How Elite Athletes Return to Peak Performance When Interference Patterns Pull Them Out

After decades of training their bodies, skills, and tactics to perfection, professional athletes possess something most people never develop: a precise experiential vocabulary for their own peak states.

They can describe exactly what being 'in the zone' is like ("I become venom", "I become wolf", "I become nonchalant-arrogant").

More importantly, they can articulate exactly what pulls them out of it.

When you know the zone, you know your interference patterns.

In those interference patterns, something pulls them, pushes, retreats them, cringes them out of their ideal state of playing.

When the Game Becomes a Tunnel

What three professional athletes that I worked with in the last seven days shared is that when they are not in the zone, when they are feeling as if they are out of the game, they seem to not be able to see their teammates so well, the dynamic of the game.

They see from behind a blur. Some see the game through a tunnel or a tube.

All of them, when they were out of the zone, found themselves internally beyond the lines of the playground. They were not in the game.

The work then becomes seeing that they have left the game while they are still in it. They are somewhere else. They are not anymore part of the dynamic.

The Dissolution of Individual Self

When they are in the zone, it is as if all of them are somehow not limited to their individual selves. It is as if they are a vital part within the dynamic between those lines of the playground.

They are immersed in it. They become as if dissolved, their thoughts lower to a very low frequency. They hear one sound.

They can only describe this state after the fact, after the game, then they can contemplate it. They know, however, when they were not in that state.

Where Performance Becomes Mystical

This is where high-level sports performance becomes mystical. This is where the athlete seems to be performing from a non-dual state of awareness. This is not intellectual.

The practice then to improve performance is to document and explore what happens when interference patterns arise that block them from this natural, multiple-decades-trained capability that they have.

It is not a limitation of skill at this point; it is a limitation of identifying oneself with the interference patterns.

"There's a pic of me on IG... people think I'm grabbing my jersey. Really, I was grabbing in my head some chains, and I was breaking them... I just felt all that energy coming back to me like: be free." - Codi Miller

The Skill of Rapid Return

It is practically hanging around for minutes or quarters of an hour in the interference patterns while the game clock ticks. If a game only takes 10 minutes or 40 minutes, there is very little time to step out of those interference patterns.

So for them, it becomes a skill to lower and lower and lower the time it takes them to return to the zone.

That is the progress of awareness expansion in the performance environment.

How do you experience the zone within the lines of your day-to-day playground?

How elegantly, quickly, effortlessly do you return "to the game"?

IN SEARCH OF...

Psychiatrist and sports performance researcher Dr Rick Leskowitz: "When people come into collective practice together our bio-fields indeed can synchronize in measurable ways... and that actually predicts better cooperation."

Rudolf Steiner on thinking, feeling, willing: "To will my thinking is freedom; to think into my will is love."

Yunus Emre, the one who found Rumi's writing a bit too long: "That which you say is "I" in me, I am not in me. There's an "I" in me, deeper than "I"."