Mreenal Chakraborty’s blog: The El Clasico of the last night once again showed why sports psychology(mental toughness) is so important in the modern-day sport. Everyone saw with the way the Argentine genius Lionel Messi lay on the Bernabéu surface with blood streaming from his mouth following a clash with Real Madrid left back Marcelo. Yet, the Argentine struggled on to score a sensational winner for Barça, despite holding a bandage to his mouth to stem the flow. Let me tell you the mystery which made it all happen last night. My professor Dr. Richard Bandler played a major part in this, who is also Messi’s personal consultant of the NLP psychological application.
NLP- In simple layman’s word NLP is the tool to interconnect MIND And Body to reach the level of Peak Performance. The information we gather through 5 senses, we store them in packets inside our Brain. How do we express and react in a situation, those information need to be tuned or Re-Pattern to enhance the performance. N-NEURO, L-Linguistic, P-Programing. Just as physical exercise, a player needs to do mental exercise everyday through NLP. Messi does that regularly. Being the only NLP expert in India, I also successfully used that application during the Junior Hockey World Cup this season and that helped the boys to become the champions. I’m still learning the NLP from Richard and want to use it more to develop more sportsmen in India.
Last night, Marcelo and Messi clashed in the Real Madrid half of the pitch, after Marcelo had released a pass along the line. With Messi arriving late to close the Brazilian down, Marcelo’s elbow caught him in the mouth. I don’t know if it was intentional or not. But those are the moments which show the differences between a normal or immature player and a special or mature player. Messi certainly belongs to that second category. In such a big game, incidents like those, often causes problems for the normal/immature players as they often get carried away with the things and start making unforced errors.
On the other hand, Messi recovered from that blow, and burst through the Real Madrid rear-guard on 33 minutes to pull Barcelona level in a crucial La Liga clash after Casemiro had opened the scoring for the home side. With the last kick of the game, Messi was decisive once again, as he met a cut-back from Jordi Alba to secure a 2-3 win for Barcelona.
For an example, for a normal player, the word “end” means it’s all over. But a special player through that NLP psychology, believes that END means Effort Never Dies. It’s all about the mindset. The incident happened with Messi last night could have presented two different approaches for the two different categories of sportspeople. For the normal sportsmen it could have been a “hopeless end”, but for players like Messi, it got turned into an “Endless hope.”
For Messi, the performance last night proved it once again that, “Tough times never last, but tough people do.”
Mreenal Chakraborty
Sports Psychologist