The Mindful Athlete — George Mumford on the Secret to Pure Performance

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The Mindful Athlete — George Mumford on the Secret to Pure Performance

The mindful legend

In his book The Mindful Athlete, mindfulness coach George Mumford recalls rooming with NBA legend Julius Erving during their college years. He remembers, in particular, Erving’s remarkable strength of character. Not once did Erving complain about practice, a bad game, or his lackluster teammates. He simply loved the game and working on his craft.

Even after breaking his toe, Erving “went out anyhow… [and] played with focus and intention”. He just seemed to be “always in flow and living fully in the present moment”. Mumford “didn’t realize it at the time, but [Erving] was a natural born mindful athlete”.

Mumford too was on a journey to mindfulness. But his road was more meandering and fraught with pain. Growing up in the rough neighbourhoods of Dorchester, Boston, while his alcoholic father “raged” at home, Mumford had “found God in getting high and leaving [his] body.”

Unable to realize his own basketball aspirations, a young Mumford went into finance instead. But his “life was falling apart”. A build-up of setbacks and misfortunes had led to a heroin addiction, ruined credit, and a failed marriage. It was too much for him and he needed help.

Lighting your ass on fire

Mumford wonders why we often wait until an avoidable crisis to act and change. Perhaps it’s a “flaw in the human condition”, “the gift of desperation”, or having “our ass on fire”—much like the proverbial frog that realizes finally that it is boiling to death.

Seeing the death spiral before him, Mumford went to an AA meeting to recover. From there, he went back to school to study education and psychology; and took two years after that without work to read “almost every book [he] could find on the subjects of mindfulness, metaphysics, psychology, and philosophy.”

Two years turned to five, and Mumford soon found himself working with prison inmates and corrections administrators on mindfulness and meditation—finding deep satisfaction in helping others to better their lives. In some ways, Mumford was “coming full circle”. He had found a calling in coaching.

Then, as if out of nowhere, Chicago Bulls head coach Phil Jackson learned about his work and asked Mumford to work with the Bulls on mindfulness.

Now, joining the Chicago Bulls might seem like an extraordinary stroke of luck. Mumford himself never imagined that he would someday return to basketball. He could not have known where his road to recovery would take him. But Mumford counted on the fact that small, positive incremental steps, each and every day, would lead him eventually to something better. 

Quelling the monkey mind

Indeed, if we’re striving for positive change and high performance, there’s a lot for us to learn from Mumford’s story and his work with elite athletes. For starters, Mumford says that change and achievement requires us to quell the “monkey mind”. We have to direct our attention and efforts to action in the present moment.

Athletes and artists understand this well. They describe a feeling of being in the “zone” or “flow”. As the late Kobe Bryant describes: “When you get in the zone,… everything slows down… you’re not paying attention to this or that noise… [You have] to stay in the present, not let anything break that rhythm… You’re kind of locked in”.

Jugglers at the circus, Mumford notes, are great examples of this too. If the juggler is distracted for even just a second, whether by the crowd or their last throw, the next falling knife or flaming torch will scar them. They succeed in part because they excel at attention-direction from one catch and throw to the next.

“A lot of athletes think the trick to getting better is just to work harder. But there is a great power in non-action and non-thinking. The hardest thing, after all the work and all the time spent on training and technique, is just being fully present in the moment.”

Phil Jackson in George Mumford. (2015). The Mindful Athlete: Secrets to Pure Performance.

Returning to the present

Focus is, of course, easier said than done. We live in a “high-anxiety modern society” that is waist-deep in ceaseless noise, distraction, and superficialities. What’s worse, the most intrusive distractions tend to come not from the outside but from within. “Negative self-talk”, “mental chatter”, inferiority complexes, and plain-old anxiety litters the present moment. 

While we can’t just think our problems away, we can practice mindfulness, Mumford writes, by “bringing [our] mind and attention back to the present moment” every time. We begin first by acknowledging our emotions, whether it be anxiety, anger, envy or shame, “in a non-attached way”.

Mumford finds it helpful to “keep a daily journal of how you respond to certain situations”. The goal here is to “cultivate self-awareness”—to recognize your reactions in the moment. Did you acknowledge your anxiety or insecurity in a non-attached way? Or were you swept away by it? 

Another exercise is the practice of concentration. Try for just a minute or two to focus on an activity like walking or sitting “without your mind wandering”. It’s harder than it sounds. But once you get a handle of it, aim for three to four minutes. Mindfulness requires conscious, deliberate, and consistent practice.

Conscious breathing

“Conscious breathing” can also help with mindfulness and distraction. While elite athletes understand this well, everyday people tend to forget just how important breathing is to physical and cognitive function.

Before your next stressful activity, “take five minutes to be still and practice”, to “stop what you are doing and return to your breath”. “The easiest way”, Mumford writes, “is to sit comfortably on a cushion with your eyes closed… to focus on your in-breath and your out-breath”. 

“Modern life, with all its stresses, has conspired to shorten our breaths. We have become a generation of shallow breathers.”

George Mumford. (2015). The Mindful Athlete: Secrets to Pure Performance.

Paradoxical intent

Mindfulness is not just about focus, but well-placed focus. Mumford tells “[basketball] players that the best way to score is to forget about scoring.” An overemphasis on the end result distracts you from what you need to do in the present.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl similarly warns of the dangers of hyper intention, where one’s fears is a self-fulfilling product of concern. An employee, for example, who fears a negative job appraisal may underperform if he or she is overcome by stress and anxiety because of it. 

Paradoxical intent, Frankl thought, can help people to deal with hyper-intention and the anxiety from anticipation. That is, the employee should focus more on process and less on outcomes to achieve better results. In a similar vein, happiness, Frankl notes, should not be a goal but a by-product of your dedication to somebody or something.

The gift of self-efficacy

From Julius Erving to Michael Jordan, Mumford has noticed commonalities in the elite athletes he’s worked with. While they differ in personality and temperament, all of them “[see] themselves as capable of continuous high achievement.” They find comfort in the horizon and “moving forward”.

They also shared in “the gift of self-efficacy”. This is “the ability to tell yourself that no matter what happens, you will take everything as a challenge, not a curse.” They did not allow injury or adversity to be all consuming. Instead, they sought new skills and expertise to make the most of their new situation.

“Self-efficacy, or stress hardiness, is the galvanizing force behind what I call the three Cs: Commitment to your growth and development; Control over how you respond to stressors; and viewing every crisis or pressure as a Challenge… High performers often look at mistakes and “failure” through the prism of error correction and attaining more skills, more knowledge, and more experience.”

George Mumford. (2015). The Mindful Athlete: Secrets to Pure Performance.

The mental game

It’s also important to evaluate ourselves fairly and honestly. In The Mental Game of Poker, Jared Tendler says it helps to think of progress and performance as an “inchworm”. That is to see ourselves not as a static number but as a distribution of possibilities on any given day.

Sometimes we’ll have good days, sometimes we’ll have bad days. The goal then is to move our average ability and its distribution in the right direction. Comparing a recent bad day to your previous best, and vice versa, can be misleading, both emotionally and analytically.

A better way to track progress, Tendler suggests, is to compare your recent best to your previous best, your recent worst to your previous worst, and your recent averages to previous averages, over a reasonable interval of time.

Inchworms and caterpillars

While Tendler thinks in inchworms, Mumford prefers to see people as “caterpillars in a chrysalis”. The goal, after all, is to dissolve our bad habits and to cultivate healthy ways. With a bit of mindfulness, we may be able to catch the metamorphosis and freedom we seek.

The mindful caterpillar, he reminds, lives in the present—“taking small steps, consistently, in the right direction”. The results are sometimes hard to see. They’re like seeds buried underground. With care and some luck, we may get to see the fruits of our labor.

For some of you, this may seem just a tad bit too spiritual. Indeed, “too much faith and not enough wisdom becomes blind faith”, Mumford writes. But “not enough faith and too much wisdom becomes cynicism.” What we’re looking for, he says, is “a middle path”.

Sources and further reading

Footnote: Deep listening

As an aside, it’s worth noting that when Mumford quit his job in finance, “nearly every one of [his colleagues], all pretty miserable at the job, said to [him] in earnest: I wish I could do that.” While “they could have”, Mumford thought, they were unwilling to trade their security and certainty for the unknown on the other side.

Now, Mumford isn’t telling everybody to quit their jobs and to leap into the unknown. Everybody’s journey is personal. What he is suggesting is that we find our intention and purpose. “Deep listening” is important here. We have to ask ourselves questions like: “what do I really want?” The best athletes, Mumford observes, have “a clear sense of purpose”. “They [know] their charter [and] reason for existence”.

“I recall that time I left the financial analysis company… Everyone else wanted to leave the job, too—they were miserable, in fact—but they’d actually grown too comfortable with their own unhappiness… or they were primarily concerned with making a living. Their asses weren’t on fire. They were too fearful of the discomfort involved in leaping into the unknown and taking risks. That’s understandable… But sometimes you’ve got to take the leap of faith… The alternative, sticking with your unhappy comfort, could be your spiritual demise… My deep commitment to meditation and mindfulness was in stark contrast to my daily life as a financial analyst. The former filled me with a sense of purpose and joy, while the latter was a dead, soul-crushing experience.”

George Mumford. (2015). The Mindful Athlete: Secrets to Pure Performance.