The Secret Ceremony
How your mundane daily routine can become a portal to high performance.
There isn’t a world class athlete, writer or musician alive today who hasn’t achieved their elite skills without using a routine.
Popular books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and Bounce mainstreamed the notion that 10,000 hours of purposeful practice is required for achieving world class abilities. The study of virtuosity throughout history bears this out.
That said, there’s an essential component to a virtuoso’s methodology that’s rarely mentioned — and that’s because it’s invisible. It’s hidden in plain sight, appearing only as mundane preparations and routine errands.
Even the person doing it may not consciously know the significance of their actions.
What is it? I call it the Secret Ceremony.
A Secret Ceremony consists of everyday activities you do before practice or work, but the arrangement of these actions are meant to gently and incrementally narrow your focus and increase your intensity for the activity ahead.
In The Score Will Take care of Itself, legendary NFL coach Bill Walsh identifies it and describes it this way:
There is a ritual, sort of a crescendo, that takes you to the very peak of preparation and readiness. The gladiator is thinking, mentally narrowing his focus, as he goes through the ritual before the game. It draws him upward smoothly into the increasing intensity and pressure of the event like a high-performance car going from zero to sixty, the gears shifting seamlessly and without notice.
I had my own ritual as a coach before each kickoff and did it almost unconsciously. I always went to my locker first and then walked through the locker room, taking exactly the same route each time. I would sit in my office and watch another NFL game on television for five minutes or so — not really paying much attention to it, just distracting myself. Then I would leave my office, and just before going out to the field I would shake hands with every single player on our team. It was that ritual that helped me to create the mindset I wanted before each game. It helped me to focus on what I was about to do, allowed me to methodically narrow my concentration to the point where I could block out everything but the game plan and its execution. The routine was part of the grounding process in which I sought to eradicate worry, excitement, stress, distractions, hopes, fears, and all personal issues.
It was like walking into a completely different room mentally, like being on a different planet.
Whatever it is you do leading up to your practice should be thought of as choreography in your Secret Ceremony — the pre-game ceremony before the main event.
Make this powerful switch in perspective and your preparations become stepping stones to higher intensity and an ideal mind state.
Consider the preparation and training of triathletes. Triathlons require various forms of sporting equipment, lotions, gels, water bottles and energy bars. Daily preparation for these athletes could be a real downer, but top performers optimize this time to help them rise to any challenge.
How to Make Your Own Secret Ceremony
Make a list of every activity you must do before your practice/work/performance. Then decide what order you want to execute each thing on the list. You will go through this sequence every day.
Build flexibility into the list. This list is the first draft of your Secret Ceremony.
The next day, as you go through the list in sequence, make changes wherever needed to narrow your focus and get into a mental flow state easily. It’s normal to have to make changes and adaptations for days and even weeks before all points of friction have been removed and the choreography on your Secret Ceremony is perfected.
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