• Difficulties with interviews? 

• Exams? 

• Golf tournaments? 

We can help!  Underlying all these difficulties is anxiety and how, in excess, it affects our brains & our performance.

Three common causes of under-performance

1. When we get very anxious or very emotional in any way, part of our emotional brain shuts down other parts of our brain that we use to think*. In other words, however intelligent we are, emotion can stop us being able to use our intelligence when we need it most. This is what people are referring to when they say that they couldn’t “think straight”. *(the amygdala cuts off access to the neo-cortex & hippocampus) This is a little known part of a more well-known survival mechanism that you might have heard of: the so-called Fight or Flight Response. It explains a lot of common difficulties that many people have in high stress situations when they are under pressure to perform: such as their mind going blank in an exam or when about to give a speech or other public performance –sometimes called “stage-fright”. It also explains many people’s inability to perform at their best in an interview.
2.  A second common cause of people not performing at their best in these types of situation is that they are not 100% focused on the task in hand: instead, at least half of them is focused on their worries about how they are performing or how they are coming across to others or the outcome (e.g. “Am I blushing/stammering/ do they think I’m a jerk?)
3.  When we are anxious about something, in the days before the big event, it is all too human to worry about all the things that could go wrong or that we could do wrong. There is nothing wrong with this if it helps us to prepare for the worst but all too often, instead we end up rehearsing failure: getting ourselves worked up & more & more anxious- and in the process, we, unwittingly, increase the likelihood of performing badly.

Happily there are simple solutions to all these problems- if we can stay calm, focus 100% on the task at hand and rehearse success instead of failure -we can access our whole brain and all our intelligence and perform at our best, even when under pressure. We can coach you to do just that using the best modern techniques and an up-to-date understanding of how the brain/mind/body system can be helped to perform at its best.

Therapist Locations:

ARKLOW; ASHBOURNE; BRAY; CORK; DUBLIN; GREYSTONES; KILKENNY; KILMACANOGUE;  LIMERICK; LEITRIM; NEWTOWNARDS