Performance Anxiety

Anxiety itself is lack of one key ingredient, when it comes to any type of performance, presence. Anxiety fuels it’s tanks on ideas, belief, past and future.

It is easy for the mind to misinterpret reality. Can we trust our thoughts? Do our thoughts represent reality?

The second we descend into judgment, we move out of the present moment into memory, projection, illusion and fantasy.

That judgment measures against the only thing that it can, the past so it’s memory at best.

The projection casts itself forward into a future that cannot exist, often laden with doubt or the weight of heavy expectation, it is just as damaging as the judgment itself.

The illusion lives on an idea that this judgment somehow helps, that somehow this threatening inner voice will help and that the aversion to the past and the future will somehow drag us kicking and screaming to a better performance and of course it never does and it never can.

The fantasy lives it’s thought bound life on a premise that if we do enough mental backgammon that it will lead to mental toughness and once again, it never does and it never can.

So what we attract into our lives is often the sum parts of what we focus on. The law of attraction is not belief or a thought, it is a fact. But the law uses your thoughts and beliefs to create the reality you inhabit, so if you think doubtful thoughts, your reality will be doubtful, if you have fearful thoughts, your reality will be fearful and so on.

But we also have the capacity to reset it, to put our thoughts into a momentum that is serving us, not hampering us, most of the time the problem is that we just don’t believe it, hence the problem perpetuates itself, you are what you think.

Every morning you get this chance for a mental reset, and when you find yourself back in same mental space as yesterday, its simply because you remembered it and re-chose it.

Oh yea, I forgot, I am full of doubt, bummer! The bummer is not the memory dude, it’s that you are re-choosing it, because you don’t realise you have the space to make a different choice.

The first proactive choice you can make is to bring yourself present here, out of this matrix of memory and the re-choosing of the past negative self talk and into the tangible reality of this moment and what it contains right now.

You don’t need to do anything, you don’t even need to think positively, just be here in this moment, pretty damn simple.

A performance of any type is a measure of your presence in it. That’s actually all there is to it.

If the process is complex on the day, it’s because you haven’t been present with what you have been doing in training, by event day you need it to be as innate as possible, if you have simply been doing it and have not been present, then you are outside of the process, not in it.

An outcome is the sum of its parts, and those parts are called the present moment, they provide the quality to any performance, but there needs to be a constant reminding to anchor yourself into the present moment, so you move from doing the performance to being the performance, and you can only be in a performance while you are present.

Performance and presence are mutually exclusive. They are in essence the same thing.

So in a performance, regardless of what is happening, don’t want for anything other than the moment you are in, anchor to it, attach your awareness to it, and the performance will be all it can be.

Let’s break this down a little further, with presence the performance is all that it can be, because that is all it takes, presence will always maximise what you have to work with in any given moment, if you walk away disappointed with the performance it’s simply because you weren’t present with your process.

Practise, training and any other mode of simulation for the process also requires presence, otherwise you will never progress. If you practise and train with a wavering level of present based awareness you will get what you practise, and to “think” otherwise is fools foil.

You get what you practise, if you aren’t getting what you want then you aren’t practising what you need and you if think that need is only met by the physical demands then you simply don’t understand what it is you want and it’s corresponding need.

We learn what we learn not because of memory but by our level of attention, it’s got nothing to do with time and everything to do with the level of awareness and attention that can only ever flow through the portal of this moment, because there is no next moment, when we get there it is always now, the next moment never comes.

Ok, what’s the skinny version Gilesy?

The anxiety is a lack of presence! It’s a fear of a fear, bound by a time that can never arrive, degrading the quality of the performance in a mental back and forth game of chess that can never reach a conclusion.

It’s a shadow being illuminated by the light of your own intelligent awareness which is informing you that this idea, this belief, this illusion and fantasy can be given up right now by simply planting your feet in the ground here in the now and refusing to allow your mind to drag you out of it into the realm of a dreamy existence that actually does not exist anywhere other than in your head!

You know those bad events where you’d rather be anywhere other than where you are? We’ve all had them right? That is a lack of presence, that is a thought driven by a mind that has a poor connection to its own server. It’s using dial up speed instead of instantaneous download. One instantly flows with what is happening and the other is spinning while it waits for further coms from a broken connection that you can’t fix because you ignored it as a daily practise, we really do only reap what we sow.

Many ignore this critical factor and can’t understand why they under perform and miss the mark when they are ticking all the physical waypoints.

Ponder the fact that when you are asleep and you dream, that you believe that dream is real.

Anxiety is similar, you believe the dream, because the thinking making the threats seems tangible, like it’s based in fact.

The past is not fact now, the future is not fact now. If you want to control a dream you have to become lucid in it, to realise, well shit, I thought I was under threat but it was just a dream.

The anxiety is luggage, you’ve been carrying it around all your life, the past and the future ruling everything you do, put the luggage down, become lucid in the dream, live here in this moment and anchor yourself in it, then watch what happens to your performance.