In this podcast, Paul Crick from GRACEWorks interviews me about my unique perspective on performance, encouraging you to go beyond the mental game to uncover the extraordinary benefits the quiet mind can bring to sport, business and life.
For almost four decades I have been living inside the question of the relationship between effort and performance.
In my book, Breathe Golf I wrote about certain performance paradoxes i.e., ‘the harder you try, the worse it gets’ in order to demonstrate that it’s the nature of the effort made that is most important, rather than effort itself.
To illustrate, recall a time in your golf, tennis or any other sport where the harder you hit the ball and the more you thought about getting your technique right, the more your performance suffered.
Now, imagine that instead of your attention being drawn outward, worrying about swing tips or the ball toss, you brought your focus inside – to the breathing, the t’an tien / hara (centre of gravity), letting tension fall away from the body and allowing the thoughts to reduce or disappear altogether in favour of a deeper knowing.
This ‘setting up from the inside’ as my students like to call it, and the effort made therein, the constant work to remember, reinforce and apply the efforts made in a daily Performance Practice is the real key to success in sport.
It is also the key to success in business. The CEO groups I’ve worked with, although some may struggle at first (inner quietude can initially appear as emptiness or just plain boredom because the mind is so used to being busy), find that inspiration takes the place of logic and analytical thinking and solutions to problems can be found in an instant, fully formed, tangible and exacting – in contrast to the mental grasping and piecing together of ideas and information.
Starting each day with a 20 – 60 minute Performance Practice will help you unlock deeper knowledge, insight and intuition and I hope you will join me on this adventure in 2026.
