Inner Excellence: Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance and the Best Possible Life

Chapter 9 examines how mental blocks develop and how they can be overcome through understanding the subconscious mind. Murphy illustrates this concept through the stories of baseball players Steve Sax and Rick Ankiel, both of whom experienced debilitating performance issues (known as the “yips”) despite their elite talents. The chapter explains that mental blocks occur because the subconscious mind seeks to protect individuals from perceived emotional or physical danger. When someone experiences emotional pain associated with a particular action, the subconscious creates neural pathways that trigger anxiety or fear when similar situations arise in the future.

The neuroplasticity of the brain allows these negative patterns to be reinforced through repetitive thoughts and feelings but also presents an opportunity for rewiring. Murphy outlines a process for removing mental blocks that involves taking the emotion out of painful memories by viewing them from a third-person perspective, identifying small changes that could have made a difference, inserting positive feelings into the context of the mental block, and anchoring those positive feelings to create new, empowering associations. This approach challenges the conventional wisdom that mental blocks require extensive time to overcome, as Murphy claims they can often be resolved in a single session.

While Murphy’s techniques draw on established principles of cognitive psychology and neuroscience regarding neuroplasticity, the chapter presents an oversimplified view of treating complex mental barriers.