The Surprising Secret to Being at Your Best When it Matters Most, Part Two
Part two of a two-part exploration of performance
There’s a story I sometimes tell about a Zen master who used to have his followers begin each day with the ritual of 10,000 prostrations to the North, South, East, and West, which would pretty much take them to lunch time. Then they would repeat the ritual in the afternoon until dinner, and then one more time in the evening before retiring.
One day in a talk, the master told his students that “There is nothing you can do to become enlightened. Enlightenment is but a happy accident.”
A monk who had grown tired of doing all of this practice every day said to the master, “If enlightenment is just a happy accident, then why do you have us doing all of these practices?”
To which the Zen Master replied, “To become more accident prone.”
In part one of this article, I shared the value of working on your “B” game — that which you can show up and deliver on every single time no matter how you happen to be feeling in the moment.
Today, we explore what is, for many people, the more exciting part of the secret:
How do I increase the odds of being at my best when it matters most? How do I become “more accident prone”?
The answer, at least to the extent that my high-performing clients and I have come to understand it, lies in a couple of simple understandings about what “our best” really is and how to invite it to show up more fully and frequently in our lives…
- It’s not up to you, but it’s not not up to you
The notion that “if it’s to be, it’s up to me” has led many artists, performers, and business people to assume that success and failure In any endeavor are 100% a matter of will and effort. But the pressure and stress that accompany that idea are the fruits of a poisonous tree. We are not only not in control of those moments of transcendent excellence where we perform “out of our skin” and deliver to a level that surprises even us, the notion that we should be is a relatively modern phenomenon.
From the ancient Greeks whose artists and scientists were reliant on the fickle affections of the muses, daughters of the gods Zeus and Mnemosyne, to the Romans, who could only hope that their attendant “genius” would deliver transcendent excellence in a timely manner, there has been a recognition baked into the culture that transcendent moments of excellence — our “A” game — is somewhat at the whim of the gods.
But our not being in control doesn’t mean that we don’t get a say in the matter. In her stunning TED talk “Your Elusive Creative Genius”, the author Elizabeth Gilbert shares a one-sided conversation she had with her own inner daemon while working on what became the runaway number one bestseller Eat, Pray, Love:
“Listen you, thing, you and I both know that if this book isn’t brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right? Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this, I don’t have any more than this. If you want it to be better, then you’ve got to show up and do your part of the deal. But if you don’t do that, you know what, the hell with it. I’m going to keep writing anyway because that’s my job. And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job.”
This is a perfect example of someone who gets the secret. She’s going to keep bringing her “B” game day in and day out, regardless of whether or not her “A game shows up. But she also knows that her genius is waiting in the wings and on the sidelines, ready to tap in and take over at a moments notice and that when and if it does, it will be welcomed with open arms.
2. Indiscriminate full engagement is our natural state
Have you ever watched a baby staring at a mobile, playing peek-a-boo with a parent, or discovering the joy of having hands and feet? They are undistracted by extraneous mental activity and fully engaged in the task at hand, even if most casual observers would be forgiven for pointing out that maybe the task at hand isn’t the most important thing in the world to be engaged in.
By way of contrast, look around at your fellow adults sleepwalking through life, preoccupied with their problems, distracted by their devices, and in the words of Neil Postman, “amusing themselves to death”. While this state of continual distraction and preoccupation may be normal, it is far from natural.
Engaging in any task while your mind is elsewhere is like driving a car with a 12-cylinder engine but never taking it out of first gear. When we show up fully and throw ourselves into the task at hand, it’s like driving that same car but with the engine firing on all cylinders, turning even the steepest hill into an easy climb and allowing us to enjoy the feeling of the wind in our hair as we take on every challenge as a chance to see what we’re really capable of.
It’s not just that we perform better when we go all in on whatever we are doing; we enjoy ourselves more as well.
In the words of the playwright George Bernard Shaw:
“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”
In my book Creating the Impossible I talk about this extra gear we all slip into when we are at our best “the invisible giant” — a kind of a universal mind that we are all a part of and comes through us more the more we fully engage ourselves in the task at hand. In this sense, showing up to our “B” game more fully creates the invitation for our “A” game to come through us.
And when we are indiscriminate in our invitation, neither saving it up for special occasions or rejecting it outright because we want to maintain the illusion of being fully in control of ourselves or the universe, we experience more “happy accidents” and become exponentially more likely to be at our best when it matters most.
Michael Neill is an international thought leader, challenging the cultural mythology that stress and struggle are a prerequisite to creativity and success. As the founder and CEO of Genius Catalyst Inc., Michael’s mission is to unleash the human potential with intelligence, humor, and heart.
To learn more about Michael and his work, visit www.michaelneill.org or join the nearly two million people who have enjoyed his TEDx talks Why Aren’t We Awesomer? and Can a TEDx Talk Really Change the World?
