ORDINARY AND NON-ORDINARY TRAINING PRACTICES

By Scott Ford

The paradigm shift we are seeing in high-performance coaching is a shift of inclusion and expansion. It includes non-ordinary training practices that transcend and include the ordinary training practices we all grew up with. With the inclusion of non-ordinary training practices to the coaching collective, the collective itself expands.

With the expansion of coaching into the territory of non-ordinary training practices comes a greater comprehension of human performance experience and how to coach it. We are not just coaching the physical dimensions of performance experience anymore. We are also coaching the mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of performance experience.

There is "performance"- what we are doing, and there is "performance experience"- our subjective, first-person experience of what we're doing. In other words, our performances are objective, but our experiences of the performances are subjective. We are playing an objective game while generating a subjective experience of the objective game we are playing.

Whew! It gets confusing as to what we are supposed to be coaching when it comes to player development. Are we supposed to be coaching the objective performance or the subjective experience of the performance? It's like choosing between cause and effect.

Our objective performances cause our subjective performance experiences, which simply means that our performance experiences have objective causes. As coaches, we're expected to know what those objective causes look like and then train our players to look like them.

For example:

When you play tennis, you should look like Serena Williams or Roger Federer.

That is the objective perspective we take as coaches, the causal perspective. When we coach objective performance as the cause, we are also coaching its causal effect, which is performance experience itself. What that boils down to is coaches training their players to generate not only better performances but better performance experiences at the same time.

The two fit nicely together, like cause & effect, process & outcome. Logically, if our objective playing processes cause our subjective playing experiences, then more inclusive, more expansive, and more comprehensive playing processes would simultaneously cause more inclusive, more expansive, and more comprehensive playing experiences. Like, for instance, the non-dual performance experience of playing in the zone.

We have all experienced playing in the zone, meaning we've all experienced a non-dual performance experience. What did it look like? What did your non-dual experience of playing in the zone look like on the outside? Then, what did it look like on the inside? And when you remember what your insides and outsides looked like when you are playing in the zone, just go out there the next time look the same. Same insides, same outsides, same experience. That's how you get in the zone on purpose. Will that be cash or charge?

If playing the zone was that simple, we'd always be playing in the zone. We wouldn't even have to think about it. We'd just do it. Like Nike, we'd just do the zone.

"Hey, Coach! What are we going to do today?"

Coach: "We're going to do the zone."

Player: "Cool. How do I do the zone?"

Coach: (Insert your zone training practices here.)

 As a coach, how do you train your players to generate a non-dual experience of playing in the zone? And how do you train them to do it intentionally, deliberately? How do you, as a coach, train your players to get in the zone on purpose?

That question has been around for thousands of years in the coaching community.

Think about it. Athletes have been randomly playing in the zone for thousands of years. Temporary peak experiences have been had in every country in the world since the beginning of human experience. In every country of the world, players have wondered what caused their temporary zone experiences. Why? Because if they could intentionally repeat the cause, they could consciously repeat its effect and transform their temporary and random zone experiences into consistently maintainable and improvable zone experiences.

By adding non-ordinary training practices to their coaching programs, Tier 2 coaches are transforming the face of human performance development. High-performance coaching aims at performance in the zone, and the non-ordinary training practices that cause the zone effect, once considered woo-woo and impractical, are now being practically applied and made available online.

Also available online is the Evolutionary Sports Collective (EVO), where non-ordinary practices are welcomed into a family of ordinary and non-ordinary coaches, athletes, trainers, and practitioners. EVO is expanding the knowledge base of coaching as next-generation coaches bring their creative minds together to teach and learn collectively and to lead the expansion of coaching and performance consciousness into the novel territory of playing in the zone on purpose.

If you think that playing in the zone on purpose is impossible, then your thinking could use an update. The EVO Sports Collective provides coaches and players with updated training practices that include rather than exclude the non-ordinary dimensions of performance experience: the mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions that fully potentiate our performance experiences by expanding both their cause and their effect.