Here are #12 and #13 of twenty-five reasons I've come up with that we fail to master optimal mental focus.

Again, they are not in order of importance. We would enjoy far more frequent successes in our lives if we spent just as much time on mental mastery as we do on physical mastery. There is unbelievable synergy created when they are worked on together in unison. Unfortunately, many never enjoy the vast rewards of this synergy because of these reasons...

To Your Strength and Mastery,

Garin Bader

12 ) We think that mental focus will miraculously become keener when the game is on. We fool ourselves with that adage that we work best under pressure and that the eyes of a crowd or adrenaline will somehow sharpen our mental lenses purely by the "magic of the moment".

Granted, many of us have done some of our best work under pressure. Deadlines can be a good motivator. But, they don't always bring us optimal inspiration nor our best performances. To rely on keen mental focus because of the pressure of deadlines is courting disaster more than it's courting inspiration.

Although we may have given some of our best performances under pressure, we shouldn't depend on that and it's reckless to do so. Those that have been practicing 2-4 years for the Gold in the Olympics know that their competition have also been rehearsing under every condition and way ahead of schedule in order to win. They're certainly not depending on the Olympic Torch to give them last minute inspirations and newfound abilities. To wait until the last minute for inspiration that may or may not come is certainly not preparing yourself to stay within your optimal mental focus zone.

Certainly miraculous things often will occur when the synergy of a crowd, adrenaline, and other factors are present, but to not prepare ahead of time in every aspect to the best of our ability is to be hoping for the best instead of preparing for the best.

13 ) We haven't practiced mental focus techniques when our blood sugar is low, when we haven't eaten, or slept well and are not used to regaining it quickly in those circumstances nor have techniques to help circumvent those conditions in the first place. High stress situations put your body in precarious situations quite often that completely crumble the best mental focus practitioners. So, when your body isn't feeling up to par in real life competition and/or inevitable high stress situations, the reason our mental focus often spirals out of control is because we haven't practiced in those kinds of sub-par conditions.

People often say there is not a substitute for experience on the playing field. That may be true in one sense. But what is for certain is that we don't learn to practice and cope with "bad" physical conditions when we rehearse. Most people always want to feel in the best physical condition before they go out to practice because they feel they should achieve optimal performance every time or simply hate feeling uncomfortable.

The fact is, in performance and in the heat of the game, nothing is usually perfect and far from being comfortable. Your body is usually feeling stress long before your mind even recognizes it. So, if you haven't rehearsed when your body isn't feel well for whatever reason, those conditions will completely throw you off your best performance.

I feel you can create your own "experience" every day by rehearsing every scenario you may ever encounter - including those days where your body isn't feeling it's best. Having the attitude that every day is a good day of learning even if your body is feeling like crap, will bring you mastery much faster and you'll gain experience at a much faster rate than most of your competitors.

Murphy's Law is usually present in stressful conditions and we must practice to retain the keenest of mental focus when Murphy comes visiting. For some reason he always has a pass to get into every situation! He's never invited but Always seems to show up for those that don't expect him. "Bad" conditions are normal circumstances that occur in competition and unfortunately most of us practice mental focus to operate under the best conditions - which rarely happens in the field of competition or performance.

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Here are eleven out of twenty-five reasons I've come up with that we fail to master optimal mental focus. They are not in order of importance. We would enjoy far more frequent successes in our lives if we spent just as much time on mental mastery as we do on physical mastery. There is unbelievable synergy created when they are worked on together in unison. Unfortunately, many never enjoy the vast rewards of this snynergy because of these reasons... In a few days there'll be another 14 more.
To Your Strength and Mastery,
Garin Bader

1 )    We spend hours training our bodies and usually schedule no more than a few minutes with mental focus techniques - if even that. We brush our teeth regularly without trying to come up with excuses not too. And yet, we often do it without any self-negotiating for a lot longer than we spend in trying to master seeing our successes in our minds with complete clarity and conviction.

2 )    We know mental focus is necessary for peak performance but still spend little time trying to learn and incorporate new ideas into our training that may work better for us. Just like anything else, what may seem like small adjustments actually translate into huge returns if you're willing to experiment and be vigilant to those small degrees that either improve or degrade your performance. Think of how a golf club amplifies a bad stroke - mastering small adjustments is a never-ending quest for the master to know how to activate the best stroke for the situation. Likewise, you want to spend time tweaking and mastering "small details" consistently as well.

3 )    We spend a lot of time talking about mental focus training and reading books about it, but too little time in actually applying what we know or have learned. Knowledge is not mastery in itself - applying knowledge to action regularly puts us on the road to mastery faster than anything else. There are enough armchair critics who have little comphrension of how to engage peak performance on the battlefield - fooling themselves into thinking that talking a good game is on the same playing field as one who is engaging it for real with real live action instead of words.

4 )    We think that mental focus will come automatically once we master our chosen physical activity. The reverse is most often the solution. Unfortunately, we spend countless hours practicing actions with half-assed intentions thinking that mastery of the physical with give us automatic mastery over the mental and end up never realizing the synergy that's created when you work on the mastery of both of them at the same time.

5 )    We often waste time stubbornly trying to adopt another's mental focus techniques instead of modifying things to better fit us or taking the initiative to discover our own methods that'll work best for us. It's great to go shopping for designer clothing. But if the look doesn't fit, either go to a tailor or adjust it yourself to fit perfectly. Some styles you love may fit and look much better on a completely different body type than your own. Let them wear it and find what works best for you.

6 )    Even though we know this, for lack of imagination, stubbornness, or courage to find our own way, we keep trying to make our current visualizations translate well into physical actions regardless of their poor performance record. Eventually because of unpredictable outcomes and continual failures, many begin regarding visualization training as trivial and give it little emphasis or time.

7 )    We don't exactly know how to translate mental focus techniques into physical action - so we end up thinking too much in our heads or spending too much time in our bodies instead of seeing everything all at once like an eagles eyesight - seeing the entire valley while also soaring down honing in on the bristling hairs behind a fleeing rabbit's ears. When you can see, hear, and feel detail and everything perspective all at once, you're in a zone that'll generate peak performance consistently.

8 )    We surmise that mental focus is a stationary destination and that we must remain in its zone no matter what - instead of realizing our mental focus should be a fluid lens that can quickly adapt to inevitable fluctuating circumstances. Mastering mental focus means being able to adapt to a huge palette of energies and movement that we may encounter.

9 )    When the stakes are high, we often focus on calming the mind down and the slower thought processes bleed out to the muscles and nervous system often resulting in sluggish body mechanics - which in turn leads to more stress because it often prompts more disatrous results because of a disconnect of mind and body moving together as one.

10 )    We fail to master mental focus because we spend the majority of our time mentally rehearsing optimal performances we desire in third person instead of seeing and feeling them in first person. By not really believing deep down that the masterful mental movies we're seeing are really being performed by us, that displacement of real belief inevitably puts your brain at a disadvantage because in real live action scenarios it's always judging your performance with that perfect one you see in your optimal mental pictures. When your brain hasn't been conditioned to fully believe you possess the same masterful actions you see in your imagination, then your brain continually lags behind your actions instead of leading it. That's why there'll always be conflict between intentions and actions unless we change our thoughts and feelings to be congruent.

Your brain doesn't know the difference between an imagined event or a real one. You're much more likely to stay in the mental focus and peak performance zone when you've trained your brain to be in the actual skin of that successful athlete or performer you see in your mind at all times - feeling and reacting to every exhilarating action.

11)    We don't visualize our successful outcomes infused with the highest intensity of empowering emotions and then wonder why we can't get optimal focus when we're in the thick of the game or performance. Without every fiber of our being engaged in rehearsal at all times, how can we expect unwavering mental focus? In performance when our actions are being scrutinized by all, emotions suddenly flair up in force. The added surges of emotional electrical firestorms that could have been harnassed for supreme mental focus and optimal power end up throwing us off our game. Knowing all shades of what emotions and thoughts empower you help foil the ones you known definitely don't aid you. That's one of the reasons why rehearsing with full-on genuine emotions can empower maximum mental focus.
   
Many times we get rattled too easily by the emotional brainstorms that occur naturally when andrenaline is present and pumping through our veins hard and fast. Adrenaline can help give us super strength, speed, and keen mental focus. But we must learn to harness it and be able to call it up when we need it. How is adrenaline activated? Usually directly by high emotional engagement. We need neglect to train our mental focus to go with the flow under extreme pressures. Enough said?

In the intense coverage on the training and personal lives of the Olympic athletes, one of the things you discover when you listen closely is how massage and recovery are just as important as the actual physical training regimes. It's down to a science and is taken very seriously. Many athletes have personal massage therapists to make sure the tiniest of kinks are massaged out several times a day.

Without putting importance to this, they know there is no chance for Gold. Even the slightest tension will hinder peak performance physically and mentally. Milliseconds are what win Gold medals and attention to minute details such as every aspect of relaxation is also scrutinized very closely in Olympic training.

Some Olympians are lucky to have even two full-time therapists to make sure optimal muscular strength, body energy, and mental focus are flowing without hinderance.

Of course, most of us "civilians" are lucky to have a massage once a month if even that. Most spas and therapists charge an arm and a leg just for that one massage. To even consider hiring full-time massage therapists would break most people's bank account. So if have neither the money or time to do this and we still want to achieve Gold in our daily lives, what do we do?

If you're not lucky enough to be married to a massage therapist like I am, then it's certainly much harder to get in the "Gold zone" like Olympic athletes and other top performers.

Think back to how fantastic you feel when you've had a massage and how every cell in your body feels ready to exude maximum execution of movement and concentration. I'm sure most of you have thought, "Wow, just think of what I could do if I had this every day!"

Other than the cost, I know many of you simply can't afford the time with work, family, and workouts all demanding attention. But, recovery and relaxation are musts to think clearly and to make certain the body has recuperated from workouts before you pile on more pain and tension creating layers upon layers of damaged muscle tissue and injuries. Both the body and mind need recovery time - clearing time, rejuvenation time, breathing time. 

A great massage can certainly speed up clearing your mind from senseless chatter and thoughts that contain little focus that play over and over creating undue tension. But something easy you can do to help clear your mind is to take frequent and scheduled breathing, meditation, or "intention breaks" and to make certain that the sounds that are coming into your brain aren't accumulating debilitating tensions.

I've installed a program on my computer that plays incredible scenery and sounds of nature from all around the world - from underwater tropical reefs, to the snow blowing over the Alps, to crickets in grassy meadows with horses.

At work and the gym throughout the day, you can hardly go anywhere without hearing some kind of music, chatter, industrial sounds, and freeway noise. We tell ourselves we don't hear it. But believe me, scientists will tell you that it's influencing your psyche and body mechanics in ways we'd hardly think possible. Usually those sounds add to the tension instead of taking away.

Whether you're aware of it or not, your mind adjusts to the tempo of your surroundings - hence the science of music manipulation that is crafted to influence the unconscious psyche. Scientists have found that classical music played in malls decreases violence and theft. Music with tempos at 60 beats per minute slow your heart rate down. The list goes on and on.

All kinds of music is crafted and logged into specific playlists to relax you and make you more likely to buy because of your relaxed mood in groceries stores and malls.

But, just as music influences, so can the screeching of tires, motor engines, and whirs of city traffic. Pointless chatter in the office can decrease your concentration on work just as easily. These outside "tension influencers" begin encouraging shallow tight breaths day in and day out and other tensions that affect our speech, our handwriting, our choice of words, to the quick tiring of muscular strength and speed.

Today I'd like to tell you about a technique I've used for many years that has allowed me to learn faster with greater mental focus and to integrate what I learn from one field into the other at a high rate of speed. And, of course, it has also helped me gain great strength quickly by applying this very technique.

In my years in the Conservatory of Music, I think a lot of my colleagues thought I needed electroshock therapy because I'd utilized my time in our assigned practice rooms in a most peculiar manner.

Where most would be practicing their chosen instrument the entire time of several hours. I'd play the piano for 15-20 minutes and then do handstand pushups, then pick up a deck of cards, go back to the piano, then pick up my bokken(a wooden samurai practice sword) and slice through the air like one of the Seven Samurai, and then back to the piano.

I'd continually be changing things around, the time, and activities - every practice session throughout the day - never leaving time for the brain or body to get "settled in".

Yes, I'm sure it was quite bazaar to a lot of people. But going from one discipline to another in succession is an incredible tool for quick learning in many respects.

It's also one of the techniques that I firmly believe helped me in winning 13 international competitions in my career. My competition seemed to always be scrathing their heads in how I had so much energy and was quick to gain sharp mental focus no matter what the situation.

Well, duh, you exude what you practice.

One is that it instantly changes your mental focus which is a very good thing. In having to apply it instantly to different situations that don't last long and repeated many times throughout the day, you have many times to learn to regain optimal mental focus quickly in different circumstanes. Most gain mental focus in one or two things - maybe - once a day.

By getting up from one thing and moving right to the next, you change your energy and are forced to change your mental focus in a new direction each time. Most of the time, that new change in energy and mental focus are the very things that gets you past the stumbling blocks that were hindering the former.

When you hit each project for short periods with both varied mental focuses and vast changes in energies, you begin seeing the crossovers of applications to each discipline. Thus, you learn faster, gain greater speed, increase strength, power, mental focus and awareness - quicker.

Try hitting your handstand pushups several times a day during a quick break at work. Really how long do 3-5 take to do? Try doing wall isomentrics the breathing deeply for 30 seconds while waiting for an elevator. The list is endless. But watch how quickly your strength and your mental focus begin improving  tremendously fast by doing changing things around on a daily basis. Notice how that rush of blood to your head, your lungs, and muscles many times a day changes both your energy and mental focus for the very next activity you do afterwards.

Sure, you might get some stares and family members and coworkers quickly looking for the right sized straight jacket for you. But from what you learn from this, they'll never be fast enough to catch you. :)

To Your Strength and Mastery,
Garin Bader