Harnessing Your Highest Potential In Performance
By: Tania Miller
Tags: Performance, Self Improvement, Music, Sports, Self Development

Automaticity

Fascinating to me on this quest for neuroplasticity is how we can engage our whole mind in the process, and by that, I mean the conscious focus and work that we bring to any activity while at the same time building a connection to our subconscious. Our subconscious continues to do our work, make connections, and feed our imaginations.

Carl Jung writes in Man and His Symbols:

“When something slips out of our consciousness it does not cease to exist, any more than a car that has disappeared round a corner has vanished into thin air. It is simply out of sight. Just as we may later see the car again, so we come across thoughts that were temporarily lost to us. Thus, part of the unconscious consists of a multitude of temporarily obscured thoughts, impressions, and images that, in spite of being lost, continue to influence our conscious minds.”

For writers, musicians, artists — creators of any kind — this means creating a constantly sparking connection between the part of the brain that is actively creating connections behind the scenes (subconscious) and our intended, focused work. For performers, and this includes athletes, performing artists of all kinds, public speakers, it’s about connecting our practiced, planned, rehearsed, and studied minds to our subconscious to let go into a higher elevation of all that we are and to continue the work. Jung continues:

“This subliminal material can consist of all urges, impulses, and intentions; all perceptions and intuitions; all rational or irrational thoughts, conclusions, inductions, deductions, and premises; and all varieties of feeling. Any or all of these can take the form of partial, temporary, or constant unconsciousness. Such material has mostly become unconscious because — in a manner of speaking — there is no room for it in the conscious mind… It is, in fact, normal and necessary for us to “forget” in this fashion, in order to make room in our conscious minds for new impressions and ideas. If this did not happen, everything we experienced would remain above the threshold of consciousness and our minds would become impossibly cluttered.”

We “are” the intuition, the experience, the history, and the collective active memory of what we have been all along. We retain all of our connections, all of our memories, all of our experiences — and in the performing moment, we put everything to use. We can connect to this “well”, this infinite source when we connect our performing brains to our subconscious brains.

This is essentially how we use automaticity in our performance. We build up our work, practice again and again until certain skills become automatic. Then we let our subconscious take those skills on, and we move on to something else. In this way, if we have a method to tap into our subconscious when we need it, all of these insights, automatic skills, understood knowledge, and experiences are there for us in the performing moment to draw from spontaneously. It makes up then what we call our “talent”. Part of our talent is innate, and part of it is this collection of skills that have been automatized.

Think about The Queens Gambit again. Beth, the chess prodigy, knows all of the patterns. She already knows many or all of the possible moves. Her brain has assimilated many patterns and she remembers all of them. But she continually thinks about everything in her head while she plays. Old “known” patterns she doesn’t need to think about and instantly “sees” through her subconscious, and new thoughts and patterns she deals with in the moment. She’s present in her calculations, spontaneous, and connected to her subconscious imaginations — and she can trust these.

We can become masterful at performance when we harness our abilities to let go and to allow our automatized skills, our creative subconscious, and our present focus to fire together all at once. This is true mastery in performance.

Howard Gardner is an American developmental psychologist who is a professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard. He wrote the revolutionary book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences that highly influenced how we think about intelligence and education. Here he writes about how poets can build automaticity through training and then let go into the performance of writing:

“On the road to poetic maturity, young poets often set for themselves a number of poetic tasks… W. H. Auden indicates the point (and the limitation) of such exercises: “It would take an immense effort to write half a dozen rhopalic hexameters in English but it is virtually certain that the result would have no poetic merit.” Following such a rugged drill, it is often desirable to set oneself a somewhat simpler task. At such times, previously mastered skills can be drawn on automatically, and the words may flow. Thornton Wilder comments, “I believe that the practice of writing consists in more and more relegating all that schematic operation to the subconscious.”

When a swimmer or a runner works on starting positions and technique, a skater on a specific muscle strategy for a jump, a dancer on energy projection in a progression — all of these things become the mental and physical focus at a certain time and then fade away into automaticity while the mind elevates to the next task. The athlete’s goal, in performance, will be to automatically connect to all of these embedded skills, and they will do this through trust and a still, focused mind.

Similarly, a solo violinist must practice a concerto for hours, and in this time the music is relegated not only to the muscle memory in the fingers, but also simultaneously in the brain — every key, each phrase, and every part of the structure. A soloist is noting repetition, and which door to go through into new territory. When musicians, conductors, and speakers memorize, we reduce all of the details into the core structure.