Mental Shifts for Peak Performance Edition 003

For most of my life, I thought that spirituality had no place in high performance.

Faith felt like a lack of ownership. A handoff of responsibility.

In 2nd grade, I read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, the story of a young Japanese girl who, after developing leukemia from the Hiroshima bombing, folded 1000 paper cranes in a desperate wish to survive.

As I read it over, and over and over again, I remember trying to make sense of how a higher being could allow such catastrophic devastation that had no logic to it.

From that moment on, I dismissed the idea of faith in anything beyond myself. I built my operating system around self-reliance. And it worked. Every obstacle became something I could outwork.

EFFORT GAVE ME CONTROL.

Control looks a lot like discipline, but at its core it is fear trying to stay in charge. It shrinks the moment to something that you think and feel like you are managing.

When I work with high performers who operate from control, including myself, the outcome is almost ultimately the same: brain fog, stress, emotional constriction. The very fuel they’re running on eventually consumes them.

What releases them is trust.

Not blind faith. Not wishful thinking. But a kind of trained trust, built through relentless preparation, followed by the intentional release of the outcome.

That release is spirituality in action.

Spirituality is your capacity to stay with uncertainty and discomfort without needing to fix, reframe, or escape it.

It’s nervous system strength. The ability to feel fear without overriding it. To sit with disappointment without rushing to turn it into insight.

Most high performers avoid this because it asks them to surrender to what they spend their lives trying to outrun: fear, sadness, vulnerability.

The same feelings I didn’t know how to hold when I read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. I wasn’t just confused by the devastation, I didn’t want to feel the full weight of grief and anger that came with it. It was too much. So I put it down.

But trust doesn’t come from avoiding emotion. It comes from being willing to feel what you don't understand.

A high performer rooted in trust looks different. They’re lighter, freer, more creative. Not consumed by their craft. In love with it.

When Michael Jordan was asked how he handled the pressure of always taking the final shot, he replied:

“WHY WOULD I THINK ABOUT MISSING A SHOT I HAVEN'T TAKEN YET."

That’s not arrogance, that’s trained surrender. It’s the calm that comes from mastering the inputs and letting go of the rest.

None of this is mystical.

It’s cognitive. It’s embodied. It’s performance psychology at its core.

Because trust forces radical presence.

It pulls your mind out of outcome management and into direct experience. The moment uncertainty stops being something to avoid, your mind stops wasting energy trying to escape it.

THE REWIRED TAKE:

CONTROL BURNS ENERGY. SPIRITUALITY CREATES MORE OF IT.

This is the edge.

I dismissed spirituality because it didn’t feel logical. The paradox is: the highest performers practice a version of it every day.

Meet the moment,

Ashley

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SHIFT YOUR MIND:

DEFAULT

Try to control the outcome and avoid discomfort. Overanalyze, over work, over effort.

SHIFT

Control the inputs, then release the outcome.

Focus on what you can influence: your process, your preparation, your internal state.

Not the result. Not how others respond. Not what happens next.

HOW

Stay engaged with what’s in front of you, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Feel what arises.

Let the outcome unfold.