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Following on from my introductory article on the Three Principles of Optimal Performance. This excerpt is part two from my upcoming ebook on Optimal Performance.

Our brains are always thinking, its what they to do, but we don’t have to participate in thinking that is not healthy or helpful, we can see it for what it is, let it go, not taking it seriously. Previously habituated patterns of thinking, of the stories we tell ourselves, with ego and personality, become just that, creations of ego … we see that they are not us, they are fictions of thinking and imagination.

Psychologist Dr. Keith Blevens put the Three Principles into an historic perspective when he wrote:

“William James, widely regarded as the father of psychology and its greatest writer and thinker, published his seminal work, The Principles of Psychology, in 1890. He compared the state of psychology as a science to that of physics before Galileo. James regarded his own brilliant work as exploratory but provisional. His expressed hope was that the field would eventually discover causal laws that would make possible the prediction and control of mental life.

He asserted that “such knowledge, realized on a large scale, would be an achievement compared with which the control of the rest of physical nature would be relatively insignificant” (Morris, 1950). These causal laws, these principles, are precisely what Syd Banks has somehow come to know.

   Mr. Banks not only discovered these principles, he has also effectively shared this understanding with people in many walks of life, some of whom, like myself, were psychologists. But something else has happened that even William James could not have foreseen. This more-than-intellectual-understanding, as it started to come alive in others, awakened in them new and evolving levels of simple but pure presence of mind, of mental health. And for that we all will be forever grateful.”

Sydney Banks enlightenment experience came to his conscious mind from the universal mind, as he describes it, the energy and intelligence of all life.

In his personal mind, he had unconsciously and innocently lived in a reality of limitation and mental suffering, ruminating over his life experiences.  Banks was an orphan who had to leave school at 14, as he described it, the story he told himself and lived in was ‘poor Syd, poor Syd’. He had been trapped in and believed his own story of limitation. His subconscious mind, full of memories of hardship, anxiety and self doubt was his space of daily living. His insight showed the illogic of this, he was walking backwards through life looking and living in the past as if it was real. Because of this he was never present with the immediate joy and freedom of the moment.

Sydney Banks’ insight and the understanding embodied in the Three Principles has opened up a new psychological paradigm to guide mental health and human performance into the future.

Implications of the Three Principles for Optimal Health and Performance

Thought Factory – we live in a thought generated reality, our brains are thought generating machines, literally a ‘thought factory’ that generates thousands of thoughts a day. Understanding the three principles allows us to see how we create our reality via thought and project that out into the world.

One Thought – We are one thought away from mental health, from peace of mind and optimal performance. One thought, one insight will change your thinking that changes your reality. That insight is not dependent on prior learning, knowledge or intellect, it is dependent on an openness, receptivity and intention to better mental health and performance. Mental health & optimal performance are about finding healthy thoughts from moment to moment.

Operating System – the Three Principles are the fundamental operating system for mental and physical life, they are not an application, they are the operating system that the software of our learnt knowledge and skills runs on. This operating system comes from universal mind and runs on wisdom and insight, a far deeper and more powerful intelligence than our personal mind of knowledge, experience and skills. Wisdom comes to us via insight and intuition.

Innate Health – the Three Principles allows us to see that mental health is our innate state.  In the same way that our intelligence will automatically and innately go about the process of healing a cut, we don’t need to consciously do anything other than clean and dress the wound. When we have a mental experience that we perceive to be negative, we don’t need to dig around in the past to keep on reliving it, we take the learning from the experience and focus on healthy thoughts in the present moment.

Learning – the operating system is not a skill set. It’s important to not confuse the 3P’s with learning, the 3P’s are not a magic wand, it facilitates accelerated learning but it is not THE learning of a specific skill. It is the intelligence that our learnt intelligence and experience resides in. Understanding the 3P’s does not teach you french or spanish, to ride a bike or drive a car, it won’t remember the maths you need to pass your exam next Friday. It will help you to have a clear mind, to focus with clarity, to attend to what is happening around you rather than be distracted by ‘what if’ thinking.

Focus – ‘Distraction is the enemy of performance’, is an old coaching saying of mine. When we are present in the moment we intend, attend, act and respond to what is, rather than imaginary ‘what ifs’. We spend more time living in and performing in the present moment, when our mind is not distracted by ‘what ifs’ we see, think and act with clarity. This has incredible power as the information we receive via our senses is clearer and thus more accurate. The clarity of thinking in the moment leads to clarity of focus and decision making. What takes us out of the present moment, out of the ‘Zone of Optimal Performance’ is the distraction of anxious, erroneous or outdated thinking that creates confusing ‘what if’ thinking.

Constant Truth – The psycho-logic of the principles allows us to see how thinking works and by extension how we create our reality via ‘thought in the moment’. Thought creates our reality moment by moment, our experience of our feelings is always our experience of our ‘thought in the moment’.

Out Dated Thinking: When old, outdated thinking is seen for what it is, it falls away and then you have less on your mind, when you have less on your mind, your innate joy and sense of harmony returns to its default status.

‘What If’ Thinking – When you have less ‘past – future’ thinking going on, then you are not being distracted by anxious thinking about what may or may not happen, you experience more of the present in the moment. You act and respond in and to the moment.

Separate Realities –  Life is experienced individually and uniquely, no one person can think and experience life as another. It allows for respectful communication and understanding of another persons thinking and reality. It helps us to insightfully and compassionately relate to other people, becoming less judgementmental and egotistical.

Synchronicity – Synchronising our personal mind with universal mind allows us to experience and bring harmony to our lives. Personal mind is ever changing, as our thinking changes; universal mind is constant and unchangeable. When personal mind synchronizes with universal mind, we are present in the moment, attending to what is, not what isn’t.

Clarity – when we are not distracted by imaginary thinking we experience clarity of mind, this leads to clear and precise thought and action. It allows for accelerated learning as the filters of outdated thoughts and beliefs become redundant. What you see and  experience is much closer to an accurate representation of reality undiluted or distracted by past – future ‘what if’ thinking.

Demystify the Illusion – The principles clarify the misunderstanding of the first story we are typically educated into, the ‘outside – in’ myth of finding happiness through accumulating belongings, people and experiences and see that this is not possible, when the logic of the principles is applied to this myth it is seen for what it is, an illusion.

Decompress Stress – It helps us to see how the silent killer of the last and current century works, how it is a self created illness and the 3P’s offers us understanding to alleviate this. We see how stress and the perception of ‘pressure’, ‘expectation’,’worry’ and ‘self consciousness’ are created and how we can transcend this to perform with a clear mind, focused, ready and relaxed.

Free Wont – French scientist Benjamin Libet discovered that there is a window of time between when a thought is generated by the brain and when it reaches consciousness. This means the concept of free will is actually more a case of ‘free wont’, specifically when it is habituated thinking that doesn’t serve health or wellness. The principles allow that thinking to be seen for what it is, outdated or illusory thinking that no longer needs to be acted on, the choice is then to not act, or not respond to erroneous or out dated thinking.

A Sense of Humour – when thinking is seen for what it is, just thinking, an impersonal tool to steer us through life, the thinking that doesn’t serve us then falls away as it is no longer relevant. Much of it is old thinking that is outdated, seen in this light, much of it is humorous. You see outdated thinking and wonder how could I seriously have thought that! It leaves more space for joy, humour and light heartedness.

Resilience – when we move from misunderstanding to understanding how we create our reality, the illusion is seen for what it is, a shadow of our thinking. Its power falls away and is replaced by what was there all the time but unrealized, the resilience of the human spirit. Not a well that has to be drunk at for its knowledge or its power, the realization that you are the well, you are the power and that everything you thought you ever needed is actually who and what you are.

The principles allow us to see the impersonal nature of thought for what it is, allowing us to get beyond the limitation of our own personal history and experiences, values and beliefs. It is literally like being able to reset our own personal operating system back to the default factory settings. To start again with all the potentiality of a new born child with a blank canvas, yet to now be able to impersonally utilise our accumulated learning and its wisdom.

Following on from my introductory article on the Three Principles of Optimal Performance. This excerpt is part one of two from my upcoming ebook on Optimal Performance.

In 1973 a Scotsman had a profound insight experience which led to the understanding of how human’s create their mental experience.

Sydney Banks was a welder who had emigrated to Canada as a young man, with little education, he had settled, married and made a modest life for himself.

Banks had an insight that led to a profound discovery. Prior to this experience he and his wife had decided to attend a relationship seminar. He was an anxious and insecure man, at the time he had been discussing his insecurity with a participant on the course who replied that he wasn’t insecure, he just thought he was, as he said later when describing this,

‘What I heard was: there’s no such thing as insecurity, it’s only thought. All my insecurity was only my own thoughts! It was like a bomb going off in my head … It was so enlightening! It was unbelievable … [And after that,] there was such beauty coming into my life.’ ( Long Beach lectures)

This insight led to an enlightenment experience which gave him insight into the way people psychologically create and experience their reality. This understanding, which has spread across fields of human wellness and performance, focuses on the inside-out nature of human experience and the common misconception that life is an outside-in experience.

What Banks saw was that people experience and feel their reality via their thinking in the present moment, rather than by the innocent illusion that life happens to them and they experience this via their feelings, as if thought was not part of this process.

This distinction allows people to see that they are experiencing their world via thought, rather than feeling. Thought and feeling are not separate, they are one and the same, two sides of the same coin, yet the feeling of the moment is created by thought. As the thought comes to consciousness it is communicated to the body instantaneously via the nervous system, to be experienced as feeling. Feeling is a critical feedback system on personal thinking, as it allows us to see how our thinking makes us feel, it literally lets our unconscious intelligence feedback to us whether our thinking is congruent with our inner wisdom. This understanding allows us to see what our thinking is creating for ourselves, moment by moment, we can begin to see and feel the clarity or flaws in our thinking.

It creates a space to be able to see that we are the creators of our own reality, metaphorically it’s like our brain (the thought factory) is a movie projector and the screen is our life, the brain is projecting the movie of our thinking onto the screen of our life. It’s a self created and generated reality.

A powerful and simple implication of this, is that the problems and stress that people experience in their lives, with relationships, with the ‘pressure’ of work, with family, with ‘stressful’ situations and significant others is actually their feeling of their own thinking. This is not them having a negative experience of another person, their partner for instance, it is them having an experience of their own thinking in the moment. They are not experiencing stress and anxiety from their partner, outside in, they are experiencing it inside – out, from the feeling of their thought about their partner.

With this understanding, we begin to see space between ourselves and our thinking, the beauty of this space is that the things that we believed stopped us from experiencing peace and happiness were never more than us experiencing our own thinking. That insight alone allows people to see what their thinking is producing for them, what reality the ‘thought factory’ creates. Banks came to call his understanding the Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought, in his book the Missing Link he describes them as;

Mind: The energy and intelligence of all life, whether in the form, or formless. The Universal Mind, or the impersonal mind, is constant and unchangeable. The Personal mind is in a perpetual state of change.

Consciousness: Consciousness is the gift of awareness. Consciousness allows the recognition of form, form being an expression of Thought.

Thought: The power of Thought is not self-created. Thought is a divine gift, which serves you immediately after you are born. Thought is the creative agent we use to direct us through life.

Psychologists who have been working with the three principles have seen profound changes in people suffering with alcoholism, drug dependency and mental illness, as they see for themselves that their suffering was the result of their contaminated thinking, as if they were running faulty software in the computer of their brain. Now that they can see their thinking for what it is, they can choose not to participate in illusory thinking. This in itself allows the thinking to drop away and they can be present in the moment, moment by moment, with their innate mental health. As they become more and more at one with themselves, their peace of mind, innate resilience and light heartedness becomes more present.

Part Two to follow …

The Three Principles of Optimal Performance

Raman Sakhuja wrote to me after a post I wrote to my cricketlab.co email list about A.B de Villiers and his batting strategy.

Raman asked  … “How about the mental strategy of the game? Especially dealing with pressure of expected performance and actual performance! I have noticed  that if I go with a clear head, strategy and cool and relaxed approach, I tend to bat better VS feeling self conscious, worried about peoples expectations – easily succumb to errors.

Any drills to sustain a clear head, strategy at different positions of batting order i.e. Opening VS going in at number 4 and so on?”

My response to Raman follows below, it is a teaser, as I speak to the Three Principles of Optimal Performance without naming them directly. I will share more on this in future posts.

It is to begin a process of clarifying a misunderstanding of how and where ‘pressure’,’expectation’,’worry’,’self consciousness’ are created and how to perform with a clear mind, focused, ready and relaxed. Please note, this is a general response to his question, as this is also an introduction to the Three Principles Of Optimal Performance. I have been exploring this with acting coach Jay Welsh, who is supporting his performers with the same issue. You’ll see why it is generic as you read on, as the challenges all of us face in life, sport and every arena of human performance are all variations on the same theme …

Imagine being able to design the perfect day and then live it, where everything just flows perfectly, your relationships, the tasks you do during the day. Nothing bothers you, it is a day of effortless performance. Free, easy, light.

Is this possible? We have all had days like this, maybe not often, but we have had easy, effortless days, so why can’t we have them consistently?

Our human experience ebbs and flows with our feelings and our moods, and our moods ebb and flow with our thinking. Human thinking seems to be like the weather, raining one minute, sunny the next, quiet one minute, then a storm blows in.

Yet, we do have these times when things do seem to just flow perfectly … so what about being in this space more often, having more flow, more lightness.

Human brains don’t stop thinking and in that thinking they come up with some weird
and bizarre stuff that can throw us off track and make us feel miserable, distracted or down. But, and it is a big BUT, we can learn not to pay attention to the thinking that gets in our way and would normally effect how we feel. Thinking that leads to us feeling anxious, stressed, fearful or low on confidence, and when we don’t think about that stuff, guess what? We feel good, we feel light, free and life goes back to flowing along.

So how do we learn not to pay attention to thinking that makes us feel down? Isn’t some of that thinking important to us, surely I need to know when I am afraid or anxious so I can take appropriate action?

Yes, if there is a real threat in your environment you want your senses on full alert to protect you, so you can make good decisions to ensure you are okay. Maybe you’re in an environment with a lion or a tiger, then that is a good idea, a poisonous spider or snake, definitely! Maybe you’re in a dark street or a car park at night and you need to be aware, to make good decisions to keep your self safe.

Yes, to all of these.

Yet the inbuilt stress response we have in our brain is there to protect us, it doesn’t have to run on full alert 24/7. It should only be activated when we need it, the rest of the time it should idle quietly in the background.

So back to my original question, imagine being able to design a perfect day, is it possible?

In professional sport, as in the arts and music, performers train to deliver perfect performance, time after time. That is their job, that is the expectation of the audience, to see and hear brilliance in the performance, to be wowed !

Yet, behind the scenes that performance takes hours, weeks, years of training and practice to get to a level of performance, where it does just seemingly flow perfectly.

In my work as a coach and high performance director in professional sport, we design the performance and then train it to be delivered with that level of excellence, with that wow factor. We know months, even years in advance when preparing for a world cup, the very day of a final, even the minute the match will begin. The team and players need to be ready and perform with such excellence to be able to win, years and years of preparation, learning and performance distilled into one final performance, to win a single match, to win a world cup.

It is a consciously designed process, to be practiced so that it isn’t delivered consciously, so the performers brain can produce the performance without conscious thought, to be wholly in the moment and adapt and flow with that moment.

Which means, by extension, with a little planning and a little practice ‘all our days’ can be designed to be delivered with that level of performance. To flow, easy and light.

Performers in all fields are normal people, they suffer from nerves and anxiety, so much so, that some wonderfully talented performers have never been able to manage their anxiety and give up on their dream, consistently overcome by their negative emotions.
They literally can’t deliver their lines or their performance, or if they do it is at a level that is far below their potential.

The three principles of optimal performance clarify and explain the fundamental understanding of the human thought process and how it creates our reality, it explains how we create our experience, moment by moment.
This understanding can help us to take off our minds the types of anxious thinking that leads to miserable performance. It doesn’t stop you thinking, it allows you to see how thinking works, what thinking is useful, what needs to be paid attention to and what can be ignored and let go.

When the thinking that leads to negative emotions isn’t engaged it’s like a sunny day not being spoilt by bad weather. That doesn’t mean that when bad weather arrives, as it will, that we try to pretend that it isn’t there! Of course it is, it just means we can see it for what it is and that it will pass and we can keep on track, keep our focus, trust this understanding, knowing that the sun is always shining on the other side of the dark clouds. That in fact the default setting for our day, for our performance and our life is sunny and that the clouds and weather that pass every day and night, are just that, the weather.

We are all performers, professional or amateur, whether we be student, pupil, stay at home mother, executive, sports person, artist, musician, actor … at some stage we will all need to understand the thinking that creates these emotions, to see anxious and stressful thinking for what it is and move beyond it. There is a place which is behind the thinking that created these emotions that is quiet, peaceful, calm and where optimal performance sits and is waiting to be delivered.

More to follow …