Like many people I’ve been fascinated by the winter Paralympics. Every athlete was an inspiration.
I was listening to one competitor who was explaining that they could have achieved more if they’d had access to the sports psychologists that other Olympians had access to.
She went on to say that sports psychologists consider the most important thing was learning how to control your emotions, which come from the pressure, the crowd, the event…well good luck with that one!
However, controlling emotions seems very logical in a society that seeks to control our inward response to outside circumstances. But this is borne of a simple mis-understanding of where emotions really come from.
We live in the feeling of our thinking, always feeling our thinking. When our thinking is off base, we feel off-base. When our thinking is clear, we feel clarity. And none of this ever comes from our circumstances. But having the simple understanding of where our feelings come from is enough to start clearing the system naturally, and falling back in to the zone.
Looking for outside explanations, or applying outside solutions only creates more thinking, and so more feelings (or emotions)!!! And pushes us further away from the ‘zone’ when there is no-thinking going on when we perform at our very best. Peak performance is the absence of thought, and this never comes from ‘doing’ more thought!
The Skip of the British curling team, went from 43% to 92% accuracy in 1 day, and her reasoning (aside from drinking water and eating fruit 😉 ) was ‘win or lose, the team support is still there’.
She still had an intention to win, to do her best, but wasn’t hung up on the outcome. And as a consequence, her mind was clear and she performed at her very best. And that was just breath-taking to watch.