Shift Your Mind by Brian Levenson

Author:Brian Levenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business
Publisher: Disruption Books
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Expand Your Sense of What Is Possible

Kyle Korver understands the lobster analogy as well as any athlete I know. He is among the all-time best in three-point shots made, once set a record for most consecutive basketball games with a three-point shot (90), and has helped set a team record for wins. And yet in 2003, he was just the fifty-first overall pick in the NBA draft, which means he was passed over by every other team until he was finally picked by the New Jersey Nets. After playing solidly for several teams over the years, he was traded to the Atlanta Hawks in 2012 in a deal that didn’t make too many headlines. However, in Atlanta he became an NBA All-Star and started setting records.

The summer before he made the All-Star team, Kyle could be found in Santa Barbara, California, preparing for the upcoming season. At thirty-three years old, despite having already made millions, he was not focused on a summer of comfort. Instead, he was focused on the one thing that would soon unlock his potential and contribute to a magical season—misogi.

Misogi is a Japanese Shinto ritual of purification that often includes physical activity and then washing in an icy waterfall. In martial arts, some use the concept of misogi to develop one’s center and to shift the mind before training. Korver’s misogi—led by Marcus Elliott, the founder of the Peak Performance Project (P3), which has been at the forefront of sports science in baseball, basketball, football, and soccer—was a bit different. “This is about testing your abilities in a foreign environment. . . . It’s not a ride at Disneyland or a Tough Mudder,” Elliott explains. “And it’s really . . . hard. You have a 50 percent chance of success, at best.”201

For their test, Korver and his friends chose to take turns passing an 85.2-pound stone and a 68.5-pound stone to each other while walking five kilometers—along the seafloor. They would take a breath, dive down, pick up the rock, “run” with it until they couldn’t breathe, and then drop it and surface so the next person could take his turn. They wore fifteen-pound weights, which helped them walk underwater but made the task even more difficult. The goal is to “radically expand your sense of what’s possible,” writes journalist Charles Bethea, who joined in on the underwater relay.202

Reflecting on his first misogi—a nine-hour, twenty-five-mile open-water paddleboard trip from the Channel Islands to Santa Barbara—Korver says, “Excuses have to be dropped. Your mind has to focus. And you have to train that mindset. Everything falls into place by doing the smallest thing perfectly. That lesson from the misogi carried over to my shooting.”203 Korver was becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable, and it paid dividends when the time came to perform.

But this is something we have to literally train our brains to do. We have to will our body to move through the responses of fear and adversity so we can control those responses. That idea was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.