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.