Jayne Storey

Performance Practice Specialist. Speaker on the Quiet Mind and Peak Performance. Go beyond the mental game to discover how the quiet mind enables peak performance in business and sport.

Why we need to go beyond the mental game and change our understanding of flow.

1. How the quiet mind releases sporting potential.
When athletes quieten the mind, complex sporting movement takes on a different quality. The golf swing, tennis serve, and underwater turn all become fluid, powerful and effortless. When they over-think, things can quickly unravel and the more they ‘think about thinking’ (the mental game) things go from bad to worse. The reason for this is that when the mind is quiet, the body can move naturally; when the mind is busy with over-thinking and trying too hard, the body has trouble executing the simplest motion. 

2. Benefits of a quiet mind for business. 
When the mind is quiet, even the most complex tasks and the busiest schedules can be completed with less anxiety and mental stress, communication is more effective, goals and action-plans can be made with greater awareness and there is an uptake in responsibility, leaving individuals and teams feeling energised rather than depleted.

Teams and companies who learn to quieten the mind are likely to be the strongest, most efficient and effective in this ever-changing, fast-paced, digital world, and will retain the ability to develop human agency and potential alongside AI, which will contribute to a more harmonious world for us all. 

3. Why we need to go beyond the mental game. 
The strength of the quiet mind is that it invites a higher state of consciousness which for the sake of convenience, we can call flow (aka “the zone”). This is NOT the flow-state spoken of in psychology as a form of mental toughness and single-pointed focus, but something gentler that allows us to open up to realms beyond thinking. This enables access to creativity, inspiration, and intuition raising performance to a higher level while maintaining mental wellbeing. 

Flow has been described as the experience of “spontaneous excellence” and everything we do in flow becomes easier, reducing stress, anxiety, and mental interference – all contributing factors to tiredness, burnout, overwhelm and illness. 

4. How we can work together. 
Let me help you, your team or company, quiet the mind with centuries-old practices including breathing exercises, meditation and body-work. Combined into a daily Performance Practice which takes between 20 and 60 minutes each day, you can do the practices alone or with others, ideally first thing in the morning and revisit them when you need to throughout the day.