Occupying Your Mind with Neutral Thoughts

More than two decades ago, I was coaching a student in FITASC, and he asked me, “What do you think about?”

I said, “When you're between stations or between shooters on a FITASC parkour, I want you to look at the ground and see if you could find a Viceroy cigarette butt."

“A what?”

“A Viceroy cigarette butt. They don't make Viceroy anymore. But if you can look intently enough to see if you can find a Viceroy cigarette butt or a four-leaf clover, if you can intently look at that and tie your conscious mind up with minutia like that, then they're going to have to come over and say, ‘Hey, it's your turn to shoot next. Get on up here.’”

And then that way you're at least occupying your mind with something that's neutral as opposed to turning it loose and going negative.

Being neutral, positive or happy is a big deal. It doesn't matter whether it's a good or bad comment about your performance because the comment comes from the conscious judgmental mind. The subconscious mind is not judgmental and it's not conscious. That's the mind you want to stay in.

So, the instant you go to evaluation, whether it's “I'm shooting great” or “I'm not shooting great,” you have shifted from the subconscious brain to the conscious brain. And that brain cannot do it. Whether you're giving yourself a compliment or whether you're talking negatively, the longer you stay in your conscious mind, the harder it is to get back in the subconscious part of the brain.

It's got to be minutia. It can't have a lot of emotion to it. You can be too high and you can be too low. It's a flat line and everybody has got to go into it, trusting their process and telling themselves, “Today, this is what I'm going to do. I don't care what the results are.”

You have to consciously say this out loud to yourself (and your steering wheel and your teammates):

“Regardless of outcome, I'm running my process and when I match the speed, I'm going to pull the trigger. I don't really care what it looks like. When it matches, I'm sending it. I'm running my process. It’s all my process and I'm staying in my process today. I don't care about results.”

When you can accompany those phrases with, “regardless of result, this is what I'm going to do,” it becomes much easier for you to stay in that zone when you get into it.

It makes it easier for you to get into the zone if you've practiced in the zone, meaning you have to have done it in practice before you can do it on game day.

This is an adapted excerpt from the April 2025 Coaching Hour podcast. You can hear it in full - along with more than 20 years of archives in audio and written form - with your Knowledge Vault membership.