Is it time to rewire your brain?
I had an experience when I won the Dutch Open snooker tournament in 1989. I played the quarter- and semi-final free-flowing but, when I got to the final, it was televised all over Europe and I could not hold my cue for the first two frames!
That’s what triggered my interest in what’s happening inside the brain. I went on some courses in America and, since then, my approach has been more about helping players not to allow themselves to get into those anxious, fearful states. It’s more of a modern approach to psychology and it’s what I call neural rewiring. You’re rewiring your brain to achieve better automatic thoughts, which leads to a better emotional state. That, ultimately, has the biggest influence on performance.
I started working with Rafa Cabrerabello in June 2015. Next year, he was going to Augusta and the Ryder Cup. This year I was working with both finalists at the World Snooker Championship, Mark
Selby and Shaun Murphy. It’s a sevenstep process to rewire the brain and, through repetition of watching videos, listening to audio and identifying your own negative thoughts, you can create opposite positives and train the brain to produce more positive thoughts and emotions. Selby has been doing it a year and he feels like a different person.
He runs this process twice daily and it takes 30 minutes for all seven steps. Over a period of two to three weeks, we will identify what a person’s automatic negative thoughts are and he/she will usually list between ten and 20 (e.g., you’re not good enough, they’re better than you etc).
Your subconscious takes everything as fact. For example, you might be safe in bed, have a nightmare at 3am and are then frightened to death. How does that happen? Your brain is seeing something it doesn’t recognise and fires off these fight, flight or freeze mechanisms.
The traditional psychology approach for something negative is to try and recover from it. We want to train the brain not to fire in the first place and create the opposite, personal, present
“YOU ARE REWIRING YOUR BRAIN TO ACHIEVE BETTER AUTOMATIC THOUGHTS. IT’S NEURAL REWIRING” Chris Henry, mental and performance coach
tense positives of that negative. Everybody should be doing this stuff.
One part of the process is to collate a list of opposite positives and, on a voice recorder, say each out loud three times (e.g., “I am a top-class golfer”). You may not be, but it will create the belief that you are. Then, squirt some aftershave on to your wrist that you’ve never used before so it’s a brand new smell. Now, with your earphones on, press play so it appears inside your head like a thought.
Over a couple of months, Selby said these new thoughts were beginning to pop up automatically. It’s not a complicated process but it just needs doing. And guess what aftershave he was wearing when he won the world final? The same one with which he started this process!