Renowned mind coach Emma Murray outlines how she would help Nick Kyrgios realise his potential
She has played a key role in transforming AFL premier Richmond and turning Scott McLaughlin into a Supercars champion. Now Emma Murray believes she could help Nick Kyrgios realise his potential to become a world tennis champion.
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The renowned mind coach who helped transform AFL juggernaut Richmond and Supercars champion Scott McLaughlin believes she could help wayward tennis player Nick Kyrgios reach his potential.
The Tigers have won two premierships in the three years Emma Murray has worked at Punt Rd as its mind coach.
She also has also worked with McLaughlin – who has referred to Murray as his “secret weapon – since 2018 to help the New Zealander claim back-to-back Supercars titles.
Murray – who Tigers star Dustin Martin publicly thanked after winning the Brownlow Medal in 2017 – specialises in removing “road blocks” from athletes’ subconscious minds to allow them to make the best decisions in the present moment.
She said she would love to work with Kyrgios, who is yet to realise his huge untapped potential amid a string of bizarre on-court behaviour.
“People say I’m mad (when I say I’d love to work with Kyrgios) and I say ‘no, I absolutely know I could help him,’” Murray told the Herald Sun.
“I believe this work can help any athlete and I believe it only strengthen s the work they do with a sports psychologist.
“It’s not in competition with a sports psychologist.
“We have one at Richmond I work really closely with, and I also think there are a lot of athletes out there that don’t want to try it because they have done it before and it didn’t work for them.
“But sometimes as an athlete we’re running subconscious patterns of behaviour, and like with Nick Kyrgios, we’re running patterns that aren’t serving us well.
“And there was a time, maybe as a kid, where it may have been serving him well but they aren’t now.”
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Murray said opening the subconscious mind to replace “bad files with good ones” was a very powerful technique.
“You look at Scott McLaughlin’s starts (to races), we looked at that as an area of growth for him,” she said.
“If you go back into V8 history, you’ll see that Scott stalled at the start of his first race.
“Pretty much from that moment forward, your subconscious mind is not going to let you be very free or comfortable on the start line of a race.
“It’s going to then hold you back from that situation to protect you, but once we unlock that then, holy hell, have you seen Scott’s starts this year? They’re pretty good.
“Not because we consciously talked about his starts, but because we just took out one file and put in another file.”