Everyone I work with is has unique challenges, goals and needs, and so my process always looks different.

I always start with an initial 15-minute consultation. This helps us both determine whether we want to proceed and if we are a good fit.

If we decide to go ahead, I will share some forms online you can complete so I can get to know you and what you want out of therapy. If you want to integrate this with your coaching, I may ask your coach to complete some forms or to speak with them.

Once we know what your goals are, I will suggest a package that best suits these. These are usually six to eight sessions, but this is flexible and depends on the goals. We can also time the sessions around coaching or events, including performances or competitions.

Sessions include different elements you want to work on, side-by-side, so that you can reach your goals faster. For example, in one session we may work on pain management and habit building for training consistently. The next session we may look at goals for an upcoming competition and work on anxiety and mindset.

Between sessions I may assign tasks so that the work we are doing together is being integrated effectively into your training and life, and so that the information we have in session is accurate. You can think of this as a part of your training plan.

Towards the end of our time together, we will start to space the sessions out a little. This gives you time to implement changes and really find out what’s working. Our last sessions will focus on transferring skills learned to other areas of your life and creating a plan to integrate everything you have learned into your life consistently - even when things get challenging.

If you are interested in continuing our work together - whether it's long-term, or top-ups before events and competitions, I offer reduced rates for returning and maintenance clients.

Hypnosis is a state of heightened suggestibility. We respond to suggestions all the time, often without thinking about it. Hypnotherapy is about choosing to enter a state of heightened suggestibility to respond to positive suggestions we choose.

Hypnosis works with your nervous system to help you feel positive, calm and focused. Entering hypnosis is as easy as daydreaming, if you can daydream or relax your mind in any other normal way then you can enter hypnosis.

Hypnosis is a cognitive state, not a feeling. It may feel different for different people, at different times and depending on the focus of the hypnotherapy. It may feel like relaxation, absorption in the imagination, intense focus on one idea, or many other things.

Hypnosis isn’t like sleep, because you need to consciously accept the suggestions being used in hypnosis, and you can’t do this if you’re in a sleep-like state. You may feel very relaxed, but you should be mentally awake the whole time. I adapt hypnosis for sporting performance to be alert hypnosis, where you integrate hypnosis into a sporting ritual.

You cannot be hypnotised against your will, and when in hypnosis you will only respond to suggestions you want to respond to. Hypnosis is a temporary state of mind you choose to enter and can choose to leave at any time.

In a word, yes. Hypnosis has been found in many studies to be an effective, especially when paired with CBT, mindfulness and relaxation therapies.

The British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a 'Clinical Review' of hypnosis and relaxation therapies and found that:

• “Hypnosis and relaxation techniques can reduce anxiety particularly that related to stressful situations”
• “They are also effective for panic disorders and insomnia, particularly when integrated into a package of cognitive therapy,”
• “A systematic review has found that hypnosis enhances the effects of cognitive behavioural therapy for conditions such as phobia, obesity, and anxiety.”
• “Randomised controlled trials support the use of various relaxation techniques for treating both acute and chronic pain,”
• Randomised trials have shown hypnosis to be of value in asthma and irritable bowel syndrome,”
• “There is strong evidence from randomised trials of the effectiveness of hypnosis and relaxation for cancer related anxiety, pain, nausea, and vomiting, particularly in children.”

(Vickers & Zollman, 1999)

Hypnosis has been scientifically proven as a treatment for many medical and psychological conditions such as:

• Anxiety
• Panic disorders
• Insomnia
• Phobias
• Obesity
• Both acute and chronic pain
• Asthma 
• Irritable bowel syndrome
• Cancer related anxiety, pain, nausea, and vomiting, particularly in children.
• Improving sporting performance 
• Creativity 
• Confidence and self-efficacy
• Improving focus and attention

Being at the top of your game in any sport is not only about physical competence and skill, but also about mindset. This could be reducing anxiety and stress, improving confidence, focus and attention, and self-efficacy or the belief that you can do it.

Hypnotherapy works on mindset, through suggestions that improve self-efficacy and confidence and imagery that builds a positive mindset. Once you can let go of limiting beliefs, you can focus on performance.

Hypnosis has been shown to reduce anxieties (Li & Li, 2022) and improve performance (Miró, et al., 2025) and confidence (Li & Li, 2022).

Working on an area of sports performance where an athlete is struggling with technique, imagery in hypnosis can help athletes to practice the improved technique in hypnosis so they can replicate this in real life. One study found that just 10 minutes of hypnosis improved throwing accuracy in tennis – an effect that lasted 1 week (Jalene & Wulf, 2014). Imagine what six sessions could do!

One literature review found sports hypnosis to be effective for ball games, including basketball, golf, soccer, cricket, and badminton; archery, weightlifting and shooting sports (Li & Li, 2022). Meanwhile, a study focusing on the use of hypnosis for downhill Mountain bike athletes found hypnosis reduced anxiety, improved self-confidence, regulated nervous system activity, and participants reported feeling safer, under less pressure, more confident and positive in the race after the hypnosis intervention (Hoffmann, et al., 2024).

Pain is created in the brain as a response to real or perceived stimulus that causes fear. It’s our body’s way of telling us we are not safe and to get us to do something about that. Because pain is created in the brain, hypnosis, mindfulness and somatics are effective for reducing pain.

This is true whether the pain is because of tissue damage (nociceptive pain), nervous system damage (neuropathic pain) or is nociplastic/chronic pain (see the next FAQ below).

Because pain is created in the brain, we can use hypnosis when in pain to change the perception of pain. This might involve accepting the pain, changing the sensation, changing the location, turning the pain down or even making it disappear completely. MRIs have shown that just being in hypnosis reduces the activity of the salience network – part of the brain that is vigilant to threats.

When we start to learn that we can control our own pain like this, we become the ones in charge. Paired with mindfulness and relaxation, hypnosis is effective in reducing the experience of pain.

Meanwhile, when we use hypnosis and CBT together, we can make lifestyle changes that improve the way we live in pain. Often, people living in pain for a long time start to plan their lives around the risk of being in pain – Hypno-CBT can free you from this.

One literature review found that hypnosis can help with managing cancer pain, low-back pain, arthritis pain, sickle-cell disease, temporomandibular joint (TMJ) pain, fibromyalgia, disability-related pain, and chronic pain. The treatments in the studies included other aspects such as CBT, education around how pain works, relaxation and teaching self-hypnosis (Elkins, et al., 2007).

Specifically for athletes, hypnosis has can improve injury recovery (Miró, et al., 2025).

Somatics is a type of body-focused therapeutic work that focuses on internal perceptions, physical embodied experience, and the connection between mind and body. Rather than treating the body as a physical object to be measured and managed, somatic work invites you to tune into how your body actually feels; moment to moment, movement to movement. The word itself comes from the Greek soma, meaning "living body."

Hypnosis is already inherently somatic because it works with autonomic nervous system regulation, but we can go beyond this: noticing how your breath changes under pressure, recognising where you hold tension before a competition, or learning to tell the difference between productive discomfort and a signal worth listening to. It's body literacy, and it's something most athletes never get taught but which can make a huge difference.

For disabled athletes, this work can be quietly life-changing. Many have spent years in a complicated relationship with their bodies; shaped by medical appointments, adaptive equipment, and a lifetime of being told what our bodies can't do.

Somatics gently flips that script. It helps you build (or rebuild) a relationship with your body rooted in curiosity and trust rather than frustration or disconnection. Whether you're navigating pain, working around variable energy levels, or managing a condition that affects sensation, somatic awareness gives you more information to train and compete with your body, not against it.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - CBT - is one of the most well-researched psychological approaches in the world.

At its core, it's built on a straightforward but powerful idea: the way we think shapes the way we feel, and the way we feel shapes what we do. Shift the thought patterns, and you shift the whole chain.

Sport psychologists have drawn on CBT principles with world-class athletes for decades, because competitive sport is, among other things, a relentless mental challenge. Self-doubt before a big race, catastrophising after a setback, the inner critic that pipes up right when you need to focus. These are exactly the kinds of patterns CBT gives you practical, learnable tools to work with.

For disabled athletes, there's often an extra layer of mental load that non-disabled athletes simply don't carry. Navigating accessibility failures, being chronically under-resourced, fielding unsolicited opinions about what you "should" be able to do, or managing the psychological weight of a progressive condition. These are real, and they affect performance. CBT helps you identify the thought patterns keeping you stuck; whether that's I have to prove I belong here or one bad session means everything is falling apart; and replace them with something more grounded.

It's not about forced positivity, but about thinking more accurately, so you can act more freely.

Mindfulness is the practice of paying deliberate attention to what's happening, in your body, your mind, and your environment, without immediately trying to fix, judge, or escape it. That's really it. No particular spiritual tradition, no hour-long meditation sessions, no requirement to sit still and feel serene.

What mindfulness builds, over time, is the gap between stimulus and response. In sport, that gap is everything. The difference between a composed competitor and a reactive one often comes down to whether they can notice what's happening internally without being hijacked by it.

Mindfulness trains exactly that, and the research backs it up across focus, stress regulation, resilience after injury, and performance consistency under pressure (Wang et al., 2023).

For disabled athletes, this can be genuinely transformative; particularly if you live with pain, fatigue, or a body that doesn't behave predictably.

Rather than being in constant battle with your symptoms - bracing against them, spiralling when they spike - mindfulness teaches a different way of relating to them. That shift in relationship with your own physical experience isn't just mentally healthier; it frees up enormous energy that can go straight back into your performance, your training, and your love of sport.

Yes! Sport is my specialism, but the tools I use (hypnotherapy, somatics, CBT, mindfulness) are just as powerful outside of it.

If your goals are something I can genuinely help with and I have availability, I'd love to hear from you. Book a free consultation and we'll figure out together whether we're a good fit.

Yes! Disabled athletes are my primary focus, but I work with non-disabled athletes too.

If you're drawn to this work and feel it resonates with you, book a free consultation. If I'm not the right person, I'll do my best to point you in the right direction.