Sports performance anxiety is the nervousness or fear athletes feel before or during competition, which can negatively affect anxiety and sport performance outcomes.
Sports Performance Anxiety Coaching in Melbourne
Elite performance isn’t just physical — the mental game matters just as much. Sports performance anxiety can affect athletes at any level, from weekend amateurs to professionals, and left unaddressed it can quietly derail a career. At Whole Mind Strategies, Tony Gilmour has spent over 10 years helping Melbourne athletes build a winning mindset and manage performance anxiety at the subconscious level.
You can be the fittest, most skilled player on the field and still lose the game in your head. Performance anxiety doesn’t discriminate by talent – it shows up in golfers who suddenly can’t putt from three feet, boxers who freeze in the ring despite months of sparring, and footballers who play a flawless training session and then tighten up the moment the whistle blows in a real match.
For over 10 years, Tony Gilmour has worked with athletes across Melbourne – from weekend club players to UFC fighters — helping them close the gap between how they perform in training and how they perform when it counts.
Psychotherapist Tony Gilmour has worked with several high-profile sporting professionals in Melbourne for over 10 years developing a winning mindset. Tony has developed a sports psychology program to bring about changes at a subconscious level to improve performance and lessen anxiety through hypnosis. Our sports performance hypnotherapy program consists of 6 individual clinical hypnotherapy sessions to combat performance anxiety in sports over a six-week period, coupled with a set of 6 sport hypnosis recordings to listen to between sessions and a set of 9 recorded tracks that can be listened to in a car. Rest assured, confidentiality is assured for all our sports performance anxiety patients.
Tony’s clinical sports performance anxiety hypnosis sessions occur at his practice in Dandenong, ideal for residents in Knox, Oakleigh, Cranbourne, and the greater Melbourne area.
An Experienced Sports Hypnotherapist Who Has Worked with the Best in Their Field
As a sports and performance psychologist, Tony has worked with numerous sports players in Melbourne, casual and professionals, who are looking to achieve their maximum potential in the sports they play. Some sports players he has successfully helped combat the psychology behind performance anxiety sports include:
- UFC fighters
- Boxers
- Tennis players
- Footballers
- Kayakers
- Golfers
- Lawn bowlers
- Basketball players
- Martial artists
- And many more
These are real-world anxiety in sport examples where mental performance issues were successfully addressed with therapy.
Our Sports Anxiety Program for Melbourne
Tony’s program starts by teaching you how your mind works so you get an understanding of how we create anxiety and sport performance, what we do, and how to set and achieve your goals. In sports, we train our mind and body through repetition until we have developed a skill or technique. This skill is trained in the subconscious mind and body until it becomes habitual. We don’t need to think about it.
Our subconscious mind is processing information at 20,000,000 bits of information per second and sends messages to muscle memory to perform the skill or technique. We are not even conscious of it. However, when anxiety in sports performance interferes, athletes can feel blocked, pressured, or overwhelmed.
How Sports Hypnotherapy Melbourne Uses Hypnosis and Psychology?
Let’s take the example of someone jumping up to catch a ball. First, the mind must work out the speed of the ball, the height, the distance, and the trajectory and calculate where the best possible place will be to catch the ball. At the same time, it must be calculating the speed, height, and distance the body must move to reach that point. The mind must at the same time be sending information to just about every muscle in the body, on just the right amount of tension or release that will enable the body to take
Those couple of steps, jump up and bring the hands together at just the right time and with just the right amount of pressure to catch the ball. That body is one hell of a machine and that mind is one hell of a computer.
The problem is thinking. Once we bring in the conscious mind and start thinking, things like anxiety and sports performance interrupt the flow of information passing between the subconscious and muscle memory. This is what’s known as the yips in golf. When athletes are off their game due to performance anxiety in sports, it is usually a psychological issue, not a physical one.
Who This Is For
You’ll recognise this if any of these sound familiar:
- The “practice-game gap.” You’re consistent, even excellent, in training — and then something changes the second there’s a crowd, a scoreboard, or an opponent watching.
- The yips. A skill you’ve done thousands of times — a putt, a free throw, a serve — suddenly feels foreign, and thinking about it only makes it worse.
- The pre-competition spiral. You know the anxiety is coming before you even arrive at the venue, and it’s started affecting your sleep, appetite, or motivation to train.
- The “one bad moment” that won’t let go. A specific mistake, injury, or loss is still running in the background every time you’re in a similar situation.
- Coaches and parents looking for support for an athlete who’s mentally blocked despite having the physical ability.
If any of that’s landed close to home, this program was built for exactly that gap between physical skill and mental performance.
What to Expect
Here’s what the program actually looks like, so there are no surprises before you book:
- Session 1 is about understanding, not fixing. Before any hypnotherapy, you’ll learn how your subconscious mind actually executes trained skills — muscle memory processing roughly 20 million bits of information per second, well below conscious awareness — and exactly where anxiety interrupts that process. Most athletes find this alone changes how they think about their own “mental block.”
- Six sessions, one per week, six weeks total. This is the timeframe that’s proven necessary to shift ingrained subconscious patterns — not a one-off pep talk.
- Recordings built for your sport. You’ll get 6 hypnosis recordings tailored to sports performance, plus 9 additional tracks designed for listening in the car on the way to training or competition.
- Full confidentiality. If you’re a known or competing athlete, this matters — nothing about your sessions is shared, including with coaches, clubs, or sponsors, unless you choose to.
- No guaranteed outcomes. Like any registered healthcare provider, we won’t promise a result — Victorian consumer law prohibits it, and anyone guaranteeing outcomes should raise a flag. What we can offer is a structured, evidence-informed process.
- Delivered from Dandenong, easily reached from Knox, Oakleigh, Cranbourne, and greater Melbourne.
Can Hypnosis Work for Sports Performance Anxiety?
Sports players need plenty of training to develop their skills, however, it is crucial that they are always in the right state of mind so that their bodies perform at their best. Should their mental state or sports performance anxiety be hindering their abilities—whether at training or during major competitions—it can have a detrimental effect on their long-term career.
Whether you are on the courts, at the gym, or on the pitch, hypnosis can help address the effects of anxiety on sports performance that exist within your subconscious.
Tony Gilmour, like other healthcare providers in Melbourne including psychologists, doctors, and psychiatrists, does not offer guarantees for his sports hypnosis services.
With guidance from a dedicated sports mental performance coach, you can learn how to deal with performance anxiety in sports, discover how to overcome sports performance anxiety, and build resilience to perform at your peak.
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