By Erin Del Toro, ACHE Licensed Clinical Hypnotherapist

Leading up to the 1984 Olympics, after 20 years of low rankings, the coaches for the USA Judo team knew that to make a dent in the Japanese-dominated scene, they needed big change. The American Olympic fighters they trained were highly skilled. During practice, it seemed like the athletes should be able to beat most of the fighters from other countries. But when the US team brought their skills to the Olympic stage, they failed out more quickly than the coaches could explain.

They decided to try a new approach by hiring 7th degree black belt and former educator George Hamm specifically to develop a new mental preparation training model. Their reason for banking on George was simple – in addition to being a Master Instructor and being heavily formally educated, he was primarily a sports hypnotherapist with a new approach that had been proven to work. 

Hamm observed the abilities of the US Judo team, saw that they were capable enough to be ranking higher, and decided to try a demonstration. He found a Japanese martial artist who had NEVER trained in Judo before and brought him to practice. Secretly, he showed the young man a few basic moves, explained the rules and put him straightaway into the ring to fight the team’s best Olympic athlete. 

While the American fought the untrained Judo artist, his coaches noticed the difference in performance – it was a replay of the former Olympic games as the American fighter lost strength and ability, giving a landslide victory to the young Japanese man. 

It was clear that there was only one reason the US fighter lost…he gave up the match subconsciously before even starting, the moment he realized his opponent was from Japan. 

Hamm went on to train the team with his proven mental programming techniques, leaning heavily on hypnotherapy. In the Cinderella year of 1984, the US Judo team came out of nowhere to take the silver medal in the half-middleweight class and the bronze in two other divisions. The US team had learned their most valuable lesson –  the formula to winning was in their minds.

This story happens in athletics and every other area of life.

Your kid has been training all season, making winning moves for their team like crazy, but when it gets to the championship playoffs, they just seem like they are off their game. It happens in sales, it happens in business, in interpersonal relationships, with learning and testing, with personal financial growth and pretty much anywhere the human mind can come up with some good reason that success may not happen. 

Ourselves, our partners, our children, our employees, our teammates…how often does failure happen simply because in our minds, we subconsciously think there’s enough reason for us to not succeed?

George Hamm found the solution to this quandary as he experimented with the power of the mind, and he knew hypnotherapy was the fastest way to level up his athletes, but his strategy works for anything. It works for sales, business success, for test-taking, for learning, for any kind of emotional change and pretty much anything you might desire to succeed in.

Hamm’s athletes succeeded because, as he liked to put it, he was “Teaching the other 90% of the mind.”

You’ve probably heard the statistic before that human beings consciously use only 10% of our brains. The other 90%, the subconscious, is constantly processing and managing memories, feelings, involuntary body functions and new information coming into the mind. 

You can think of the subconscious brain like a computer acting exactly as it’s told to – programmed by words, thoughts and experiences. Relying on the filter of the conscious mind, the subconscious mind believes anything that the conscious mind doesn’t nix before accepting it as truth. We do this all the time as we decide whether or not something is true. 

An exaggerated example of this might be that you walk into a room wearing a grey shirt and a co-worker says to you, “I like your yellow shirt.” Most likely, the conscious part of your brain will immediately reject this thought and “filter” it away from your subconscious mind since you already understand you are wearing grey. If you didn’t use your filter, say you didn’t consciously understand colors for some reason, you would be highly suggestible to the yellow shirt idea from your color-challenged friend.