Embrace Your Greatness, Find the Flow, Discover Success – The Mindfulness Expert Behind Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant.
by George Mumford.
Buy here.
Sentence Summary.
Greatness is inside all of us, start consciously mining it.
“How can we move from bracing for failure to waiting for fulfillment?
Is there any other question as significant for our performance or our happiness?
I’ve been around greatness all my life. I roomed with basketball great Dr. J (Julius Erving) in college, and I’ve worked with the elite of elite athletes, including Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Kobe Bryant, and Shaquille O’Neal. There is no doubt these athletes were tremendously gifted, loaded with talent. But what I’ve learned from my association with them is that natural ability wasn’t what made them great. What made them so exceptional was that they were what I call unlocked—they were in close touch with that a part of themselves that was most truly who they were. That is what allowed them to develop their potential in the way they did.
Greatness can be discovered in each and every one of us. It’s not just the Kobes of the world; I’ve seen that greatness emerge in men convicted of murder serving consecutive life sentences in prison. This potential is not a euphemistic, feel-good fantasy. It is real and tangible and attainable for all.
I know this from working with everyone from elite athletes and powerful CEOs to those pushed to the margins of society. I also know this from the arc of my own life. I’m almost forty years into recovery from alcoholism, and heroin addiction. My life changed through prayer and meditation and through service. I dedicated myself to working with people from Yale to jail, from locker rooms to boardrooms. I know that in order to keep learning and growing and expanding, I have to teach. That’s what I’m doing in these pages.
My mission has been to help anyone in any place at any time unlock the greatness within them. The greatness within is why we are alive. It is what we have to offer the world.”
I agree with Mr Mumford, and am fascinated as to why, if it’s so bloody great, both for the self & society, so few folks are “Unlocked”. Why is it not the “Default Setting” for humanity?
I honestly believe that “The Greatness Within” is our “Godshard“.
And I agree with Mr Maslow that if you deliberately choose to hide your light under a bushel, the unhappiness will find you.
The Hero’s Journey
“Joseph Campbell, the enormously influential author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, brilliantly illuminated the archetypal hero’s journey, which to one degree or another we are all on.
The hero sets out from his homeland to slay the dragon, to save the kingdom and win the princess. Campbell’s point, extrapolating from Jungian psychology, is that we all need to confront and, in one sense or another, slay our dragons, conquer the cave of darkness inside us where our fears and delusions live, before we can return home with hard-won insight, wisdom, and self-knowledge and take our rightful place. Only after this kind of painful and perilous confrontation will we truly have something to offer, to contribute to the world. That is what’s most significant. Not just that you know yourself by confronting your dragons, but that through doing so you are able to help others, to make a difference.
This is not a once-and-for-all process. It is something that never stops. Imagine yourself as a phoenix, rising from the ashes of the dragon that has blasted you with fiery breath. You don’t rise from the ashes complete and fully realized, your phoenix plumage all shimmering and aglow. No. You have to keep evolving. Part of being unlocked is that it’s not a onetime deal. It never really ends.”
Prerequisite to this Journey is to have let go of the Little Ego which makes it all about you, and to realise that it is all about others. The boon is not for you, it is to be shared with others. And as we all interconnected, the Rising Tide Will Lift All Ships.
And it really is never ending, not a destination to be arrived at, but a guiding star to provide a direction of travel for the zig-zag journey of an entire lifetime.
The Phoenix analogy is beautiful, and something to hold on to during the shitty times of life. This too shall pass, and you shall rise. And the shit won’t stick!
Releasing the Masterpiece
“You may be familiar with what Michelangelo said about his approach to sculpting.
He didn’t actually create statues for which he is famous; rather, he ‘released’ them from the stone in which he worked. His process stripped away, laid bare. That is the process we all go through to unlock. We remove the extraneous, the layering of our conditioning and defenses, and the ways that we have been untrue to who we really are until we find what is authentic within us—an authenticity that is always there, waiting to be revealed.
I call this greatness inside of us the masterpiece within. We might also think of it as our essence. The people we most admire, who are accomplished, masters at what they do, are in touch with this essence.
But everybody has that masterpiece within them. We need to uncover it. The degree to which we can see it and let it express itself is going to be reflected in the quality of our lives. The masterpiece within is ours and for no one else. It is always unique. There’s only one; only one you.”
The word Character comes from the Greek meaning to stamp or chisel.
We are constantly chiselling our character, one +1 or -1 at a time.
And the Masterpiece is the GodShard.
George talks about how he helped his players chisel their character –
“I introduced them to the concept of being a spiritual warrior, explaining how that involved the conquest of the ego, the small self. You compete against your previous best self; the opponent is secondary. And I stressed the necessity of struggle and needing to get comfortable being uncomfortable. One side of the coin is freedom and potential; the other is uncertainty and anxiety. The Danish existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called it ‘the alarming possibility of being able.’ Anxiety must be accepted and fully experienced. As former poet laureate Robert Frost said, ‘The best way out is always through.’ As spiritual warriors, we have to train ourselves to overcome the internal obstacles and difficulties that stand in the way of allowing our latent abilities to express themselves. That is what unlocking is all about.”
He also tells us: “No struggle, no swag. That could be the motto for everything we do in life. Without struggle, we don’t grow. Without something to push against, we don’t become stronger. It’s not just a matter of physical strength either. It’s the same for emotional resilience and wisdom. Nothing is worth anything if it’s easy and effortless. It doesn’t mean anything if you don’t pay for it in sweat and blood (literal or metaphorical).”
Obstacle Make Me Stronger.
Easy in theory, horribly hard in practice.
But worth it, to be able to justifiably regard oneself as a spiritual warrior.
No Days Off
“MJ never took a day off.
Not one. He was always connected to spirit, though he didn’t need to go to church to accomplish that. Spirit was already inside him. He had an attitude and philosophy about life that saw him as earning everything. He wasn’t asking anybody to give him anything. He practiced with the same level of intensity and competitive fire with which he played. He was the best player in the league, maybe the greatest of all time. But he was always working. We can all learn from that kind of relentless drive and consistency of effort about the nature of pure performance: it comes with total commitment and grueling work. Even at MJ’s level: no struggle, no swag.
MJ practiced the way he played because it all mattered equally to him. When he took the court, opponents knew they were in trouble. He was going to be a problem. It didn’t matter who he was up against. There was nothing casual about him. That’s just the way he was.”
How do we unlock this potential within all of us?
Via a “relentless drive and consistency of effort” with “total commitment and grueling work.”
Other “ExtraOrdinary” folks who would agree, Michael Phelps & Bob Bowman, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The Ultimate Quest
“‘People sometimes say I’m ‘locked in,’ but that’s not it,’ Kobe said, referring to the times when he’d been in flow or in the zone and had performed at a particularly high level. ‘When you’re there, it’s something that’s free and easy.
It’s not about being ‘locked.’ It’s about being loose.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘It’s really about unlocking. It should feel perfectly natural and unencumbered. It’s about just being. Just doing. The way a river flows.’
‘Or the mamba moves!’
How I miss that cat. There will never be another like him. The rabbis say that when a person dies, a whole world dies with them. What a world Kobe built in his short, intense life.
Kobe’s death is a great example of the Buddha’s fundamental teaching of impermanence—that everything changes, that nothing is here to stay. Kobe’s death added urgency to my desire to help people unlock and access the divinity inside them. Until we do that, it’s impossible to recognize it in others. And that is why it’s so important that we find it in ourselves.
That is my definition of success.”
As a wise friend tells me on a regular basis, Stay Loose!