Unlocked by George Mumford | Book Recap by Sean DeLaney

Unlocked: Embrace Your Greatness, Find the Flow, Discover Success

By George Mumford

A world-renowned psychologist and mindfulness performance expert who has helped superstars such as Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant transform their careers, offers proven strategies for unleashing our innate strengths, avoiding burnout, and discovering enduring success.

Checkout my notes on George’s previous book, The Mindful Athlete

We all strive to find flow, when our skills, expertise, and mindset are aligned and we can perform, unimpeded, at the highest level. George Mumford calls this being “unlocked”—a state anyone can achieve at any time. A psychologist trained in the field of mindfulness and personal development expert, Mumford has decades of experience helping a wide range of individuals—from CEOs and NBA superstars to the chronically underrepresented, those experiencing homeless and fighting addiction—contend with the challenges and opportunities inherent in life. Now, in this life-changing guide, he shares his wisdom with all of us, no matter our background or socioeconomic status, brilliantly guiding us on a path to discovering and harnessing our own individual potential.

How can we move from bracing for failure to waiting for fulfillment? That’s what this book will show you.

I call unlocked— they were in close touch with that part of themselves that was most truly who they were. That is what allowed them to develop their potential in the way they did.

It’s okay to model yourself after those you admire. But in sports or any other pursuit, that’s only the beginning. You need something more: you need to find your “gift to the world.”

Mental Discipline Training

Is about directing and sustaining attention, being in the moment, and remaining calm and present regardless of circumstances.
100 percent of the time— need to be moving toward our goal. And in order to do that, we need to be able to let go, and I mean really let go, of our mistakes.
Create space between any given stimulus we may receive and our response to it. Through mindful breathing— closely following the breath going in and out of the body while carefully tracking our bodily sensations and the pattern of our thoughts— we can all become aware of and extend the space between stimulus and response.

Being Unlocked

Being unlocked is about getting in touch and focusing on the inside instead of focusing on what’s outside of us. So what’s out there is a reflection of what’s in here. That’s when life starts to feel right. It takes on a rhythm and direction all its own, and we’re amazed and carried along. Kobe through practicing came to that understanding: This is how I need to do it. This feels right. I feel more alive. I feel more like myself when I do it this way.
Bill Russell is writing about being fully unlocked. He describes this state as a feeling of connection that on rare occasions envelops all the players and refs; they are inhabited by a kind of group mind, similar to the intelligence of a flock of birds flying full speed, all turning together in perfect synchrony. It’s what physicist David Bohn calls the “implicit order” suddenly made manifest and explicit. It is a feeling of prescience, knowing what’s going to happen before it happens. It’s significant that Russell says this shared unlocked experience happened perhaps only five or ten times during his career, at the end of games. It is not a state we generally attain, although researchers today are working to better understand it and what produces it. Russell is talking about an extreme instance of what we all sometimes experience as “flow state” or “optimal experience,” terms coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi. We could also think of it as being “in the zone” or being “locked in.”
The accomplished people that I’ve worked with, whether top- notch athletes or corporate CEOs, or those who have overcome great hurdles, seem to have the ability to access this state, perhaps not readily but in a way that allows them to perform at a consistently high level. My role and work is to help individuals access this state. Not everyone is ready for it. There has to be the willingness to go beyond what we feel is possible, what we think are our limits. This is part of becoming unlocked.

When I asked Kobe for a blurb for my book The Mindful Athlete, he wrote generously: “George helped me . . . to be neither distracted or focused, rigid or flexible, passive or aggressive. I learned just to be.”

To just be. He summed it up in a nutshell. That really is the essence of all I teach.

Find yourself. To this great work, we all are chosen.

Effortless Effort

One of the primary lessons that Herrigel learns from his archery sensei, Master Kenzo Awa, is to let the arrow shoot itself. This is the same thing I taught Kobe— to score without trying to score. Awa teaches Herrigel what in the Zen arts is called “effortless effort.” The arrow finds a target not because we’re trying to hit the target, not even because we’re looking at the target. We cultivate being present and allow our inner wisdom to express itself.
In kyudo, as in all areas of life, energy has to build and be released at the proper time, in accord with rhythms to which we are not usually attuned. Herrigel gives the example of a clump of snow slipping from a leaf. The leaf bends and bends under the weight of the accumulating snow until finally the angle of the leaf tilted downward is so steep that the snow falls off and the leaf springs back. This is the way of the bow. The bowstring is released in the same way that the leaf bends and springs back. The timing of the release is perfectly natural. It is unforced. It is not intentional but effortless and inevitable.
In coaching Herrigel, Awa says, “The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You do not wait for fulfillment but brace yourself for failure.” How true this is in all we do. The predisposition toward failure can be subtle, but it is nonetheless deadly.
But the master is pointing at something deeper and even more significant. He says that when we do something, we think we are doing it. In one sense that may be true, but our involvement isn’t all that’s happening. Something is flowing through us that is much greater than we are. Our egos tell us that we are the person who does this or that. But we’re not. When we are unlocked and in touch with the power within us, in touch with our true selves, we move in effortless synchronicity with the greater whole; life moves in us and through us. Which is what is going on all the time anyway, although we’re not in touch with it, mindful of it, because our thinking process gets in the way.

AFFIRMATIVE AWARENESS

Acknowledging and growing from mistakes is part of what I call “affirmative awareness.”
It means being able to let whatever’s in front of us speak for itself in its own language. And then being able to say yes to it and embrace it. Mindfulness is not just about creating space inside yourself to allow that to happen. It is not a negation. It affirms. It says yes. It is both an awareness and an embrace of things as they are.
Affirmative awareness doesn’t deny or blame. It simply says: This is the way it is, and I can change it. I am responsible, and I can change the way I see things; how they impress me.
Mindfulness reflects what is in front of it. It strips away the need to interpret, to push away that which the mind perceives as unpleasant or grasp at what the mind thinks it wants. It requires the opposite of weakness. It requires fortitude: the strength to not shy away from the difficult or painful but rather see those things as an opportunity to learn and grow, to find the strength inside yourself, to open yourself to more of life’s limitless opportunities.
We learn in the affirmative awareness of mindfulness that we have to be able to be still. To engage with what’s in front of us moment by moment. To let what’s in front of us speak in its own language.
To work with that rather than embellishing or interpreting based on our past experience or our fantasies about the future— that is, our regrets or hopes.
There’s nothing wrong with wishing or hoping— wanting to improve who we are and to change the world for the better. Those impulses are sacred and part of who we are as human beings. First, however, it is important to learn to be still and develop insight— to have the capacity and awareness to see things as they are.

We shall see that for the ability to consistently perform at our best, we need to develop integrity. Mental training is critical, but it must be rooted in integrity and wisdom, spiritual qualities of insight and understanding and a feeling of what we might call intimacy with life.

Authenticity

Winners have different potentials. Achievement is not the most important thing. Authenticity is. The authentic person experiences self- reality by knowing, being and becoming a credible, responsive person. Authentic people actualize their own unprecedented uniqueness and appreciate the uniqueness of others.
Authentic persons— winners— do not dedicate their lives to the concept of what they imagine they should be; rather, they are themselves and as such do not use their energy putting on a performance.
When we get in touch with our authentic selves, we transform and are transformed.

We unlock our uniqueness, huge reserves of energy, and the feeling of having found our purpose and direction: we know who we are and where we’re going.

This is not a narcissistic journey toward self- gratification and selfish achievement. In fact, the transformative journey is not primarily about us. It has a wider impact. By its nature the energy we unlock and the direction it sends us in has to do with giving back to the world and helping others. The philosopher Martin Buber wrote: “If a man makes peace in himself, he can make peace in the world.” In other words, when we express the truth of who we are, we become a force for good.
- Similar to Maslow
Einstein said that the most important decision we have to make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or a hostile universe. When we believe that the universe is unfriendly, we are always in fight- or- flight mode. It is impossible to grow in those conditions.

We can’t be in survival mode and growth mode at the same time.

It wasn’t even voluntary, really. There was something pulling me that I was powerless to resist. It was like a riptide. They say when you’re caught in such a tide you have to swim with it. You will exhaust yourself trying to swim against it, trying to break free from its pull. That’s how people drown.

RIGHT VIEW

This is called “right view” in Buddhism. If you have wholesome thoughts, you’re going to have wholesome actions. Mahatma Gandhi has a lovely formulation for this: 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; your values become your destiny.

To embrace what we fear. To work through it. Is there a more powerful experience in life?

No struggle, no swag

That could be a motto for everything we do in life. Without struggle, we don’t grow. Without something to push against, we don’t become stronger. It’s not just a matter of physical strength either. It’s the same for emotional resilience and wisdom.
When we’re struggling to find our authentic self, it’s generally not going to happen without suffering.
Uncovering the masterpiece within means facing our existential aloneness, the suffering that is the root of life.
- This is the first Noble Truth in Buddhism, and it is the insight of existentialism. We need to admit our feelings of loneliness and our related fears. To really feel them. With the admission of those feelings and fears comes the ability to be vulnerable, to admit that we often don’t know what we’re doing. Without vulnerability, how can we possibly be authentic?

I hope you have discovered the joy of the success that comes from unleashing your authentic self. It starts with understanding that you are wholly unique and possess rare abilities, and it requires a willing descent into your past to wrestle with what stands in your way. We have to see where we’re hiding out. And, you know, we have to recognize that we need help, that it’s impossible to unlock on our own. Only with this kind of honesty and willingness and vulnerability do we emerge and begin to see a new path, a promise for what we can offer the world.

FREEDOM IS A STATE OF MIND

If you’re free in your mind, you’re free. Freedom is a state of mind. Liberation is something internal; it’s a mental condition.
Often, it requires untethering ourselves from that which doesn’t serve us.
That’s freedom. As the great novelist and poet Hermann Hesse said: “I live in my dreams— that’s what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not their own. That’s the difference.” We all need to stop living other people’s dreams. We are all on our own unique path. In one sense, freedom is being able to see that and live it.
We tend to assume that our “inside” is colored by what’s happening to us; that our internal state is largely determined by external circumstances. We do much better as human beings, however, when we flip that equation. Once you get your mind right, everything else falls into place. As bestselling author and self- help expert Wayne Dyer said: “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

Take Responsibility

The truth is that many of us have a tendency to live without taking responsibility for our actions and choices. We passively move from day to day, interaction to interaction, blaming others and the world for the things that make us unhappy. We see ourselves as acted upon rather than acting. We just go along with whatever is happening, detached and drifting. We don’t fully embrace our connection to each other, opting instead to live selfishly. We live in a dream of our own making, and we shirk reaching out to help others, seeing that as too much effort and preferring to take care of ourselves.
On one level we’re all in the prison of our conditioning— that is, the ways we automatically react to what’s happening around us and the self- image we’ve constructed and cling to tenaciously (though it bears little or no relationship to who we really are). We can either live trapped in that fantasy or wake up to the reality that we possess innate greatness and are capable of the unimaginable. And yet we are also existentially alone and helpless; that too is reality. Life feels infinitely precious and can be snuffed out at any second. Love and loss are inextricably linked. These paradoxes are at the heart of the human condition.

Buddhist monk and author Thich Nhat Hanh said: “Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity.”

The first thing I taught the inmates (and it was something I practiced myself ) was how to stop being reactive; to slow down, remain calm, rest, and heal. I realized that slow was smooth and smooth is fast, as I would come to teach athletes. When it’s smooth, you’re not tripping over yourself, getting caught up, wasting time and energy.

Here’s the exercise that I had them do. Please try this wherever you are:

Visualize a pristine mountain lake. The lake is very quiet and still. The water, unruffled, reflects high, untouched, snow capped peaks all around, and cloudless sky. Forests of deep evergreen border the water. Let this image rest in your mind as you keep your breathing deep and slow.
Then imagine dropping a stone into the middle of the lake. Imagine it slowly sinking down and down through the cool, clean water. Let it sink slowly in time with the rhythm of your breath. Imagine it sinking to the bottom of the lake, where it gently settles. Let yourself rest with that stone in the cool, clean depths.
THE GOAL OF THIS EXERCISE IS TO MOVE US FROM FIGHT, FLIGHT, and freeze mode to rest and digest. Our nervous system is typically calibrated so that our left brain— the rational, reasoning, planning, active, directed part of us— is dominant. Our left brain knows absolutely nothing about non- doing (at least for a right- handed person).

We would do well to remember what Yoda said to Luke Skywalker: “You must unlearn what you have learned.”

“Awareness of breathing.”

I invited them to be with the breath. To keep returning their awareness to the breath. To be aware of the duration and speed of the breath. Of breathing in and breathing out. To feel the breath moving into and out of the body. To feel the breath in the whole body, from head to toes, entering and leaving. I encourage you to try this as well.
We could spend a lifetime on just this one practice.
By keeping our awareness on the breath, we can slow things down. The tempo of experience shifts. With that comes control

Kobe & MJ

It’s the same thing I would go on to teach Kobe and MJ: how to cultivate and become intimate with the interior terrain between stimulus and response, between input and output, between what you feel and how you act.
In basketball, when you’re able to do that, players say the game “slows down.” You can actually see that happen sometimes. Something shifts and suddenly a player will be “in rhythm.” The game suddenly feels easy. There’s syncopation. When players are in this mode, they often say something like: “I’m letting the game come to me.” It’s about responding rather than reacting, as I just said. To react is to be on automatic, as involuntary as an echo. To respond, on the other hand, is to come into tune with, to resonate and align with.
They had flipped the equation. Their inside was determining their outside. They were doing time rather than letting time do them.
Some of those double lifers were freer than most people walking the streets. They were at peace with themselves. I could talk about the Buddha, Jesus, or Muhammad— it didn’t matter. They were truly open, able to move in any direction inwardly, as though the constriction in their freedom of movement on the outside had led to the development of inner mobility, perhaps much the way someone who loses their sight will develop an incredibly acute sense of hearing. These prisoners, in touch with the vastness of their interior, were mental travelers who were free to roam. They had surrendered to life exactly as it was and had an unshakable equanimity. Nothing could move them off their sense of inner peace. They treated the prison like a monastery and their cage like a monk’s cell.

This is liberation of the mind. Liberation means that even in the most horrendous circumstances we know we have a choice about how we respond to what’s happening around us.

Tai chi now informs everything I do. I meet hard with soft; I absorb and transmute and send force coming at me back in a way that relies on the basic form I learned. My movements are circular and flowing. I work with the graceful arcs of the tai chi form to help people take their aggression and negativity and difficulties and turn them into something beautiful and true. By making the hard soft, we transform so many of life’s difficulties. What seems aggressive and intractable, a threatening assault that contorts us into an uncomfortable position or painfully pushes

As we unlock, we become sensitive to the way the slightest things can make all the difference. The way we wash the dishes is not separate from how we treat each other. All of life demands of us care, attention, and appreciation. Every human being is worthy of respect.

There was something glorious about this quest, and a bit maddening: to give yourself over to seeking rather than finding.

It was so open- ended. There was always more. And you knew you would never master even a fraction of it. Sifu asked us to cultivate a spirit of inquiry, an exquisite inquisitiveness and commitment to embrace the unknown. And to do it with joy. That was the spirit of her dojo, and I carry that spirit with me in everything I do.

PURE PERFORMANCE

While peak performance is what people tend to strive for, one of its qualities is that it’s inherently unsustainable. It doesn’t promote growth, and it slides into an inevitable letdown eventually.
In contrast, pure performance is about the quest for authenticity, which leads to purity of expression. There is no peak in pure performance, because there’s no limit to the possibilities that exist.
Peak performance is stationary— a mountain summit. Pure performance is flow, carrying us along ceaselessly and constantly revealing new heights, new possibilities, and new potential. Once we experience pure performance, we feel more fully ourselves and we want more.
Pure performance is not about specific moments of transcendence— the peaks, if you will—but about the process of becoming, of self- discovery, of finding out what we’re made of and who we really are.

Pregame Routine

I talked instead about being alert, being relaxed. Being focused on the moment and making the next play. Not worrying about the longer term, the bigger picture. Just taking it one play at a time.
When I spoke to the team, I set an intention for the game and typically talked about embracing their own authentic way that they played the game, which needed not only mindfulness— being in the moment and focusing on the now— but insight.
“What is insight?” I might have said. “It’s information, it’s your discerning intellect working in accord with your intuition and your direct experience in the moment. Insight needs to be balanced with trust. Trust in yourself. Trust in the team. Trust in the game plan. Trust leads to faith, and faith is what you need in order to make right effort, which will lead to a good result. Your effort has to be based on insight and mindfulness of the moment, of what needs to be done now.
“What makes effort right? That it’s coming from that place of stillness and emptiness that we touch when we meditate.
Then— as was typical in my work with teams— we did a little chi kung, Chinese exercises that move energy through the body and focus the mind. This movement work was usually followed by breathing exercises. I had the players close their eyes and bring their awareness to the breath, breathing in and out into every part of their bodies from their heads to their toes. It’s amazing how this helps to clear and focus the mind. And I wanted their minds clear, wanted them to have the experience of emptiness and be able to access the still point in the midst of the tremendous, swirling pace of the game. I wanted them to have the experience of the eye of the hurricane.

Eye of the hurricane

That’s where your authentic self is found and begins to express itself. Right effort needs to be balanced by concentration and poise. We need to be focused on the present moment, on what’s happening in that present moment. This process gives us the opportunity to follow the game plan, see in real time how we’re doing in relation to the game plan, and adjust what we’re doing to achieve our goals.”
The repetition of the experience of accessing the still point— the eye of the hurricane— that comes through meditation makes it easier to access that place even when we’re not meditating: when we’re walking on a busy city street, preparing to walk on stage to deliver a presentation, being creative in whatever sphere we’re in. Experienced meditators are able to slip into the eye of the hurricane no matter what’s going on around them. The ability to do this helps athletes make plays and compete, remaining calm and focused and making decisions moment by moment from an unpressured and unperturbed place rather than being a bundle of nerves, reacting to what’s being thrown at them at the breakneck pace of an NBA game (or whatever level they’re playing).

Michael Jordan

I was very aware of MJ’s presence that day. The aura around him was extremely strong. I’ve never felt anything like it. It was like coming into the gravitational field of a very large planet— Jupiter, for example. Matter bent toward him and around him. He created his own atmosphere.
When you’re experienced in teaching meditation, you can feel people’s internal state as they meditate. You can see it in their posture and read it in the tension (or lack thereof ) in their face muscles. You can hear it, like a score of music, in the quality of their breath. Both Michael and Kobe were without question my best meditation students (along with those double lifers in the prisons). The two greatest basketball players I worked with were also my best meditators. But this holds true as a general rule— the best athletes are also my best meditation students.

Teachability of MJ & Kobe

I’ve often wondered with Michael and Kobe whether part of their genius was that they were so teachable. So coachable. They seemed to immediately see what you (as teacher or coach) saw, to understand the rationale for what you were trying to do. It went the other way as well.
Teaching MJ and Kobe was exactly like that. They each had a very special kind of flexibility and open- mindedness. It might sound strange that when we’re most in touch with who we really are, we’re also at our most open. Our true, authentic self is not a fixed, unchanging thing. People who insist on defining themselves in that way tend to be rigid and self- defeating. We are fluid. In one sense, we are like chameleons. We do best when we allow the spontaneous expression of all the different selves that arise from the true self, that which makes us who we are and cannot be replicated, and which gives us an almost limitless ability to learn and grow.
When I watched Michael play, I noticed that one of his uncanny abilities was to become calmer as the game got more intense. It was almost as if the pressure comforted him. Perhaps the pressure created a kind of swaddling. His concentration and focus increased. He entered the eye of the hurricane. While the storm raged around him, he was in a place of placid stillness.
MJ never took a day off. Not one.
He was always connected to spirit, though he didn’t need to go to church to accomplish that. Spirit was already inside him. He had an attitude and philosophy about life that saw him as earning everything. He wasn’t asking anybody to give him anything.
He practiced with exactly the same level of intensity and competitive fire with which he played. He was the best player in the league, maybe the greatest of all time. But he was always working. We can all learn from that kind of relentless drive and consistency of effort about the nature of pure performance: it comes with total commitment and grueling work. Even at MJ’s level: no struggle, no swag.
Phil Jackson was always looking to help the team get to higher and higher levels of wellness. That was the ultimate goal— winning was a by- product.
The way we measure pure performance is against our personal best. Phil wanted that for the team. Phil didn’t stress winning so much as wanting his players to be best possible versions of themselves— to find themselves in the game. He stressed that the way to do this was by working together, by dropping the “me” in favor of the “we.” One could think of the analogy of five fingers of one’s hand, all working together. The fingers are moving but they are connected, directed by something larger than each finger individually.
Phil and I worked with the dynamic tension between the me and the we. It’s a delicate balance that all of us— in one way or another in whatever sphere of life we’re in— are always balancing.
For me to be able to work with him— to teach him— I had to communicate that great as he was, there was another level to be attained. This didn’t put him off. He had beginner’s mind and was always up for improvement, for doing whatever it took to get better. What I was doing was not just about upping his game— it was about helping him better understand himself. That’s one of the most important adventures we can have. Not simply to understand our quirks and personality or the nuances of our motivation. Those things are interesting and important, yes— but they’re not the crucial task. What I mean is knowing our essence, and that is not subject to analysis. Our hearts speak to us in this language. But we need to listen.

Honestly expressing ourselves is about being fully engaged. We express what’s inside us for no particular reason other than the joy of the moment. We don’t withhold. We just focus on doing the task at hand to the best of our ability. We do what we’re doing. Make a pass, set a screen, negotiate a contract, sing a lullaby to our child before bed, write an email— it doesn’t matter. Be in touch with your authentic self. That is what the Zen saying that Phil quotes— chop wood, carry water— conveys. Just do. Don’t second- guess yourself. It’s not that our wants and needs aren’t real. But there is also a deeper reality at work, and we need to come into tune with that as well as taking care of ourselves. And as we experience that deeper reality and our authentic self, as we come into accord with them, we find that our needs get taken care of in a way that is often new and wonderful.

PURE PERFORMANCE AND THE AUTOTELIC PERSONALITY

Another way to think about pure performance is that it’s the result of what’s called an “autotelic personality,” a term that comes out of the psychology of flow. Someone with an autotelic personality undertakes an activity for its own sake, not for other means. “Autotelic” also applies to an activity or endeavor done for the sake of the experience and not some other goal.
The goal of the activity has nothing to do with anything outside oneself. To play or work or live in an autotelic way means that the joy of accomplishment, or end result, and the joy in doing whatever it is we’re doing in the moment are indistinguishable.
That does not mean we stomp out any vestige of intention. On the contrary. We set our intention for what we want. But then we execute the intention in a way that we’re going to feel good about from start to finish.
Autotelism is a clean- burning fuel. There is no detritus, no residue. No smudge of ego. We could be performing and still lose.
It’s important to set goals, and it’s equally important to be able to let them go and just manage the moment. It’s the same way of being that we discussed above— to just do. When we’re in flow, in the zone, our sense of self- consciousness evaporates, and something larger than ourselves begins to reveal itself through us.
The possibilities for newness come when we are able to let go of or transcend our conditioning, the subtle and not so subtle messages that have lodged inside us regarding what we’re capable of. The constant evaluative measures that have been foisted on us, and which we have foisted on others. Or, perhaps most injurious, that we have foisted on ourselves.
When we’re most truly ourselves, we display effortless effort. The snow naturally slips from the bamboo leaf and the leaf springs back. The arrow finds its target in the dark. We score without trying to score. We feel most fully ourselves: not some washed out, scrubbed clean, disinfected, whitewashed angelic epitome of goodness and virtue. What we are is perfectly natural— nothing artificial or affected. We’re not pushing an agenda or trying to make something happen. Life is happening in us and through us. We have the kind of childlike innocence that I mentioned earlier, which Maslow referred to as playfulness, spontaneity, and purposeless creativity. We become again like children, having the gift of being in the moment— without filters, with no other intention than to express ourselves. Pure performance is rare: there is no “I” present— at least, not in the way we usually think about the self. The child at play is in her own autotelic universe.
Shunryu Suzuki, the author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (referenced earlier), in the prefatory material to that book, describes what it was like to be around Suzuki: He [Suzuki] exists freely in the fullness of his whole being. The flow of his consciousness is not the fixed repetitive patterns of our usual self- centered consciousness, but rather arises spontaneously and naturally from the actual circumstances of the present. The results of this in terms of the quality of his life are extraordinary— buoyancy, vigor, straightforwardness, simplicity, humility, serenity, joyousness, uncanny perspicacity and unfathomable compassion. His whole being testifies to what it means to live in the reality of the present. . . . In his presence we see our own original face, and the extraordinariness we see is only our own true nature.
World champion bodybuilder, movie star of Terminator fame, and former governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger said that lifting one weight with total consciousness is equal to ten lifts with less than total consciousness. That’s a very powerful statement. To be fully in the present moment, to have total consciousness, is what pure performance is all about

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible

is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.

— Muhammad Ali

TIM GALLWEY THE INNER GAME OF TENNIS

WROTE THAT THE FIRST SKILL NEEDED TO DEVELOP THE inner game is the art of letting go of “the human inclination to judge ourselves and our performance as either good or bad. Letting go of the judging process is a basic key to the Inner Game. . . . When we unlearn how to be judgmental, it is possible to achieve spontaneous, focused play.”
The process of “judging” that Gallwey notes above is also similar to what I learned with Larry. We followed the movement of the mind away from negatively perceived stimuli or objects (an unpleasantly blaring car horn, for example) toward something perceived as pleasant (the delicious dinner we’re looking forward to), or toward something to which the mind is neither attracted nor averse. We’re almost always unconsciously involved in this kind of evaluative process— one that judges things bad or good— with detrimental effects. That process keeps us from being fully in the moment. It is as though we were only half alive.

INSTILLING STRESS HARDINESS AND CONFIDENCE IN KIDS

What I do want is for them to feel less crippled by their mistakes, to instead see mistakes as challenges and as a path to growth. I want them to understand that it is only through the struggle that we gain the mental toughness and fortitude to succeed. That it is only through trying and failing that we build inner strength. And that at their young age they should begin to consider this as a lifelong process; they can (and even should) begin looking at life this way starting now.

Finding the right pace and a rhythm to our life is essential.

Can we identify our own rhythm?
Can we feel how we’re at our best when we move through life at a certain pace?
Can we gauge when we’re giving an appropriate amount of energy to any given task, as well as when we’re overextended?
This kind of pace or rhythm exists at the micro level too, in the pacing of each breath. When we become aware of the breath, we are on our way to becoming aware of our internal rhythm, the pace at which our life wants to move. And when we become aware of our breath, through the breathing techniques we’ve already discussed, we can learn to regulate our rhythm and live in a way that helps us feel balanced and present in the moment while also helping us achieve our long- term goals.

Error Attribution

Sports psychologists study what’s called “error attribution.” It’s an easy enough concept to grasp. When we make a mistake, what do we attribute our error to? The novice or amateur tends to attribute errors to some fault: I am not fast enough, strong enough, smart enough. The elite performer, however, tends instead to attribute errors to lack of sustained effort. Instead of withdrawing energy and getting defensive about mistakes, the elite performer brings more energy to bear, using all her resources to figure out how things work and aligning herself with that. In mindfulness training, we call this “right effort,” a concept we touched on earlier.
Right effort is based on wisdom, on understanding. We realize— like the meditation- ready double lifers in the prisons where I taught— that we are responsible, no one else. We are responsible for how we react to screwing up and to whatever life throws at us, no matter how seemingly unfair. It always starts with us, with the individual self.
We develop what’s called “stress hardiness.” The stress that comes with challenges and hardship is crucial for growth. We just have to know how to use it positively.

The caterpillar falls to the ground and then dies.

“What do you think the story means?” I ask the kids. “What’s the lesson here?”

“You’ve got to do it for yourself,” I remember one young girl saying. “No one can make you into a butterfly.”

“That’s exactly right,” I said, glad that the message had gotten through. “The lesson is that it is by struggling to get out of the chrysalis that you build the strength to fly. I’m sorry to say it’s the same for all of us. You have to build yourselves up. You have to know adversity in order to become strong inside.”

Stress hardiness comes from being able to separate stimulus from response. I explain to the kids: “You can watch your own behavior, your own reactions. Say someone does something mean to you. You can develop the ability to look at yourself from inside, to step back inside yourself and see how you’re reacting to that meanness. You can observe yourself. You can feel curious about why you’re reacting in a way that feels hurt, insulted, or vengeful. You can develop an inner witness to your actions that has the ability to say, ‘Wait a minute, slow down, don’t jump the gun. Chill!’”
“This ability to look at yourself from inside is the first step in becoming really good at something,” I tell the kids. “Self- awareness is the ability we have to observe and evaluate our own experience. When you observe yourself, you can make adjustments. The trick is to learn to observe your experience without getting down on yourself. One way to do this is to remember that we are always observing to learn. When we remember that it’s all about a love of learning, self- observation becomes much easier to do. Sometimes, it’s still hard. But it can also be exciting and fun.”

And I know that you know that your heart doesn’t know anything about arithmetic. Your soul isn’t controlled by algorithms. It takes trust. It takes being able to make mistakes and not get down on yourself. It takes being able to realize you have a choice, even when you think you don’t. If you remember one thing about our talk today, let it be this— you always have a choice.

LOCUS OF CONTROL

If the locus of control is external, it means that society or perhaps our ideas of status or the opinions of other people— something outside us— is dictating our behavior. When our locus of control is internal, it means that our decision- making process is in accord with who we are inside, not with the messages coming at us.
I wrote my master’s thesis in psychology on teenage suicide. I learned that the major factor determining whether or not teens at risk die by suicide is whether or not they feel that there’s someone in their life who loves them unconditionally. This is vitally important for all of us. When we can begin to experience the greatness within, we feel loved. Unconditionally. We discover a greater capacity inside ourselves, something bigger and more powerful. We know our perfection in all its imperfect humanness.
I’ve been told that I don’t give the kids any answers; what I want them to do is find things out for themselves. The children need to experience mindfulness, right effort, trust, insight, and confidence. Without personal experience of these things, they’re just a bunch of words.
As I’ve noted above, we always want a formula to help us grow, to free us from pain, to help us gain confidence, to make us wiser and better human beings. But there is no formula. That’s why I find it essential to draw wisdom and insight from all traditions.

The question is always:

Why am I reacting the way I am reacting?
What is driving that?
How can I see clearly in this moment?
How can I generate hope?
How can I keep my connection with the divinity inside me? And, finally and most important, how can I serve?
How can I help?
What does it mean, I often ask the kids I teach, to keep generating hope?
How can we embrace whatever comes up and say yes to it?

The most fortunate people, I say “are not the people who are rich or famous but those who are able to live in a state of energizing enthusiasm.”

ENERGIZING ENTHUSIASM

Where does enthusiasm come from anyway? Is it something that “possesses” us? Or is it perhaps part of our temperament, with some of us just naturally more enthusiastic than others? Does enthusiasm have to do with our genes, or is it the result of the way we were raised? All these factors count, but I know from my own experience that we can also generate enthusiasm. My enthusiasm is sustained by my hunger to learn, which is only increasing as I get older. As long as I have that, I am being drawn into the future. There is a feeling of excitement in the process of becoming. What is going to happen next? Each moment is pregnant with possibility.
The word enthusiasm comes from the Greek entheos, meaning “the God within.” When we connect with our authentic self— the self that feels connected with the ten thousand things— we feel the God within. We feel the unfolding of life moment by moment, along with a sense of awe, as we do when we’re in a flow state.
With true enthusiasm, there is no calculation, no playing the angles, no staging, positioning, or posturing, no calculation of pluses and minuses. It is the math of one plus one equals six! There is a spontaneous unfolding that we’re part of, though it’s hard to grasp because it is both a “now” and a “then.” That unfolding has been named a silence, an emptiness, but in my experience it can also have a propulsive quality, a sense of movement. For me it is often active, kinesthetic.
I have often worked at the intersection between stillness and movement. My preferred kind of mindfulness is active.

It is not about sitting on a cushion contemplating emptiness. It is mindfulness on the go, being in flow and in the moment, yet in motion; it is when we’re at our most active, most dynamic. When movement comes out of the stillness, there’s a knowing, a wisdom of what to do, how to do, and when to do. The seeing and doing co- arise without a hair’s breadth between them. In fact, it’s more about being than doing because there is no doer. Something larger than ourselves is speaking and acting through us. And we know: this is what we were born for— it is the be- all and end- all, the alpha and the omega.