Above All Else, page 25
On the other hand, there are also many people with amazing technical skills, but who aren’t able to consistently perform to the full potential of those skills. Their minds are too busy with other thoughts that don’t concern the task of the moment. They don’t have the confidence to stay calm and trust that their instincts will lead them to their best performance if they just let them.
We are all born with the innate inclination to trust our instincts. As babies and even toddlers, we had little other than our instincts when determining a course of action. A “gut” feeling would tell us to do something, and we would follow it.
Fortunately, as we grow up, we have many new experiences and gain a lot of new information. Unfortunately, we start to pay less attention to our gut feelings, intuition, and instincts, and instead are led by fears of making mistakes, worrying about other people’s perceptions of us, and concern for the final outcome rather than the task at hand. All of these are contrary to operating on instinct.
We operate on instinct when our minds are calm, undistracted, and purely focused in the moment. It is an incredible yet very natural experience. Our senses pick up and make us aware of everything that is happening around us. We see, hear, and feel what we are confronted with and instinctively respond to it without analysis, or at times without even conscious thought.
Many of us have experienced unique moments in various activities when we stopped thinking and were going on automatic. These moments often happen when something suddenly forces us to operate on instinct without giving us a chance to think or do otherwise. The result is often a level of performance we didn’t even know we were capable of.
Nearly everyone who drives a car has had an experience like this. There you were, calmly cruising down the road, enjoying a good song, when another driver suddenly pulled out in front of you and slammed on the brakes. In the fraction of a second that you had to respond, you hit the brakes, looked in your mirrors, looked to the sides, hit the gas, turned to avoid the collision while not causing another one. You took evasive action in a matter of seconds. You never trained for, or practiced, the particular maneuver that was required of you. But the situation demanded that you respond without hesitation. You handled it and didn’t even realize how terrified you were until it was over. You don’t even know how you did it. You were forced to trust your instincts because you didn’t have time to think or do anything else. Your instincts came through for you and they always will.
Our instincts are only as good as we have trained them to be. If you had come across the same situation during your first time behind the wheel of a car, you would have been less likely to respond as well. An experienced taxi driver would have handled it better. A NASCAR driver, better still.
We will perform at our best, whatever level that best is, when we trust our instincts to take us there. If we are trying to excel in any activity, we should be constantly training our skills and developing our instincts with the goal of becoming a “natural.” To do this, we must start practicing the “skill” of trusting our instincts while our abilities and skills are still early in their development.
Training to Trust Your Instincts
Few concepts are less understood than that of trusting our instincts. We all get the idea. But isn’t it something that just happens by chance? Something only exceptionally talented individuals can do? And what exactly are our instincts anyway? Is it really possible to actually train to trust them?
Deep inside us all, the innate ability exists to trust our instincts. Given the fact that it exists, it is also possible to train the “skill” of trusting our instincts.
To become a natural who can instinctively perform at the best of your abilities without obvious thought or effort, you must do two things:
1. Train your skills to the point that they become instinctive muscle memory. (This is not limited to physical skills used by athletes. The same is true for social, communication, mental, and emotional skills that are required in so many other fields.)
2. Retrain the actual instinct to trust your instincts that you had as a small child.
Some people may be genetically built to more easily accommodate the skills necessary for certain sports or activities, but we are not born with specific instincts for them. These types of skills are acquired. Only after much repetition and extensive visualization do such skills become instinctive and happen automatically as muscle memory.
When our minds are calm, undistracted by outside thoughts, and focused only on the task at hand, trusting our instincts and performing at our best happens automatically. In that moment, nothing else in the world exists except the next “move” we need to make. We aren’t aware of physical pain and don’t feel fear or anxiety. The only thing in our world is this basket, this pass, this joke, this comment, this expression, this stroke, this dance step, this chord, or the free-fall formation that is required from us at that moment. When we stop “trying to think” how we do a move and just do it, we are allowing our instincts to take over.
I am pretty good at typing. But if asked to write down where the letters are on a keyboard, I couldn’t tell you. My fingers know where they are, but I don’t. If I think of what I want to write, not “how to” write it, and trust my fingers to hit the correct keys, they usually do.
For the purposes of this conversation, please accept these two definitions:
Instinct – A move or a skill that you have trained to the point that it has become muscle memory and happens automatically without the need for conscious thought. (Putting one foot in front of the other when you are walking.)
Trusting your instincts – Trusting your mind and body to do the move or skill it knows by muscle memory on its own, without conscious input from you. (You don’t think about how to walk, you just walk.)
For simplicity’s purposes, please allow me to approach this conversation in terms of sports. But understand that the skills an athlete trains in are no different from the skill of responding to difficult customers and students that waitresses and teachers must learn and practice.
In formation skydiving we can most efficiently train our individual flying skills in a vertical wind tunnel, incredible machines that are basically free-fall simulators. In the same way a golfer spends a great deal of time slowly and smoothly working out the body mechanics of a perfect swing, a dancer methodically practices new dance moves, an actor rehearses expressions in a mirror, or a lawyer practices approaching the jury, in a wind tunnel skydivers can practice the exact physical input necessary for aggressive, precise body flying moves.
With enough practice, we all eventually learn the technical skill. It’s not perfect, but we understand how it is done. We do it slowly because we have to think through every part of the move in order to coordinate all the participating body parts so that they work together as one.
At this time the skill is not yet trained to the point of muscle memory. We are capable of performing the move, but to do it correctly, our bodies require many reminders from us in the process. With enough repetition and visualization, our body begins to develop some degree of muscle memory. The muscle memory allows us to think less because our body knows more. The more of a move our body knows as muscle memory, the fewer reminders it needs from us during the move. If we relax and trust our instincts, we will naturally allow our body to do what it knows how to do, while only giving it the additional information it needs.
The ultimate extension of this is when we have executed and visualized it so many times that the entire move happens with minimal thought or none at all. We recognize the need to make a specific move, and it happens automatically, instinctively. This is true, whether learning to play a sport or an instrument, fly a plane, drive a car, or type on a keyboard. It’s all the same.
It is a long road from the time when we first learn a particular move and must think through each part of the exact physical input necessary to the time when that perfect move happens automatically with little or no thought at all.
This raises the question, If during our learning progression the amount of conscious reminders we need changes, then how do we know how much we need to think about it at any given moment?
We don’t want to be mentally lazy and not think enough. But we also don’t want to overthink. Everybody understands how crippling thinking too much or overanalyzing can be. Overanalyzing is the opposite of trusting your instincts.
We know what not to do, but we don’t know what to do. If we don’t know the answer to learning how to trust our instincts, who does?
Our bodies do. If our minds are calm, focused, and distraction-free, it happens easily. Here is how it works:
• The more muscle memory our body has, the fewer conscious reminders it needs from us.
• If we let it, our body will automatically perform the amount of a move it currently knows as muscle memory without additional conscious reminders from us.
• If your body knows 40 percent of a particular move by muscle memory, it only needs the other 60 percent reminded from you. Our body will know how much of the move it has trained as muscle memory and will “ask” us for the other 60 percent.
• If we are calm and focused in the moment, we will “hear” our bodies ask for this information and we will instinctively answer with the information it needs and only the information it needs.
There is an internal conversation going on between our mind and our body. We cannot “try” to make this conversation happen any more than we can “try” to walk or make our body do anything it already knows how to do. This internal conversation will happen instinctively if we let it. (Most often during this process, the part of a move you have to remind your body how to do is the beginning of a move. Once you get it started correctly, your body will often finish the job on its own.)
When we stop trying to tell our bodies what to do and allow them to do what we have trained them to do, we will be trusting our instincts. When we do, our bodies will come through for us.
Trusting our instincts is not limited to sports. In every walk of life, regardless of how well trained our instincts are, we will usually do our best by trusting them. Recent brain-scanning technology has shown that the brain unconsciously makes rational decisions, quickly analyzing the data it gets, and reaches a decision sometimes seconds before our conscious minds “think up” that same decision. Actions that feel like random choices or instinctive responses are often logical thought processes using available information carried out in the unconscious mind. Many successful businesspeople say their best decisions are the ones they make using “gut feelings” or instinct.
How Overanalyzing Cripples Our Performance
If we are wrapped up in external concerns and distractions, our instincts are not able to take over. Usually out of fear, we don’t trust that our bodies or minds will do what we’ve trained them to. In addition to the 60 percent it needs, we also try to force on it the 40 percent it already knows. Now instead of operating at 100, we have overloaded it at 140 percent. This is more than a natural internal conversation. It becomes noisy and distracting as opposed to calming and focused. Our instincts are blocked by too much thought, worry, and analysis.
We end up poorly executing skills that we had already trained to be muscle memory and that we were previously doing well. We analyze our performance in a desperate attempt to figure out what we’re doing wrong. Being the dedicated people we are, we start trying even harder to fix the problem. But the actual problem was trying too hard and thinking too much in the first place.
In trying so hard, we have obviously decided that everything we are aiming to achieve must be very difficult. The more difficult we think it is, the harder we try. The harder we try, the worse we do.
The most unfortunate thing here is that this “analysis paralysis” only happens to people who truly care and are giving a 110 percent effort to make it happen. It is usually caring so much that causes them to go down this path in the first place.
To become a natural, you must have the confidence to try by not trying. To care by not caring.
Consistently performing at our best is easy. We have to work hard in training and bring our skills to a high level. We have to visualize extensively (see page xx) and do many repetitions in order for those skills to become instincts. There are no shortcuts. We have to be disciplined in training ourselves to trust our instincts. But once we have done the hard work, we just relax, calm our minds, trust our instincts, and let it happen.
If you want to have this relaxed confidence when you are called upon to perform at your best, you must have practiced it in training. You will have proven to yourself in practice that it works, and you will be calm and confident the day of the meet, the meeting, the big day. You will know without any doubt that as long as you calm your mind, rid yourself of all distractions, and focus on the task at hand, your absolute best performance will emerge on its own.
This may sound as if I am describing some mystical experience that brings to mind “Feel the force, Luke.” And that is exactly what I’m saying.
The Optimum Performance State: Flying
“On the Line”
There are many definitions for the mental state we are in when we perform at the top of our game. It has been referred to as “flow,” “the zone,” “on the line,” or the “ideal performance state.” It is a place where our minds are calm, undistracted, and focused in the moment. When we let our instincts take over. It happens almost effortlessly for us when we allow it to.
Slalom skiers achieve their fastest times we they are on the line. They can only go down a hill as fast as they can control. If they try to go faster, they will be less efficient in their handling of the course and lose time or fall and be out of the race.
On the other hand, if they are led by the fear of falling, their priority becomes to not fall rather than to go as fast as they can control. This approach will prevent them from pushing themselves to the fastest speed of which they are truly capable.
It is important to start training this ideal mental state, whatever you want to call it, right from the beginning.
There is one thing that is absolutely essential to understand: the ability to perform at your best is a trained skill. Though your “best” performance level will progress with training and time, the skill to perform at that best is the same skill for a novice as it is for a pro. The skill to perform at your best will remain the same skill even as your “best” advances.
It is a rare individual that is perfectly balanced. In our daily lives and activities, most of us tend to be either on the more aggressive or more passive side. This is not simply a learned and acquired behavior. Infants come out of the womb with a tendency toward one or the other. It is truly a part of who we are. We are born this way.
Our best performance happens when we are right on the line or in the zone. If our instincts are to be overly passive or overly aggressive, then trusting our instincts will not lead to our best performance. We will tend to favor one side of the line or the other. We need to retrain ourselves to be instinctively on the line. Though it may be difficult to change “who we are,” it is not impossible. We are certainly able to change who we are in the limited context of performing in our chosen field.
When we review and evaluate our performance, it is not enough to ask whether it was technically correct. We want to dial in our natural state so that we train it to be right on the line. The questions we need to ask are “Was that my best?” “Was I on the line?” “Did I have more in me?” “Could I have been more aggressive?” “Was I too aggressive?” “Do I need to calm down more?”
In order to be right on the line, you must give yourself conscious reminders during your preparation, visualization, and during the actual performance. If you are someone that tends to be too passive, you will need to remind yourself to “Go,” “Push it,” or “Gun it.” If you are someone who tends to be too aggressive, it will be more along the lines of “Stay calm,” “Stay cool,” or “One at a time.”
Your abilities change, but the skill of performing up to the full potential of your abilities doesn’t change. You must learn this skill at the beginning of your training and continue to practice it as your skills progress. Anytime you are required to perform at the best of your abilities, it will just be another step in this process.
How to Put Yourself “On the Line”
In skydiving and other high-speed precision sports (HSP sports), there are two diametrically opposed qualities. By definition, high speed implies high adrenaline. When you are racing down a ski slope, around an auto track, on a motocross trail, or through the sky, your heart pounds and the adrenaline flows.
But to stay on the line, maintain control, and maneuver your specific “course” at the highest speed possible, your mind must be calm. Things are happening at an incredibly fast pace. Within fractions of a second you need to be able to recognize adversities that require you to alter your plan, or advantages that allow you to push yourself harder. You must instinctively make the decision that produces the best results. There is no time for extended analysis or deliberations.
As you increase your speed, you squeeze the same amount of information into a shorter amount of time. For this amount of information to be instantly absorbed, processed, and for the correct decision to be made, you need to be calm, very calm, in an almost meditative state. The faster you go, the calmer you must become.
The common error for many HSP sport athletes is that they don’t establish the necessary level of calm. Our adrenaline is pumping and we love it. We come out of the gate, kick it into high gear, and try to hold on. In formation skydiving, this may work for a few seconds or, if you are really lucky, for an entire jump. But you’ll never get through the meet without blowing up.
