Perform Beyond Your Peak: Expand Your Performing With Brainspotting
By Tom Rohrer, PhD, LMFT
In my practice, I often work with athletes and creative performers of all skill levels who are looking to take their game to the next level. They tell me that they have reached their best but want to know a way to perform even better. For these clients, I often suggest the Brainspotting Expansion approach — a revolutionary therapeutic process used to promote and enhance your skill sets, regardless of your sport. Brainspotting is based on the idea that where you look influences what you feel. Finding and focusing on the correct point in your visual field allows your brain and body to easily and quickly help you adjust and improve your level of performing.
As any athlete knows, sometimes your brain and body get stuck in old negative thought-behavior patterns and become your own worst enemy. For example, maybe you’ve had a stretch of poor performing, anxiety, worry, and memories of past problems come up. Brainspotting’s “Expansion Model” helps you move beyond these negative feelings and experiences, by focusing on your brain and body’s knowing, connecting to that knowing, and expanding it. Check out this previous article on my website about an athlete client who used Brainspotting to improve performance and limit game time anxiety.
According to David Grand, PhD, developer and trainer of Brainspotting, it allows you to push past your self-limiting patterns, such as anxiety and fear, to grow beyond the limits you have subconsciously set on yourself. This “Expansion Model” is based on the belief that human growth potential is infinite.
What is the Expansion Model?
When you hear the word “expansion,” you probably think about growing. But in the case of the Expansion Model, you won’t be growing physically. Instead, you’ll connect with your personal resource states and the eye position that helps you connect. Later, looking at that same eye position during practice or during your athletic event will allow you to fully reconnect to those same resource states.
So what are these resource states? They include your deepest inner knowing, strengths, and mental capabilities. By tapping into them, you can expand your deepest desires and goals. Guidance via Brainspotting helps you unlock your resource spot — a personal characteristic or series of characteristics you’d like to expand for your athletic or creative performance development, including:
- Courage
- Hope
- Possibility
- Resilience
- The Zone
As your guide during expansion sessions, I may suggest resource options for you to focus on and embrace. Yet, the best information and guidance comes from within you!
No matter the resource you are trying to develop including being in “the Zone,” expansion work helps you connect, magnify, and amplify the skills required to surpass what you thought was your best personal performance.
To truly benefit from the Expansion Model, you need to realize that your brain’s wiring is infinite. Using Brainspotting techniques, you can lock onto your “expansion spot” or the point in your visual field that connects with your brain’s wiring of that resource. Why is this important? It’s because the Expansion Model promotes bottom-up (unconscious up to conscious) processing, allowing you to fast-track your desired changes for performance and creative thinking.
If you are looking to improve your athletic, creative, or professional performing, look no further than the Brainspotting Expansion Model. Contact me today to learn more about how this revolutionary therapeutic approach can help you.
