Standing Tall

Professional tennis players will tell you their secret, if asked nicely. Professional footballers will tell you the same thing, as will elite athletes, race car drivers, and most anyone who has ever visited "the zone" - that special place where absolute performance takes place.

What is it about "the zone" that makes so much difference?

Well, its a mental thing. Your Mind produces the blitzing performance that, on the day, providing it is the best blitzing performance, makes you the winner.

In many sports and competitions, your ability to influence your competition is limited, or zero. All you can do to make them worry about you is perform better than they do.

Even in some team sports, it is hard to put the other side off balance unless you are winning by such a margin they mentally give up the chase.

So what performance excellence comes down to is being the best - doing your best - at the critical time that enables you to win the competition.

But you can't always do that - the forces of evil - distractions, important things, confused thinking, tiredness - can make it hard to perform on the day, the way you need to.

So you need to ask the tennis pro what the secret is.

And if they are honest, they will tell you that when they are in "the zone", the ball seems bigger, travels slower, they see it earlier, it feels "warm", and they feel as if they are taller, looking down a little.

I had an experience yesterday that made me remember all that I had forgotten about stress management, and performance.

I forgot the golden rule - if you really, really want something, you have to be prepared to let it go. I tried too hard, didn't relax and let my ears do the work, and suffered the consequences.

And at no time did I feel taller.

When you find yourself in a similar situation, it is not the end - just the beginning. First you have to recognise you are mildly stressed, then you have to deal with it. If you go to a much earlier blog here and find the chapter on Stress in Orbit, you will find a lot of simple, fast acting techniques for stress management. Circular breathing is the one I should have used yesterday, because then I would have regained my ability to think quickly and listen and analyse before entering the verbal fray.

However, it was a great learning experience, and this blog has eventuated because of it, so something good and worthwhile is what we now have.

Think strong, stand tall, pull your shoulders back, take a deep breath, and above all, be positive.

You can do it, and you will.

Honesty and Intellectual Integrity

One of the very few blogs I follow is NPR 13.7.

Recently a new "master blogger" has been added to the site, to introduce a "softer" side of the science debate.

Suddenly I find myself uncomfortable and confronted by some of the blogs this person writes. Really uncomfortable, and really confronted.

So much so that for the first time I can remember, today I actually challenged this person to be intellectually honest.

Now he may well be within his rights to proffer a point of view that is different to mine, but I challenge his right to use his position, academic learning and achievement, and his access to design an argument that is fundamentally dishonest, by disguising the content in such a manner that the core of the issue remains hidden.

Many will argue that the core is only hidden if no one challenges it. I would argue that the level the core is hidden at is only in the purvey of a handful of people in the world, most of whom will never read this blog.

The basis of a good honest argument or discussion is that the elements that we differ on are "apples to apples" - or Like to Like - you know from experience you cannot argue your case if the other side slips off onto a tangent, or does not pay you the resect of recognising your argument and countering it specifically and directly.

And I guess this is what upsets me most about the new blogger. He does not seem to respect his audience. It is almost as if he is talking down to the masses to demonstrate what a brilliant thinker he is.

In my experience, really brilliant people never have to demonstrate how clever they are, because simply by their actions and their thinking processes they provide leadership to others allowing them to learn from the experience, in their own time, and in their own way, and form their own mental maps from the encounter.

This whole process today reminds me of all that I dislike about political correctness, and rewriting history.

It's as if the older we get, and the more mature we get, the less we are trusted to work it out for for ourselves.

Noddy can no longer sleep with the policeman, and we can no longer believe in the tooth fairy.

Why?

Why can't a child's story be just that, a child's story?

Why do we suddenly feel the need to protect everyone from everything?

What happened to free choice, and personal responsibility?

A friend of mine said just yesterday after yet another bad experience with the airlines that "the terrorists have won, in a manner we still can't conceive of, and Big Brother is here to stay".

Sadly, I think he is correct. But we did it to ourselves, and we have to take responsibility for that.

That is being intellectually honest.

Now, incase some one will think I am taking a shot at the new blogger and not giving him the opportunity to respond, I am pasting this entire blog into an email to him, with an invitation to discuss my feelings.

I'll let you know the outcome.