The Mindful Athlete

“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 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 other powers possible.”

“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.’”

“Every high-performing mindful athlete knows that if you want to achieve something, there’s a good chance that you can, no matter what, if—and this is a big if—you’re willing to pay the price. You not only have to focus on your intention, but you also have to be willing to get up early in the morning and do the same thing thousands and thousands of times—and then another thousand times—with intention. Which leads me to deliberate practice. …

When I worked with Kobe Bryant, he was making about thirteen hundred three-pointers a day in the off-season when he was working on his three-point shot.”

“Our bodies like to be in homeostasis. We like to be balanced. Life is hard enough—we want to be comfortable! But, again, to get better and improve our game on and off the court, we need to move out of our comfort zones. That doesn’t mean you should so far out of your comfort zone that you can’t function well. Our bodies work best when we push them in small increments. If we push ourselves too far, eustress can become distress. We have to really pay attention, because they can manifest the same symptoms. Eustress is achieved through moderation, sticking to the middle way, and not going to extremes. …

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.”

“It’s been my experience with all the athletes I’ve worked with, from the Lakers and the Bulls, to girls’ soccer teams, to weekend warriors, that while there are always calamities, extreme circumstances can make you stronger. This is what’s called having a strong sense of self-efficacy: the ability to tell yourself that no matter what happens, you will take everything as a challenge, not a curse. You’ll rise to the occasion and say, ‘Okay, the going is tough but this is going to be great!’

Self-efficacy is the ability to 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.

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.”

“Some people say that they don’t know what their intention or purpose is, but often they simply haven’t spent enough time listening to themselves carefully and in silence. Deep Listening is very useful here. 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. Nearly every single elite athlete or successful individual I’ve worked with had intention and a clear sense of purpose. They knew their charter, their reason for existence.”

“The more you practice mindfulness and the more often you access conscious flow, the more you feel that spirit of love. Because in some respects, the two are connected to that same big ‘Something.’ The more you feel that greater spirit of love, the less room there is for distraction. There is no room for concerns about being good enough or better than so-and-so, for all the concerns about what other people will think or say in the future, or how you did or what happened in the past. There is no room for any negative self-talk and distracting chatter, or for feeding the wolves of your hindrances.

Instead, you are flooded with consciousness and are fully and wholly concentrated on the here and now. This si the experience every athlete has when he or she is fully in the Zone. Sometimes we call this ‘being on fire.’ All distractions are burned away. This is pure performance at its best. This, ultimately, is the path of the mindful athlete.”