Peak Performance

Most people who want to perform better — whether in their career, in a creative practice, or in any arena where they’ve set a high standard for themselves — arrive with a version of the same belief: that if they work harder, practice more, push through the resistance with sufficient force, they’ll get where they want to go. Tension equals work equals result.

It’s a fear-based model — or at times, guilt-based. The inner voice that says if you ease up you’ll lose ground, or that you don’t deserve to enjoy what you’re doing until you’ve earned it through sufficient effort. It works, up to a point. It also costs a great deal — in exhaustion, in brittleness under pressure, in the growing distance between a person and any genuine pleasure in what they do.

What actually underlies peak performance is something closer to the opposite: not more pressure, but less interference. The self-monitoring mind — the one that calculates how you’re doing while you’re doing it, that activates doubt and self-criticism at the worst moments — is the obstacle. But simply trying to suppress it doesn’t work either. It has a history and a logic. It is connected to something personal about how a person learned to assess themselves, what the consequences of failure felt like before this job or this performance existed.

Understanding that is more useful than any technique for getting out of your head. When the interference is understood, rather than just muscled through, it tends to actually diminish. And what it was blocking — the capacity to be present to the work, to find genuine pleasure in it, to perform with full access to what you actually know — has room to come through. Surprisingly, many people who do find peak performance, discover that it isn’t more toughness, but softness, a softening, that gets them there.

See also: The Apps You Can’t Close — which explains the biological basis of this.
See also: The Value of Silence.
See also: Creativity.
See also: Imposter Syndrome — on the self-doubt that often underlies interference.