INTRODUCTION:
BELIEVE IT, LIVE IT, EXPERIENCE IT

Breathe, relax, soften. Eye on the ball, you’ve got this. Stay calm, stay strong. This is your time. Now go, protect the ball, accelerate, breathe, open. See the space, magnify the space, and now release the ball into the space. It’s easy.

What is this, you might ask? What ball, what space, soften what? This is the inner voice of an athlete I worked with who scored one of the greatest goals in his sport.

While the words above give you an insight into the focus that he had within, outside of this calm, process-driven voice is a stadium of people screaming with all their hearts, creating a deafening wall of sound. Around him, players and coaches are shouting an array of instructions, and the massive scoreboard tells him that his team are losing and time is up. If he misses this shot, his team loses the championship. A lifetime of hopes for the fans and the dreams of his teammates sit firmly on his shoulders.

Everything outside of him is noise, chaos, adversity and pressure, telling him that there is no hope, only threat. Yet everything inside of him is silent, calm and focused, his senses telling him that thereis time and thereis hope and opportunity.

To many, this is a once-in-a-lifetime shot, a shot they have never taken before and might never get a chance to take again. But to him, this is a shot he has hit a thousand times, and he knows it only ends in one way: with him scoring.

In the months leading up to this split second, he had spent hundreds of hours visualising, mentally rehearsing and emotionally preparing for it. He had reprogrammed his inner story, which reprogrammed his entire belief system. He had done this by listening to an audio of specially chosen statements that ended with a very important one: ‘I am an elite player, I am powerful and strong, I back myself in every situation, and Iwill have a massive impact on this season.’

But what made this even more spectacular is that for the months previous, he had not been a starting player on the team. In fact, he was facing being dropped out of the panel.

Rather than getting angry or giving up, he had decided this was the biggest opportunity of his life. Everything in his heart and soul demanded that he do whatever he could to get back on that team.

He broke his training down into every possible area: physical, technical, tactical and mental. And every day, he made sure he was getting better and better in each of those key areas. He had a deep belief that if he could get back on the team, he could have a massive impact and create something special, not just for the team but also for the people in his community, the people he cared deeply about.

We created a special audio for him, one that focused on him expressing himself, on becoming the greatest player he could be: ‘I am an elite player, I am powerful and strong, I back myself in every single situation, and when my opportunity arises I will execute it.’

On the day of the game, he was not selected to start. In fact, it seemed highly unlikely that he would even feature. Yet that morning, with his usual strength, courage and passion, he turned up mentally, physically and technically. He was ready and prepared to play. He told himself he would have a massive impact on the season. When the ball came to him at that critical moment he was now fulfilling a prophecy, he was stepping into something he had visualised a thousand times, so there was no shred of doubt or distraction. He had seen it, lived it, experienced it, and now he simply had to exec