Gymnastics is a fantastic sport. There are a lot of gymnasts in the family. We have even had the Welsh junior champion, Celtic champion and British Junior champion. So this is a sport in which I have a lot of interest.

A common problem that can develop in this sport is fear when doing moves such as flicks. (Flicks are a complex manoeuvre where the gymnast flips backwards touches the ground with their hands and flips up on to their feet). The child will go to do the move and then back out, this is a similar thing to what occurs in golf. The golfer goes to swing the club and does what is commonly referred to as the yips.

Many children given time will overcome this issue, others don’t. Yesterday, I was working with a stunningly talented gymnast who had had this problem for four years. She could do most of her gymnastic moves excellently but was repeatedly pulling out of her round-off flicks. We had a great time. I used EFT, TAT, NLP, in fact I flung everything at this one.

Interesting points I put in forward whilst doing the EFT was, “you don’t even have to think about doing a roundoff flick, because you already know how to do that don’t you, you can just trust that you can do that.”

In order to be able to do intricate movements such as flicks etc you need to be operating on auto-pilot, just like the pilot in a plane. He just lets the plane fly itself. Auto-pilot in humans is basically the unconscious mind, if you try to consciously control a flick you are far less safe. The way to switch to auto-pilot is to turn off the nerves. 

Another method I used was finding out what feeling she had that let her know that she felt extremely confident. She has a “surging feeling in her chest”. She felt this feeling when she thought about somersaults. We used this and associated it to round-off flicks whilst doing EFT.

Today, I found out that she is happily somersaulting, flick flacking, doing round-off flicks without a care in the world. In other words she is back to her normal confident self doing.

All the best,

Tania