The paradox of sport
Elite-level sport is incredibly demanding. You have to train your ass off. Push yourself through early mornings, workouts you think you can't finish, striving for something you don't truly know if you can achieve. In the aspirational phase, financial and time pressures are added. The reality of many unfunded sportspeople is juggling a job or jobs with the same level of training as a full-time athlete. You just won’t make the progress that’s required without doing this work, but it has to be paid for. Regardless of your financial situation, so much is invested. The unfunded sportsperson is time-poor, and the funded sportsperson is meaning rich.
When you factor in that it takes years of consistent work to reach a world-class level, there is ample opportunity to create a lot of meaning in the result. Beliefs are subconsciously created based on how the world looks to us. And these beliefs work like a roadmap in our mind. It instructs our experience, where to go, and what to create.
It’s the reason why, most likely, if you grew up in the Western world, you struggled to sleep on the night of the 24th of December. Until you reach an age when you realise the truth, at this point, you may still be excited by the presents, but the experience would have lessened.
Our highest belief always drives our thoughts. What we think (again, whether we’re aware of them or not) becomes our experience.
Having done all of this work, it then becomes the time to perform; you need to let go of everything. All the work you've done, time, energy and money you've invested. All of the meaning about what's about to happen. In short, the result. When your whole life is dedicated to this one thing, this is perhaps easier said than done.
So many of us struggle to perform because sport demands of us what our culture doesn't. To be present. And presence is absolute.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re thinking about the next shot, the last shot, the next game, the last game or the competition next year.
We cannot be in an imagined future and be present.
We cannot relive our experience of the past and be present.
And in psychological terms, it is in the present where we perform at our best.
Sport is the perfect way for you to discover who you truly are. This is because its design demands you to navigate your psychology. Consider this equation.
You begin a sport; you find joy in it and its challenges. You perform at your best for your current level when immersed in the experience. ie when present.
To become world-class, you have to dedicate your life to your sport.
During this process, the more you commit in resources (time, energy, money etc), the more compelling the idea that the outcome is of increased importance becomes. It’s important to note that there is no direct correlation here, as our experience is subjective, and the outcome is still essentially the same.
The one thing that doesn’t change is the psychology of performance. The mental state from which you perform at your best is still exactly the same as when you began your journey in sport. It becomes more elusive because of the layers of thinking, stories and complexity accumulated along the way. Shoshin, the concept in Zen Buddhism, known as beginner’s mind, points to this.
So, in turn, because you want to perform at your best, sports bring into view what inhibits our performance. I will, in fact, argue that it is the perfect vehicle for increasing self-awareness. The greater the meaning created around the outcome, the busier the mind. The busier the mind, the more amplified the experience, and the worse the performance becomes.
So this is the paradox of sport; to become world-class demands everything of us, and yet we need to retain the beginner’s mind.
Total physical commitment and yet zero mental.
This can only be found in one place. Now. It is when we’re present we are most free. This is when we transcend the “pressure”. Technique aligns, and we perform beyond limits.
