Beyond Tools: Embracing the Deep Shift in Performance Psychology for Profound Change

I have noticed that quite a few people are pondering the shift in direction I have taken in the field of performance psychology. One reaction comes from those who begin to see what I have seen and say: "This is completely different and changes everything fundamentally." Another reaction is from those who haven’t seen it yet and express something along the lines of: "Anders has become less concrete. Before, he had so many practical tools, and now he mostly talks about how thoughts affect life as if that's something new."

Since my passion is to reach people and see when a flash of insight puts a sparkle in their eyes, this difference is something I have thought a lot about. Why is it that some understand how radically different and more powerful what I now share is, and some think it is the same as always, just repackaged?

This is something we all face when we are trying to market a service or product that we know has greater potential than anything else on the market. To get through the screams of everyone else claiming they’ve found the “secret,” the “keys,” “extra,” and “world-class” is not easy for anyone to sift through the noise and find what is right.

So why then, is the insight that we live in the feeling of the quality of our thinking and not in the feeling of our current circumstances, so different? Isn’t that what everyone is talking about? Change your thoughts and think more positively and you will feel better! Change the tone of your inner voice, embrace your good feelings, have a broader perspective. Shift you mindset! Make really big pictures of good things and minimise your internal picture of anything that is negative. Surround yourself with positive people and avoid any pesky "energy vampires".

Most who have tried this find that it can improve things slightly and one might even become more productive. The problem is that at that level you can change a lot, but it does not make anything different. You might make more money but you are not any more satisfied with life than before. You might lose weight but often end up still feeling inadequate. When you understand what I am pointing to in this article, you don’t need to change anything and yet everything is different. Something that my coaching clients describe again and again.

The question I hear you ask is: How do I get there? Well, glad you asked, because it's not something that can pushed into you. Rather, it works a little bit like getting a tan. You don't have to know how to make melanin as a protection from photons banging around in your strains of DNA. You just have to expose yourself to sunlight and whatever life-force and innate intelligence you have will do the rest.

Same with a genuine insight that lifts you to a new level of understanding. We don't know how that happens. We just know that it happens when we expose ourselves to new ideas and directions of thinking. Because it kind of happens beyond the intellect when we see something new and fresh for ourselves. That's the internal sunshine.

To accomplish this here I want to pose some questions and invite you to reflect on them and see something new. As someone once said: I don't know who discovered water, but I'm pretty damn sure it wasn't a fish:

1. Can emotions be sent to you over time and space from the past, i.e., events and situations that have already occurred?
2. Can emotions be sent to you over time and space from the future, i.e., events and situations that have not yet occurred?
3. Can emotions come from what is happening in this hot moment, i.e., what is going on right now?

And here are a couple more questions building on the hopefully insightful answers and reasons you gathered from contemplating the first three:

1. If others can feel completely different from you about the exact same thing, whether it's the past, the future, or the present, what does that difference depend on?
2. Can you think about the same thing at two different times and have completely different reactions to it? (e.g., count to 10 to calm down, one time it “works,” and another time it makes you even more upset as you count. Or any other mental tool you've tried.) What does that difference depend on?

I hope that at the very least, this makes you pause and look in a new direction for solutions. Perhaps you will see the psychological freedom that comes from understanding the principles behind how we all create our experience of the world moment to moment via our thoughts. That the outside in fact looks different depending on the state of mind from which you think.

With an upset mind, we feel upset no matter how we try to think calming thoughts. From a calm mind, on the other hand, we feel calm even in normally upsetting situations. That is why if you do not think about your job from a stressed mind, your job cannot stress you. Which is the reason a full to-do-list can both be linked to being stressed and feeling energised. Time dragging on and time flying by. All depending on your state of mind.

This is now not something you need to work on. A calm mind is just a mind that is not as filled with thoughts taken seriously. That is why mental techniques don’t “work.” You cannot think your way out of thinking too much because for obvious reasons that will only make things worse. However, you can understand where your experience of life is actually coming from. And, every time you catch yourself to realise that the only thing in the way of unleashing your potential is your own insecure thinking in this moment, you uncover the natural flow we are all born into ...