The Mindful Athlete by George Mumford

The Mindful Athlete: Secrets to Pure Performance by Geoge Mumford

Michael Jordan credits George Mumford with transforming his on-court leadership of the Bulls, helping Jordan lead the team to six NBA championships. Mumford also helped Kobe Bryant, Andrew Bynum, and Lamar Odom and countless other NBA players turn around their games. A widely respected public speaker and coach, Mumford is sharing his own story and the strategies that have made these athletes into stars in The Mindful Athlete: The Secret to Pure Performance.

Mumford’s deeply moving personal story is unforgettable. A basketball player at the University of Massachusetts (where he roomed with Dr. J, Julius Erving), injuries forced Mumford out of the game he loved. The meds that relieved the pain of his injuries also numbed him to the emptiness he felt without the game and eventually led him to heroin. After years as a functioning addict, Mumford enrolled in Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction program, and made meditation, on and off the cushion, the center of his life. He kicked drugs, earned a master’s degree in counseling psychology and began teaching meditation to inmates and others.

THE FIVE SUPERPOWERS

The Five Superpowers are mindfulness, concentration, insight, right effort, and trust. These spiritual superpowers are interconnected and they work together. Buddhism sometimes calls the first three powers—mindfulness, concentration, and insight—the threefold training. Our unconscious mind contains the seeds of all these energies. You can cultivate these three energies throughout the day, in whatever activity you’re engaged. Mindfulness, concentration, and insight contain each other. If you’re very mindful, then you have concentration and insight in your mindfulness. Generating these energies is the heart of meditation practice. They help you live every moment of life deeply. They bring you joy and happiness and help you to handle your own suffering and the suffering in the people around you.The fourth power, right effort or diligence, is the energy that makes us steadfast in our practice. Cognitive function improves when we have a positive state of mind. Bringing diligence to our practice of mindfulness is a great way to cultivate positive mind-states. But when we practice sitting or walking meditation in a way that causes our body or mind to suffer, that isn’t right effort because our effort isn’t based on our understanding.The last of the Five Powers is trust. It can also be seen as faith or confidence, but the way that I like to look at it is as courage. Having the courage to delve into the unknown and trust what is found there makes the practice of mindfulness and the other powers possible.

“The minute your mind is elsewhere, the present moment is gone.”

Flow

Csikszentmihalyi describes flow, or being in the Zone, as the act of being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies.
Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.” He even has a formula for flow that he describes in this way: “Flow occurs when both challenges and skills are high and equal to each other. Good flow activity is one that offers challenges at several levels of complexity.”
Flow is your ability to stay in the present moment. It’s a very particular state of mind. The ability to stay present is what fosters the Zone experience. There’s no denying that strength and skill are a big factor in achieving high performance in sports, but many players have extraordinary strength and skills.
The real key to high performance and tapping into flow is the ability to direct and channel these strengths and skills fully in the present moment—and that starts in your mind. The flip side of this equation is also true. No matter how strong or skillful you might be, your mind can also impede that talent from being expressed, and it often does so in insidious ways if you don’t take care of it.

“Think about the eye of a hurricane, or the calm still center in the middle of a cyclone. No matter how intense the storm or what’s swept up in its gale-force winds, that calm, blue center is always there. This is the metaphor I like to use when talking about the space between stimulus and response. We all have this quiet center within us. Mindfulness reconnects us to this center space, where we fully experience the present moment and have access to the transcendent wisdom that’s often associated with conscious flow. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, neurologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl famously described it this way: ‘Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’”

Space Between Stimulus & Response

Viktor Frankl famously described it this way: Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Life is all about the stimulus that we experience in the world and the way we interpret that in our minds. We can react to this stimulus in various knee-jerk ways—with anger, agitation, anxiety, fear, craving, doubt, guilt—or we can respond to this stimulus by getting still, paying attention “on purpose” to what thoughts and feelings come up within ourselves without judgment, and by acting from this center space of calm.
The former way of being will keep us stuck in the same place. The latter way of being, as Frankl suggests, will lead us on a path to personal transformation, freedom, and flow.
This calm center space is what anchors the mindful athlete in the present moment and facilitates high performance and flow.

The Inner Game

This practice of the inner game can be applied in all areas of life, as Gallwey himself noted. There is no separating who we are when we play sports from who we are in the world at large. When you are flowing and clear in your physical practice, there is a synergetic clarity that flows into other areas of your life. When Gallwey describes the principles of the inner game, he is essentially describing mindfulness: practicing nonjudgmental awareness, unlearning bad habits, and learning the art of relaxed concentration.
Gallwey writes, “The player of the inner game comes to value the art of relaxed concentration above all other skills; he discovers a true basis for self-confidence; and he learns that the secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard.”

“Before you begin to exercise or do your physical activity, take five minutes to be still and practice being conscious of the space between stimulus and response. Stop what you are doing and return to your breath. Stay in the calm center. Respond from the center of the hurricane, rather than reacting from the chaos of the storm.”

Poise

The convergence of the principles I’ve outlined—concentration, outcome expectation, visualization, intention, and deliberate practice—are the secret of pure performance. When they are all present, you get the ultimate form of diligent concentration, which I think of as poise. Poise is the ability to keep calm and stay connected to that center space at all times, without getting thrown off-balance. When we do get thrown off-balance, we remember to come back to the fullness of the present moment through conscious breathing and mindful meditation.

Outcome Expectation

Focusing on what we expect an outcome will be. To streamline it even further, let’s say that an outcome can be either positive or negative. If we believe things will work out, we go into a competition or a practice with a positive attitude and confidence.
“The brain doesn’t know the difference between what we think and what we experience. So if we imagine or think about something related to the past or the future, on some level we will experience that event—including all the emotions it provokes.”

Kinesthetic Imagery or Kinesthetic Visualization

which means experiencing things in our body through the mind and thus “mentally rehearsing” something.
“When it comes to sports, we can mentally rehearse whatever goal we have in mind. Using outcome expectation as the frame, we actually rewire our brains to reflect that activity as if we were really doing it. In order to be able to do that, however, we need to have concentration and focus.”
In order to practice, relax- focus on breath- bring a specific moment or play into mind that you executed perfectly- experience how you felt – evoke every emotion and sensation. “When you get very still and focused on the present moment, and you recreate in your mind an experience that you want to recreate outside yourself (or outcome expectation)—you’re doing two things: you’re mentally rehearsing those things, and you’re also learning these things in your body. This is a very different kind of learning from the fitful, fretful focus on winning.”

Explicit Learning

Intentional conscious approach to learning that often involves dedicated drills and rote memorization

Implicit learning

Sometimes called declarative learning, implicit learning happens when we learn something without consciously or explicitly being aware of it. We may not be able to formulate in words exactly what we’ve learned, but our physical and intuitive bodies have internalized the learning.
Learning how to ride a bike is a good example of this. We are taught certain moves, but the real learning takes place experientially: by starting, stopping, falling
“focusing on the experience in the present moment. It’s nearly impossible to stay balanced and learn to ride a bike if you’re thinking about other things at the same time. The act of learning how to ride a bike demands total concentration on the actions we’re performing in the present moment. Once we learn how to ride a bike, we never forget how to do it—even though we can’t explain the process we went through to learn. We have learned how to do it through our adaptive unconscious, without an awareness of how exactly we’ve learned.”
The adaptive unconscious often world as a switchboard operator outside of our conscious awareness- “These mental processes that operate our perceptual, language, and motor systems operate largely outside of awareness.” Like the Wizard of Oz operating his pulleys and cables behind the magic curtain, the adaptive unconscious operates behind the scenes, but its impact on our mental landscape is profound as it “gathers information, interprets it, and sets goals in motion quickly and efficiently.”
“The key for the mindful athlete is to preprogram the mind-body connection with a regular practice of coming back again and again to the breath so that the body does its thing without the mind getting in the way. Mindfulness and concentration are the corrective here. With mindful intention and attention, we can rewire the brain and create a neural net that automat-ically carries out these instructions, thus freeing the mind to be present in the moment. This facilitates our ability to have Zone or flow experiences so we can operate and play on an almost transcendent level, completely in control yet totally letting go.”
Works faster than explicit learning if it’s combined with INTENTION

Intention

“Intention is purely mental. When you marry intention with positive mind-states through outcome expectation, visualization, and practice, you’re able to achieve great things on and off the court. Often these things come incrementally. Remember that taking small steps, consistently, in the right direction will eventually yield big results. That said, you have to have motivation and intention behind these small things. If you do, you’re able to achieve success despite the odds against you.”
The number one reason elite performers succeed, skill and resources being equal, is their desire and the intention to succeed. Intention is what motivates players to do what they have to do, even if it means pushing themselves out of their comfort zones—in fact, especially if it pushes them out of their comfort zones.
Intention and purpose fuel your actions.
Attention always follows intention, but you must believe you can achieve those intentions. You have to “see” what you want to achieve first.

Discovering your Intention

Deep Listening is the practice of stopping and listening without judgment or advice. Before you can listen deeply to someone else, you need to begin by deeply listening to yourself. Sit down, clear your mind, and ask yourself in silence: What do I really want? What is my life for?
Intention will emerge if you go deep enough.
Deep listening allows you to honestly evaluate yourself but you also need honest feedback from outsiders.
“That’s what this practice is about: bringing in the quality of investigation to see what is true and what’s going on. If we listen deeply we can observe a habit or an action without being identified with it and without pushing it away or pulling it in. We can just observe and ask ourselves, “Okay, what would happen if this is true?”

Deliberate Practice

“deliberate.” It means that something is done consciously and intentionally. So the first part of deliberate practice involves focusing on and practicing one specific thing that you want to improve in your game—and practicing it with intention and concentration, mentally visualizing or rehearsing while you practice and thus experiencing the move in your body.”
The brain doesn’t know the difference between thoughts and experience, so in mentally rehearsing an experience, you are sending messages to your body about the specific outcome you want to experience—and in a certain way, you are experiencing that outcome.
Must make it second nature, “practice that thing over and over again deliberately, which means with concentrated focus, steadiness of mind, intention, and a willingness to push yourself out of your comfort zone.”
High performance is less about physical attributes and more about what you bring to the table when you commit to deliberate practice.
Ericsson has identified four key elements of deliberate practice: motivation, knowledge, immediate informative feedback of your performance, and repetition. The key take-away here is that physical limitations are not really a primary concern; it’s your mindset and internal perception of self that galvanized your practice and determines how well you perform.”
Excellence lives in the mundane! “Learning is circular in this regard. We go over and over the same terrain, each time picking up more intelligence and information, even if we’re unaware of it. Remember, this is what implicit learning is all about. You might not think you’re making any progress, but your adaptive unconscious is in overdrive, and new patterns of excellence are being laid down and reinforced with every repetitive cycle of practice, no matter how boring it might be.”

Discomfort Zones

Learn to love the plateaus and difficult times you have to push through.
Must know the fundamentals of your craft and continually work on them. They must continually be repeated and incrementally pushing us out of our comfort zone.
Find the joy in the pressure filled challenging situations.
“Love it or not, to learn, you’ve got to take risks and stretch yourself. You’ve got to romance the unknown and concentrate on pushing the envelope so that you can attain new skill sets and more readily access flow even under the most trying circumstances”
In Jules Evans’s book Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, similar experiences are described involving people whose mindsets allowed them to survive unimaginably fright-ening situations.
You can teach people how their interpretive styles lead to their emotional responses. “Many of our beliefs are tied up in our self-concept. If we believe we can move out of our comfort zones, then we can, and we do.”
Pete Carroll said, “I’m trying to create a really thriving environment. That means making it as rich as possible. So there’s noise, competition, activity, and energy—like when we play. It’s better than a pristine vacuum-type environment, as far as I’m concerned. Because we never play there. We don’t talk about mindfulness that much, but that’s how we operate. We focus on what’s right in front of us. We don’t care about the other team or the environment we’re playing in. We just take every game as if it’s the most important in the world and focus right on that. That takes great mindfulness.”

Concentration

Ability to Focus is an essential part of feeding pure performance. Work daily on intense focus with what you’re doing and having an outcome you wish to achieve for that day.

Know Thyself (Game Selection)

Having a clear sense of purpose and understanding how you see yourself creates your reality.
When you don’t have a clear sense of purpose you’re often operating out of an unintentional belief system.
“Your beliefs become your thoughts; your thoughts become your words; your words become your actions; your actions become your habits; your habits become your values; and your values become your destiny.” Mahatma Gandhi
“The spirit is the life, mind is the builder, and the physical is the result.” Edgay Cayce
We all have emotional blueprints we’ve had since childhood and it’s there that we find patterns and limited thinking that create our inner obstacles that make it difficult for us to believe in ourselves.
These include negative self talk, subtle internal messages which we’re often unaware of. Many have been around for so long we’re not aware they’re causing suffering and have no relation to the person we are today. This is where you uncover the real roots of stress.
Meditation brings wisdom; lack of meditation leaves ignorance. Know well what leads you forward and what holds you back, and choose the path that leads to wisdom. —BUDDHA”
“Cultivating insight and accruing wisdom about our inner lives is the only way to become aware of the blueprints that have laid the foundation for our enduring beliefs and internal obstacles. In other words,know thyself!”
“Imperceptibly but inevitably, we become aware of implicit motives and powerful belief systems that operate under the surface, just below our consciousness, shaping our reality for better or for worse.”

Moving from Desire to Action

We have to slow down and pay attention to our behavior, on purpose and without judgment, in order to understand and know ourselves in a more concrete way.
We all have our personal form of suffering. Suffering is a part of life and there’s no way of avoiding it. If we want to evolve as human beings, we have to understand the wisdom that’s hidden in this suffering—and that includes knowing what is feeding this suffering—and commit to a path that leads us out of this suffering.

Buddha’s 4 Noble Truths

Suffering is part of life and life is stressful. But we can choose how we react to stress.
There’s a cause for that suffering. Usually these causes are expressed through cravings, attachments and unwholesome emotional mindsets.
There is an end to suffering. Well-being comes through practicing non-greed, non-hatred, non-delusion. For me, this is all part of self-knowledge, wisdom, and understanding because it’s saying that with insight and understanding, we not only get beyond the current manifestation of our suffering or stress; we can actually move way beyond it to a state of wellness, happiness, and joy.
The Fourth Noble Truth is the Noble Eightfold Path. The Eightfold Path is the way that leads from suffering, which is the First Noble Truth, to well-being, which is the Third Noble Truth.
1. The elements of the Noble Path are:
  1. Right Understanding (Insight)
  2. Right Thinking
  3. Right Speech
  4. Right Action
  5. Right Livelihood
  6. Right Diligence (Right Effort)
  7. Right Mindfulness
  8. Right Concentration

The elements of the path are interconnected and affect each other. As you can see, five elements of the path are the Five Superpowers.

This path out of suffering involves seeing how our emotional blueprints, belief systems, and habitual ways of thinking manifest in the various areas of our lives. In order to release them, we have to see them and understand them before we can realign our thoughts, motivations, and actions. The only way out of suffering, as Robert Frost said, is through it. We don’t run away from the bull, we take it by the horns. Because ultimately, we perform at our best when we’re not suffering, so we all have a vested interest in committing to a journey of self-discovery, no matter how challenging or uncomfortable it makes us.

Emotional Hindrances: Feeding the right wolf

We human beings sometimes seem almost hardwired to feed the wrong emotional wolf without realizing it, and as a result those traits grow stronger. “The human mind is programmed to turn to threats, to unfinished business, to failures and unfulfilled desires when it has nothing else more urgent to do, when attention is left free to wander,” Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi once wrote. “Without a task to focus our attention, most of us find ourselves getting progressively depressed. In flow there is no room for such rumination.”
An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

Buddha’s 5 categories of Hindrances

Sensual desire– This doesn’t only include food, sex, drugs but also “attachments to more intangible but no less powerful things, like the ego-gratification of winning at all costs, having the biggest and best toys, social status, or the way our bodies look.”
Ill will or anger. This hindrance often messes with our game when we compete, throwing us way off-base. Anger and ill will are toxic; they undermine our lives and cloud our thinking both off and on the court and field.
Sloth or torpor. This is the dulling of the mind, inattention, spacing out.
Restlessness or worry. The modern cocktail of these two hindrances is anxiety, and it insinuates itself into our lives in many different forms.
Skepticism and doubt.

“Think of each hindrance as one of those wolves. The more we feed it—and the less aware that we’re doing so—the bigger it gets and the more freely it roams around, ruling our lives, tripping us up, and creating all sorts of stress.”

Know Your Stress

All stress has an impact on body and performance because it’s all connected. We must know how we relate to the different stresses.
Not all stress is bad.
“Some stress motivates us and pushes us out of our comfort zones in just the right incremental fashion. When this happens, our bodies and minds are pushed in expansive ways that serve our game. Our bodies adapt and implicitly learn. “Adaptability is probably the most distinctive characteristic of life,”wrote Hans Selye in The Stress of Life. Selye calls this capacity to adapt one of the “great forces” that animates us and motivates us as human beings to evolve”
Stress is a state within the body that produces observable symptoms. “each of us responds to stress with a particular sign. These signs run the gamut from irritability, inability to concentrate, emotional instability, dizziness, and nervous ticks, to insomnia, stuttering, clenching of the teeth, neck and lower back pain. Know your signs.“When things get tough and our bodies start to react, we need mindfulness to reset our internal north star. We need to be quiet, listen, and practice conscious breathing to bring ourselves back to the present moment and activate the parasympathetic nervous system, putting the brake on and slowing things down in our bodies. This coming full circle helps us listen to what our bodies are trying to tell us.”

Positive Stress

There’s an important distinction to be made between stress, distress, and what Selye calls “eustress.” Stress and distress are correlated. When stress is persistent, unresolved, and cumulative to the point of being chronic—whether that stress is physical or emotional—it becomes distress. Prolonged emotional distress can eventually lead to anxiety, withdrawal, or depression.
Eustress, on the other hand, enhances physical and mental functions through such things as strength training and challenging work. This is the “good” kind of stress. Eustress can be described as that space between where we are and where we want to go—or that place between our comfort zones and the fringe of our discomfort zones.
When you physically push your body beyond its present limits, it responds to the increased demands made upon it in familiar ways; you experience shortness of breath, your heart races, you sweat, get tired, maybe feel a few aches. If you continue to push your body in an incremental fashion—ideally practicing intention, visualization, and deliberate practice at the same time—your body will eventually adjust to the new physiological level required of it, thereby increasing your physical capacity. In this way, we set down new neural pathways “while increasing our physical skills.
The same is true of our ability to push ourselves mentally. Mentally we can train ourselves to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, to feel calm in the midst of chaos and stay in the eye of the proverbial hurricane. Through mindfulness, we cultivate the ability to more readily access and stay in that space between stimulus and response, rather than react in a knee-jerk fashion to stress. We learn to have a greater tolerance for cognitive dissonance on an emotional level; even in the midst of anxiety, we can experience the feeling that everything is going to work out fine; we might even experience the kind of fear that gives us the courage to walk straight ahead, no matter what.
We can even learn to delay or let go of our desire for instant gratification by tolerating discomfort for an extended period of time, even if it’s in small increments of less than a minute, much like swimmers who increase their amount of time under water by seconds until they reach that critical minute.

Comfort and Discomfort

Our bodies work best when we push them in small increments. Push too far your body breaks down, don’t push far enough and you don’t develop.
Moving out of your comfort zone through experiencing eustress is a continuous incremental process of romancing your discomfort zone. It’s not like you get to a certain level and then stay there. Things are always either going forward or backward; they’re not staying static. If you are comfortable where you are and you just want to stay comfortable, that’s fine, but that isn’t the way to pursue excellence and wisdom.
You can’t pursue wisdom without being willing to get uncomfortable. You have to ask yourself with regularity, “Can I do better than I’m doing now? Can I play at a level above where I am now and what I’m doing now?” But you need to ask these questions with judgement.
“Without a sense of urgency, it’s hard to sustain the effort it takes to tolerate the unpleasantness of growing pains. ”

Self-efficacy

is tied to the ability to believe and see yourself as capable. It’s a core mental strength. Self-efficacy is cultivated when we know ourselves well enough to work through whatever internal obstacles we have, whether that’s a negative self-image, an ingrained sense of defeat, or other issues.
If you change the way you look at things,the things you look at change.—WAYNE DYER

Self-efficacy, or stress hardiness, is the galvanizing force behind what I call the three Cs: Commitment to your growth and development; Control over how you respond to stressors; and viewing every crisis or pressure as a Challenge. These three Cs are mental and emotional pillars of wisdom that help us increase our performance, effectively field whatever fastball might come hurtling our way, and stay in flow.”
“When you combine the three Cs with self-efficacy, you not only see crises as opportunities for growth, you also naturally create challenging goals for yourself that support that growth.”

Embracing Failure

Failure is what you make of it. Failure can be an opportunity.
Mistakes are feedback for learning.
We need to recognize failures as opportunities and mistakes as feedback for learning. We need to realize that, like moving out of our comfort zones, failures are potent Challenges for personal growth, as well as opportunities to Control how you respond to challenges and how you keep your Commitment to growth, no matter what. And, by the way, when you move out of your comfort zone, you’re bound to “fail”—but with the right mindset, you are always “failing up.

Error Correction

Crisis and opportunity are merely differing aspects of a continuum or a process. The ability to turn a crisis or a mistake into a chance to learn is essential.
One simple way to do this is through emotional error correction. In this context, errors or mistakes are stepping stones for growth. The first step in this process involves self-reflection instead of self-blame. Instead of saying to yourself, “Oh crap, why did I just fumble that game? I’m such a loser!” or instead of blaming someone else (“It’s so-and-so’s fault!”), you reflect and ask yourself: “Well, why did that happen? What can I do to change that?” The former mindset is self-defeating and in-vites powerlessness, passivity, anger, and frustration; the latter mindset opens the door to exploration and learning, which ultimately brings more energy to your game.”
“Remember what Bruce Lee said: “As you think, so shall you become.” ”

“High performers often look at mistakes and “failure” through the prism of error correction and attaining more skills, more knowledge, and more experience. No matter how many times they fail, they maintain a mental state of wonder. They keep asking; “How about if I just go and do this and let it speak to me, instead of assuming I know in advance what it is.” When we can operate on the principle that we don’t know anything but we have everything to learn, we’re infused with a sense of wonder. It’s like a little kid who’s learning to walk: he or she keeps falling down, but then something incredible starts to happen and eventually the child is able to move slowly forward on wobbly feet. Then that incredible thing that seemed so difficult becomes second nature.”

During Failure Notice What’s Right

We tend to only focus on the negative or what we didn’t do instead of focusing on what we did or what we learned. Once we begin paying attention our positivity can build upon itself.

Insight

“Ask yourself at least one challenging question each day.

Some examples:

What makes you uncomfortable in your physical activity?
Why? Where do your discomforts come from? How do they hold you back or move you forward?
What hindrance do you cultivate?
What do you crave? Worry about?
What emotion is most and least comfortable for you: Anger? Fear? Guilt? Anxiety?
Where does your stress live? Why is this particular stress inhabiting your body?

Take some time and listen to your body when you ask these questions. Don’t just answer with your mind. If you listen to your body, it will answer you.

Right Effort

When you’re directing your energy and effort in alignment with wholesome thoughts and feelings, you’re practicing right effort. By wholesome thoughts and feelings, I mean qualities like lovingkindness, compassion, generosity, joy, gratitude, and openness.
We can all transform frustration into the joy and the satisfaction of discovering how things work by converting small daily activities and tasks into teachable moments. We can learn for the joy of learning. If we can do this with a tea packet, changing a diaper, imagine what we could do with other things if we bring that same quality of interest, curiosity, and inquiry to the forefront, always asking with an open heart, “Well, what’s this?”
“the idea of the spiritual warrior, epitomized by Bruce Lee and other martial artists who’ve mastered the art of fighting without fighting. These mindful athletes use their intuition in the present moment to cultivate a connection to the Zone, always focused on the journey, not the destination. In consciously going with the flow (emphasis on the word “consciously”), the spiritual warrior goes farther with less effort. As Bruce Lee put it: “The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be.”

4 Aspects of Right Effort

“The Buddha identified the following four aspects of right effort:

1. Guarding against unwholesome qualities arising that have heretofore not arisen

2. Observing and abandoning unwholesome qualities that have already arisen, rather than reacting to them

3. Developing new wholesome qualities

4. Sustaining wholesome qualities that currently exist

Wherever you are on your path, right effort is the same: Joy is in the doing of the task and in the journey itself, however long or difficult. You move forward toward your goals, and you keep going. If you experience great resistance, you don’t force or try to push a square peg into a round hole, and you don’t keep pushing that boulder up the hill only to have it come back down on you. Instead, you get silent, focus, practice AOB to connect fully to the present moment, get clear on what’s happening, change course, and get back on the right track.

Change involves risk and getting comfortable with the unknown

“A warrior accepts that we can never know what will happen to us next. We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe. But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not knowing is part of the adventure, and it’s also what makes us unafraid.”
“The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.”
The trick, he suggests, is about what we emphasize. “We can either make ourselves miserable,” he says, “or we make ourselves strong.The amount of work is the same.” Replace “work” with “effort” and you have the same formula: Right effort makes us strong.
Wrong effort keeps us miserable. It’s our choice. If we make the choice to walk the path of the spiritual warrior, we have to act.
To use another line from a movie, this time from Star Wars: Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back:“Do…or do not. There is no try.”
“What Yoda is essentially saying is that Luke needs to commit. You either move forward with intention, or you don’t. There’s no in-between. You do—or you do not. You keep your intentions good and strong. That is right effort—even if you fail.”

“When we apply mindfulness to our experience in daily life on and off the court, we’re cultivating positive energy, which creates the spiritual power called wisdom. When we practice diligence, our efforts are steadfast, enthusiastic, and poised. When you have faith in yourself and confidence in your practice, you want to do the work of right effort and cultivate positive mind-states. This means learning how to make states of mind such as mindfulness, happiness, love, or compassion arise and manifest. It also means knowing how to handle unwholesome states of mind. For example, when anger arises, you understand how to let it go without pushing it away or trying to get rid of it, which in any case doesn’t work. Instead, with the right effort you actually pay more attention to the anger when it arises and take the time to be with it, breathe with it, and let it go without effort. By taking this deliberate action, you naturally generate a positive mind-state, no matter how angry you are. You can intentionally choose to bring positive mind-states into existence—and through right effort, you learn to sustain them. We do this by learning how to sit and enjoy sitting, without overly exerting ourselves or making it a chore. It doesn’t have to be a struggle.”

“When your actions are based on right effort, you cultivate an entirely different energy; rather than acting out of greed, or doing things strictly for yourself or from self-interest, you act for selfless reasons and thus generate more energy and opportunity for flow. Because as long as there’s a self there, as long as your ego-mind is focused on how you’re doing instead of what you’re doing, you’re operating out of self consciousness.

This mindset generates insecurity, takes you out of the present moment, and makes it more difficult to get in touch with that still and powerful center space between stimulus and response where, as Bruce Lee says, you can “be like water.”

Self Regulation

Self-regulation is closely connected with the power of self-efficacy. When you’re faced with a challenge, do you have the mental suppleness and belief in yourself to get quiet, stay connected to that space between stimulus and response, and move forward with right effort? Or do you struggle against the challenge and ultimately give up because the negative self-talk and conditioning in your mind compels you to do so?
Remember, the mind is likely to give up before the body does.

Operative Conditioning/ Automatic/Pavlovian Response

This is where instinct takes over. It isn’t just mental it happens at a physiological level. When an emotional trigger gets pulled, neurotransmitters are released that create the craving to use. By creating a space between stimulus (the sight of using) and response (actually getting high), the addict can choose to respond and act differently. The physiological response shifts and the mental obsession dissipates.
In a high-stress athletic event, the ability to react to another player’s action without emotional triggers is often the difference between a wise decision and one that loses the game.
Practice is essential for understanding how we can overcome these pressures and retrain ourselves.

Be Like Water

Be fluid like water, not rigid like ice. It’s about responding to the flow of life around us rather than reacting, because responding facilitates flow; reacting obstructs it.
Scientists at Northwestern University studying “flow net-works” found that the “best” soccer players, the ones who were most valuable to their team over time, were not the ones who were the fastest or had the best kicks, but those who had the best flow. Lionel Messi, one of the best players in the world who is particularly known for his smooth and easy flow, ranked right at the top. A related study of Dutch soccer players in the journal Psychology of Sport and Exercise in 2011 found a similar correlation between success and flow.
Right effort also concerns maintaining a balance between mind and body. That’s why right effort is often compared to the strings of a well-tuned instrument. If the strings are too tight, they’ll break. If the strings are too loose, you won’t be able to make them sound. You need to find the middle way.

Every mindful moment off the courts, no matter how small, improves your game on the courts. And every mindful moment off the courts, no matter how small, is mental preparation for your game on the courts. There is no separation.

Keep a daily journal of how you respond to certain situations.This will cultivate self-awareness and mental strength.

Ask yourself:

What was the situation?

What thoughts were you aware of during the situation?

What feelings were you aware of during the situation?

What action if any did you take during or after the situation?

As you write about this situation now, what belief systems or paradigms do you think you were operating from?”