Hello, everyone. It's Dr. Caroline Lloyd. Welcome back to the EMDR Doctor podcast. It's good to be back. I don't know if you missed me as I didn't produce a podcast last week. The week truly got away with me with the combination of the short week pre -Easter and the short week between Easter and Anzac Day, so apologies for that. I feel a bit terrible about skipping a week and letting you down, but I'm back now and hopefully we'll be able to live up to weekly podcasts from here. Although these coming few weeks are super busy for me too, I am currently working on a presentation for the MDRA conference next week so by the time this podcast drops I will be in Adelaide nerding out on all things EMDR, soaking up the information and the new ideas and probably stressing about my presentation! With this in mind I thought I would do a quick review on EMDR and performance enhancement.
Maybe this is a little bit of self -interest for my own EMDR practice. Nothing like a bit of self -EMDR to help with those tricky moments in life. It is very nice to have a skill to help oneself. So, anything that we have anxiety about can be alleviated by using EMDR. It goes without saying that a lot of performance issues can be identified as anxiety. Public speaking, pitching for a big sale, elite competition of any sort, are all going to go a lot better if we are not anxious about them, and if we hold those lovely positive cognitions of capability like I'm good at my job, I'm an expert sportsperson, I'm an interesting speaker, etc. And if it is past experiences that have caused that anxiety, then it's an easy plan to process those memories, install that positive cognition and go from there.
With EMDR, we work in three time zones, so to speak, the past, the present and the future. So with public speaking that might well play out as processing memories of past speaking engagements which didn't go so well, maybe the present triggers of seeing the stage or the podium and a future template of a successful event. The future template is a bit like the rehearsals that performance coaches might do with imagining everything going the very best it could go, but with EMDR we take it a bit slower and we process out any distress that shows up along the way until we can imagine a whole episode of the event going smoothly. As I've been preparing for this talk, I have noticed a fair bit of procrastination. Luckily we have deadlines or else I would never ever get the thing done. And the procrastination is due solely to fear and anxiety, those sneaky underlying thoughts of "I'm not good enough, I'll make a fool out of myself, everyone will know that I'm truly an imposter." Now, just naming those thoughts out loud to you right now feels a little surreal. One part of me absolutely knows that none of that is true.
However, it's that other part of me that believes it to be true that is getting in the way. Digging down and figuring out where these thoughts come from happens within the EMDR session. Our brains just naturally want to heal and so we will go to where the pain is as the processing happens. For me one of those past events was actually falling over on stage whilst playing Lady Macbeth.
Maybe when I was about 19 years old. Yep, someone in the audience actually laughed, crushing. I had actually forgotten about that incident until I started working on myself with regards to this upcoming talk. It's certainly stung at the time. Now that I've identified it and worked through it, it just feels like something that happened a very long time ago. Incidentally, fear of public speaking is actually one of the most common fears. They say that more people are afraid of speaking in public than of dying. Interesting little factoid. As we process a current day fear or anxiety, very old memories may come up with some unexpected twists and turns.
For example, birth order may well be a factor in performance. The oldest born child expects to win. The middle child often expects to come second, but they may have a very competitive streak to go with this, which can both cause anxiety and help to overcome the hurdle of procrastination. Second born children are pretty used to having to strive, work harder and complain less than the first born, who might take strength and advantage a little bit for granted. Now I'm definitely not saying that any of the birth orders are better or worse than one another, but they might have their own hangups and their own strengths to be taken into account when optimizing performance, and it is one of the factors that we would be thinking about. Early Experiences of life are so important in influencing our perception of ourselves Any experiences of being mocked or criticized or demeaned Bleed etc create our beliefs about ourselves and then we project these internalized beliefs onto our audience So if we were criticized for our public speaking attempts say in third grade, when we presented a book report to the class, for example, and we were told that we looked stupid or awkward, then we will project that onto our audience. And we will believe that the audience thinks that we look stupid and awkward. And then that creates a whole lot of anxiety and underlines and accentuates our shame and embarrassment.
And that perceptions certainly won't allow us to relax and confidently make the stage our own. So once we can identify and then process those vicious cycles of negative beliefs and shame, they lose their power and we can let them go. Fear of being injured again is a common one in sports performance in athletes and once the trust in the body has been damaged. Those negative beliefs around I'm broken, I'm damaged, my knee, my shoulder, my back is weak, my body lets me down can really impact upon the body's relaxation and the fluidity that's necessary for high performance sports.
If you imagine a tennis player reaching for a shot with that lurking thought of my body is weak or my shoulder is weak or my knee lets me down, they're not going to be playing their best game. They might find themselves freezing or underreaching out of fear and protection. So the EMDR session might focus on the previous injury and pain for example. We would be aiming to get back the trust and relaxation that comes with that. So with EMDR for performance the final stages of integration are really important. Even with the processing of the past, present and future, sometimes it's the behavioural intervention and the planning and execution of those plans that enables the previous work to be kind of fulfilled. So it's really good that I'm speaking next Saturday, right? And just one other thing that I might just pop in here. We have to be a little bit careful not to conflate or confuse mental good health with excellence in performance. It may well be our mental health flaws or difficult experiences that drive us to be outstanding performers. Just look at our politicians, for example, which is kind of easy right now for Australians because we're in the middle of an election campaign. I can think of one or to world leaders who are excellent performers whilst being possibly very damaged individuals.
Sometimes it is our flaws that drive us to excel or work hardest or win at all costs, which is an interesting conundrum for the therapist and brings us back to the idea of working on precisely what the client wants to address, not what we might think is important. Although, somehow, I doubt that those world leaders are going to end up on my draw step. I might have to do a bit more self -EMDR if they did. I hope that's been interesting for you. I will talk to you again next week. In the meantime, take good care, bye for now.
