The Use of Neuro-Linguistic Programming as an Educational-Therapeutic Programme: Two Case Studies

Introduction: Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is continuously used as one of the psychological intervention in medicine, sport, and education settings. NLP through employing its techniques and language patterns could make certain changes in connections between neurological processes and therefore, restructure individuals’ cognition and reform their behaviours. This contributes to certain advantages in educational-therapeutic sessions concerning helping athletes with emotional hardship, resulting from physical injuries. Objective: To examine a tailored intervention of the NLP model adapted for educational-therapeutic purposes to reduce competitive state anxiety of two elite basketball players after their rehabilitation programme from physical injuries. Method: This study used a case study approach, and employed the NLP model’s collapsing anchoring, perceptual positions, and meta-model language patterns, to help both athletes to restructure their dysfunctional thoughts and memories. The athletes experienced anxiety related negative thoughts and felt emotionally difficult to perform in training and competition. Results: The intervention showed promising strategies in helping the athletes to reduce their competitive state anxiety. Also, the results obtained from the interview sessions, and the quantitative analysis showed that the NLP intervention had successfully helped the athletes to cope with dysfunctional thoughts and emotionally related anxiety. Conclusions: The NLP-based intervention, to some degree, helped the athletes to deal with dysfunctional thoughts of their past injury experiences, reducing their competitive state anxiety to compete again in the upcoming competition.