Why Elite Athletes Perform Better When They Stop Trying

There's a state that athletes, artists, innovators and mystics all recognize - where something else seems to take over.

They speak of being "in it" or "out of it," describing moments when decades of skill suddenly become a foundation for something beyond their usual capabilities.

They are surprised by themselves.

The Paradox: Doing and Not Doing Simultaneously

The paradox is this:

They are simultaneously doing and not doing.

Acting with complete engagement while letting go of willpower, forcing and survival-mode decision-making.

They're not thinking their actions. That would create a delay. It's more spontaneous than that.

It's as if they enter a zone, yet that zone also encompasses them - they find themselves completely immersed and attuned in the dynamic field they operate within.

The remarkable thing is that effortlessness allows them to achieve more than their training suggested possible!

New movements emerge, unexpected solutions appear, innovation flows through them rather than from them.

It's as if their body is a channel, a tuning fork, a receptacle.

What Athletes Discover: The Power of Non-Doing

Johan Cruyff expressed something like this in an interview about a never-before-seen soccer move: "I had never done that before. It was just the solution, the right answer to the situation."

One of my pro basketball players said: "There's power in not doing… those are the moments that when you're not thinking you give freedom to really endless possibilities."

Now what is that power they're all talking about?

A Simple Way to Experience This Yourself

Consider your breathing as a practical entry point.

Do you forcefully construct your breath, building yourself piece by piece toward some respiratory ideal?

Or do you surrender into breathing, allowing it to encompass you until you become breathed rather than breathing?

What changes when I allow myself to be breathed?

Once, in a session with one of my qi gong teachers I told him "I liked that movement you added in the sequence, it was new for me."

His answer: "it was new for me too, I've never done it before - it just appeared."

Why Preparation Must Meet Letting Go

Here rests the profound paradox:

There's intention and orientation toward an aim, yet complete letting go of that very orientation.

It's like they all prepare, prepare, prepare and then to fly higher… give up.

A non-intentional state where spontaneous ingenuity emerges.

Both seem to exist simultaneously - not as opposite sides of a coin, but as complementary aspects of the same reality.

Entering such potential requires both:

Continual skill development and craftsmanship (you DO need to train, that's why I love working with athletes and all those with inner drive to test out what's possible beyond what's believed to be true!), combined with the humble recognition that we're small specks within vast fields of possibility.

The Integration: Cultivation and Reception

From what I see peak performance emerges when decades of development meet the internal conviction to stop forcing our way toward excellence - and instead allow excellence to move through us.

Excellence, it seems, is both cultivated and received.

What is it, in you, that wants to move?

What if what you're forcing toward is already trying to move through you?

IN SEARCH OF...

Lama Govinda's experience of "the spell that had seized him":

"My limbs moved as in a trance, with an uncanny knowledge of their own, though their movement seemed almost mechanical. . . my own body had become distant, quasi-detached from my will-power. I was like an arrow that pursued its course by the force of its initial impetus, and the only thing I knew was that on no condition must I break the spell that had seized me. It was only later that I realized what had happened: I had become a lung-gom-pa, a trance walker who, oblivious of all obstacles and fatigue, moves on towards his contemplated aim, hardly touching the ground, which might give a distant observer the impression that the lung-gom-pa was borne by the air (lung), merely skimming the surface of the earth."

From a call this week with Soisci, my friend and former competitive Thai boxer, when I asked her about "in the zone" states:

"Its non-doing. It's being open to receive it because it is always there - a marriage of effort and surrender for it to come through - for it to kick in."

Marcus Aurelius giving a pointer: "

Stand straight, not straightened."