to the surface and is manifested in your words and your behavior. They position your communiAbout the author: cation while you are training to For more on how Laura can help you be respectful, supportive, and become a better, more positive trainer, go to www.laurakinghypnosis.com or uplifting. call 561-841-7603.

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