Palmer Smoking Clinic
The New Way To Quit.
Since 1976
Sports Motivation Clinic Chicago
Your mental edge in competitive sports.
Hello, I'm Paul S. Palmer, founder and director of the Palmer Smoking
Clinic and the Sports Motivation Clinic and I've been working with
coaches, teams and individual athletes using hypnosis techniques for
over thirty years. It's mental training that can produce remarkable
results quickly and any athlete at any level can benefit from the
process. If you want to improve your mental game, you found the right
place.
The coaches best friend
I don't tell athletes how to play their sport. I don't interfere with
coaching, but I can make you look like a genius. I teach athletes how to
master the mental side of competition and maximize your coaching
expertise. My area of expertise is in
hypnosis, a recognized therapeutic tool that can help the athlete get in
touch with the part of the mind that controls sports performance. I
get their head in the game and the coach gets all the credit!
Did you say hypnosis?
Yes, I did. Pretty scary stuff, huh? Hypnosis has been around for a few
hundred years and yet most people have no clue what it actually is. It's
the oldest tool for sports performance. I'll
answer a number of hypnosis questions below but for now lets call the
process Mental Imagery or
Visualization, or
Relaxation Therapy or even Meditation
if it makes you feel better. When you begin to understand what
these techniques can do for you, you won't care what it's called.
What can this mental mumbo jumbo do for me?
My process can help you become the best athlete you possibly can become,
when it counts. Is that clear
enough for you? The most important athletic muscle you have is between
your ears and if you don't exercise it properly, every day, all your
work conditioning and training your body and the best coaching is a waste
of time.
There are so many ways mental
conditioning (Hypnosis, if I dare say it!) can help your game but lets start with the most
obvious one.
Do you choke under pressure?
If you are an athlete, at any level, you must have heard that the
mind plays a major role in sports competition. Some estimate it's 90% of
the problem or the solution during moments of peck performance. When the moment of truth
arrives and you choke, what happened?
What happened is, you didn't let the automatic part of the mind do it's
job. You didn't let all those hours of practice and all that good
coaching flow into the situation, naturally.
You tried to use your conscious mind to force the automatic part of your
mind to perform. I doesn't work that way. Your conscious mind is slow
and clumsy when it comes to sports performance. It's full of doubt,
trepidation and confusion when it comes to directing a sports
performance moment. Is this the part of the mind you want in charge of
your peak performance moment? Say no, or you're an idiot!
Yet, thousands of athletes let that happen every day, and wonder why they
choked. Can you fix that? YES! Can Mr. Palmer help you do that? YES!
THE ZONE
Top athletes have long reported that when they were in "The Zone", having
feelings of effortlessness, time slowing down and the ability to
recognize instantly what needed to be done. How did this "Zone" thing
happen? Most top athletes will tell you, they don't know. They sound
like dumb jocks when asked to explain how they did it or what were they
thinking when they made the big play. "I don't know", is the right
answer. The peak performance moment is not remembering the wise words of
the coach or the current game strategy or what you practiced on Tuesday.
It's about the moment only and being on automatic pilot. "Don't think,
react!", sound familiar? I can help you achieve that.
Is practice always a good thing?
We've long known,
HOW you practice is
often more important than how long you
practice. Let me give you one small example. Let's say you play
basketball. One part of the game is shooting free throws. To improve
that part of the game, you go through many hours of repetition. But, the
automatic part of the brain doesn't work like your conscious mind; it
can't tell which rep is the correct one. Is the shot that goes perfectly through the
middle of the net the right one or the one you clanked off the front of
the rim?
The automatic part of your mind can't tell a good one from a bad
one!
I'm serious, how does the automatic part of the mind know the
difference between a good shot or a bad one? It doesn't. Hopefully you
make more free throws in practice than you miss because that's the
collective memory you carry into the game at crunch time. With hypnosis
you can help the automatic part of the mind identify the good ones.
Cool. Huh?
Win! Win! Win!
Is this just about winning? It could be but not always. To some
athletes and coaches, sports is only about winning. If you didn't take
first place, you're a loser. I'm not saying that's wrong, we all need goals. But,
I've always had one foot solidly grounded in reality, you don't win
them
all. Most athletes want to play the best game they can. In team sports
it could mean you played at a personal best but your team lost anyway.
In individual sports it might mean being bested that day by a another
good
athlete (who came to see me last year). Knowing you played at the top of your game should make any
athlete proud. For my athletes, that's what I help them strive for.
What you need to know about hypnosis.
If you think hypnosis is scary, the work of the devil, mind-control
or you are worried it will make you cluck like a chicken, you have to get your head out of
the Dark Ages. Think of anything you ever saw in the movies where the
evil hypnotist sent his helpless victims out to do dastardly deeds. And
now ask yourself, have you ever seen anything like that on the 6 o'clock
news? Have you ever read a story in the newspaper of that kind of thing
happening, anywhere? No, no, a thousand times, no.
Every crackpot throughout the ages has been accused of using mass
hypnosis to dupe their followers and yet there is not one speck of
evidence that actual hypnosis techniques were ever employed, it doesn't
work that way. Hypnosis is a powerful tool because it can help
you
maximize your own abilities and not because it's a tool to control
the mind of others.
Here is what hypnosis can do for the athlete.
Hypnosis helps program the mind for competition, the moment of
truth, crunch time. Hypnosis is a match made in heaven for athletic
performance. It puts you in the right frame of mind to work on the
mental part of your game. It helps develop the mindset for peak performance that the best
athletes in the world already discovered. Hypnosis was an effective tool
for athletic performance long before sports psychology came along.
Am I hypnotized during the game?
No. The hypnosis process happens off the field, in my office and
then in
your lounge chair at home. The locker room isn't even the place to
work on your mental game. You want a place where you won't be disturbed, away from any distractions.
How much time does hypnosis take?
Here is the surprise. After your initial visit to my office (1 1/2
hours) or a team session (2 hours) you start off with 5 minute mental
sessions a day! The practice CD you get is no longer than 15 minutes and
even that you don't listen to every day. This isn't like your physical
training and/or practice that can go on for hours. How can these short
sessions help? The short answer is, you are using techniques to train
the mind, longer is not better. It's the precision
of the process not the length of time that's important.
What happens when I'm in a trance?
One
of the biggest misconceptions about hypnosis is that you are out of it
or in a trance, unconscious and under the spell of the hypnotist. That's
only in the movies. You are only relaxing in the same way you would
relax if you were intending to take a nap. You use this relaxation
process to program in what you want to have happen during the game.
Think of it as getting mental reps at winning so that during the game
you have that experience logged in. And that's only
the beginning of what you can work on.
Can anybody be hypnotized?
Yes, unless you have a condition that prevents you from
normal relaxation, you can be hypnotized. Hypnosis is not a new state of mind that you've never
experienced before. You pass through the same levels of relaxation that
hypnosis uses every night on your way to sleep. This doesn't mean that
everyone can do it instantly, only that you were born with all the
tools to be hypnotized. The relaxation experience is similar to meditation
but with someone to guide you through the experience. Hypnosis has also
been call "guided relaxation".
I make my process easy to understand and easy to use.
Read any good articles on sports psychology lately? Me neither! Have
you tried to plow through the literature on sports psychology? Most of
it seems to be written for other sports psychologists! They have their
own language and terms that no one else seems to be able to make heads or tails of. If
you
thought you were a dummy, it's not you. I've
read that stuff, (so you don't have to) and I'll be your translator.
I've made it my business to make my program easy to understand, easy to
work with and affordable.
My help is always in confidence.
Many of my athletes seek my help and don't want the world to know
how they improved their performance. If you wish to pass my name on to
other athletes, I'll be eternally grateful but I won't rat you out to
your competition or use your success story to advertize my business.
Well, do you need to make an appointment? Then
Call!
A session with Paul S. Palmer, director of the Sports Motivation
Clinic, will be the best thing you ever did to improve your game. Then
you'll have a reason to get that new set of clubs!
Next, you'll need to answer a few questions.
Before you come in for your private session, I ask my clients to fill out
the Sports Performance Questionnaire. It saves a lot of precious time,
and asks you to start to focus on the things we will work on during your
session. Use this link to get to a printable
questionnaire.
But, I have a whole team that needs help!
No problem. I have worked with teams and/or coaching staffs for years. My two hour workshop
explains the mental conditioning process in a easy to understand,
enjoyable way. I won't even call it hypnosis if it makes you more
comfortable. My program never interferes with coaching or training
methods, quit the opposite the athlete will use that expertise as part
of their mental journey. Team or coaches workshops in the Chicago-land area start
at $1600.oo and
includes a practice CD for each participant. You can also become a
team
sponsor (send me to your favorite team) but please, not as a surprise to
the coaching staff!
What kind of athletes have you helped?
Here is a sample: 1 NFL quarterback, 3 NFL players, 3 Pro Baseball
players, 2 Pro Soccer players, 1 Pro Hockey player,14 minor league baseball
players, 300 plus college scholarship athletes,1 race car driver, 1 tour
golfer, 1 Pro Fisherman, 5 Olympic
competitors, 1 National Championship college player, 83 State
Championship High School players and a whole bunch of amateur
competitors who just want to play the best game they can.
What does an office visit cost?
For a private hypnosis session and your own custom CD, the cost is
only $250.oo. Can one session do it? One session can do a lot, but to be
honest the reason one session can be so helpful is that many of my clients
never did anything to help their mental game before. Even one baby step
can mean a big improvement in performance. Mental conditioning skills
are no different from other skills, they take some practice and there are many
levels to challenge even the best athletes.
Most clients use the CD very successfully and others work better
with periodic office sessions. My personal touch and the time I spend with
my clients is what I'm famous for.
New for 2008. You can now order a Custom CD for the same cost as an
office visit
for those athletes who don't live in the Chicago area. Instead of an
office visit, I'll arrange an interview either by phone or e-mail. See
Order Form. For other applications of
hypnosis see Hypnosis
Programs.
Call to make an appointment or to ask questions about the program.
See my expanded sports wed site at
www.sportshypnosischicago.info
Office Number 708-233-1111
back to Home page
Sports Motivation Clinic
9748 S. Roberts Road
Palos Hills, IL. 60465