Quality and the sharpness of your performance are directly affected by your ability to concentrate and keep your emotions stable. I am aware, however, that many of you may not realize the depth and importance of what I am talking about.

Most "expert" information on peak performance is usually made of motivational material or advice on a certain technique to get you to improve your performance. Although these techniques, such as goal setting, imagery, and meditation are useful, I believe the most important aspect of peak performance is that you understand that you are unique and your most important job is to become the "driver" of your own life. You cannot be the driver if you are constantly taking directions from everyone else but yourself. Sooner or later, you must take charge of your life and assume total responsibility for the results you are getting.

I am telling you this because as long as you keep waiting for outside factors or tools to take you to the top, you will never make it. Most people are reacting to circumstances rather than creating them according to the results they want in their lives. Most people live doing, doing, doing. They think the "doing" is the most important factor for creating the results they want.

This is a big mistake! This is why most people never get to experience lasting fulfillment in their lives. They have become robotized and stopped creating from their innate wisdom.

They are driven by the "things" they need to do rather than by the reasons they want to live!

The "doing" emerges as you learn, erroneously I might say, that you are not enough. This limiting message comes in many forms including, "you are too thin, too fat, don't have enough money, have too much money, too tall, too short, too intelligent, not bright enough, not fast enough, too weak, too strong, not sensitive enough, too practical, too direct, etc. You get the picture. So most people react by "doing" whatever it takes to remedy the situation because they want to feel whole once again.

This is where you begin to disconnect from your innate abilities and begin to search for solutions outside of you.

This is equivalent to committing suicide in slow-motion!

Can you imagine a person begging for food and dying of starvation in the middle of a Sunday buffet at "Boulevard Restaurant" in San Francisco? Don't laugh too hard because this is exactly what is happening with a great number of people in the world. Their mental lens is so narrow that they fail to acknowledge the richness within them. Not to mention the richness in others. This is exactly what happens when people live in reaction to their fears, spontaneous demands, and expectations. They lose their self-value and innate ability to concentrate and persevere to create what they want. This is one huge reason why many people live in frustration, lack passion, fail to manifest meaningful relationships, and automatically self-sabotage. Of course, this is also the main reason so many people live a whole lifetime without achieving what they are capable of.

The alternative is to produce great performances on a regular basis by reconnect with your senses! Get back to your senses.


How can you do it?

Learn to listen to your self once again. This is not the listening that most people think about. This listening is holistic. This means you listen with all your senses and not just from your ears and your belief system.

Your being is the direct experience you have of your life. Direct experience arises out of your senses, your touch, smell, sight, audition, taste, and sensations in your body (both externally and internally). Direct experience is subjective because no one else knows what you are experiencing but yourself. Others can hear about your experience or imagine it but they can't directly experience it.

So peak performance is an experience that lives within you. Others may catch a glimpse of it and notice it but you are the only one who actually knows whether you are peaking or not. Don't expect outside circumstances or others to tell you whether you are or not a peak performer. You must realize that doing what is necessary to make a dream real is of course important. But it is not nearly as important as being connected to your subjective reality.

Why?

Because your subjective reality is the only experience you don't need any validation for. Why do people get so attracted to watching a major sporting event? One reason is that they want to connect to part of themselves that can vicariously live through the great performances of others. It is like a reminder that you are indeed capable of doing things that are as great as or greater than the people you are watching. Once you begin to live according to your subjective reality, you will start to engage your true power and awaken those abilities that are uniquely yours. The benefit is that you get to live an authentic, passionate, and fascinating life. You get to live a life that has no limits and is completely arising out of your own principles. How would you like to live this kind of life?

The trick to living this kind of life and performing at your best is to focus most of the time on your being rather than on your doing. I say most of the time because you do need some degree of objectivity. The objectivity is the evidence you are creating by living such a life. In other words, the objectivity is the results you manifest. In effect, you are allowing your subjective brilliance to manifest itself in the objective world.

You ARE NOT letting your objective manifestation determine your subjective reality.

This is the way major leaders have shaped and forever changed the history of the world. Whether it was Einstein, Freud, Mother Teresa, M.L. King, Gandhi, or Edson Arantes Do Nacimento "Pele", they each did what they were most passionate about, dared to dream when most others made fun of them, and allowed their subjective genius to lead their objective manifestations.

One simple way you can teach your self to lead by your subjective potential is to train your mind to be obedient. It is much like training a wild animal. You need to use the power of repetition and direct it to do simple acts over and over. You also need to be gentle. Think of the results you would get if you were training a wild animal to do something and you were using force and aggressiveness. You might be able to get them to do whatever you want but at the end you would have an angry and spiritless animal. Being gentle and consistent allows you to get your mind to trust you and behave how you want it to behave. Awareness meditation is an effective practice for getting your mind to do what you want it to do.

When you train your mind to work for you, your ability to concentrate for long periods of time dramatically increases. In fact, what happens when you live with a trained mind is that you greatly maximize your ability to focus.
Having an untrained mind is rampant in today's world. When people want to be calmer or concentrate better, most think that they need to try harder or tell themselves over and over "concentrate, concentrate, stay clam, don't worry, stay cool, etc." The opposite is achieved. They are out of control and hoping that things turn out OK.

This doesn't work. If this is what you do when you lack focus or feel unbalanced, then you are using only a very small portion of your essential abilities. If you are part of this group, I don't need to personally know you to be certain that you are tired, frustrated, and emotionally washed-out.

When I work with professional athletes, the key to their peak performance is not their physical talent. This is hard for most of them to understand because this is what they have mostly counted on win in the past. Now that they want to be one of the best in their field, however, they learn that it is their inner strength, natural resiliency, and ability to connect with their being that can lead them to the top of the rankings.

I wish I would've understood this simple concept when I was competing as a professional tennis player almost 20 years ago. Why? Because this is what has allowed me to regain perspective of my true potential and once again dare to dream as big as when I was a kid.

If you are serious about living the ultimate life, you've got to get serious about becoming less objective and more subjective. Otherwise, you might end up as many peak performance hopefuls have. You hear it in the news. Athletes are prematurely quitting their sport, going bankrupt only a few years after retirement, business executives being taken to jail for misrepresentation of company earnings, etc. Just last week, one of the most renowned soccer players in a major South American professional league pulled out a gun in the middle of a team practice because he wasn't happy with the way one of the other players was playing.

What about you? Are you close to pulling out a gun in reaction to your life circumstances or are you celebrating your life!

I am having one of the most exciting years of my life. And you can too. You just have to throw away the old model of being guided by your fears and expectations. Use your subjective genius to produce the results you always wanted. Make sure you train your mind on a regular basis to work for you rather than the other way around!