posted Oct 19th, 2012 - The NSL News began posting a series of paragraphs from Dan BC's book ABOVE ALL ELSE with "The Goal of Personal and Team Best" on 3 August 2012.

Dan BC gave the NSL News permission to copy some chapters of the second part of his book.

The first part is his own fascinating life story "ABOVE ALL ELSE", which is followed by "PLAYING TO WIN", where he provides guidance for teams and competitors on the way to their best performance. This part of the book will be offered by the NSL News in a series of articles.

"The Goal of Personal and Team Best" is now followed by his thoughts of how to get to performing your best.

The Skill of Performing Your Best

Though often perceived as a mystical talent that only the most exceptional and gifted people possess, the truth is that our ability to deliver our best performance in competition is a trained skill in and of itself. Remember:

• The mental and emotional process you use to perform at your best level is much the same process, regardless of the activity you’re involved in. • You can practice this process when doing the activity you are most passionate about or when just enjoying something you do more recreationally. • This process is the same for beginners and experts. Your best is your best at any level, and the skill of performing your best doesn’t change as your best changes. • Trusting your instincts will always lead you to your best performance. • Your instincts will only lead you to the best performance that you have trained them for and expect from them, a level of performance that you have proven you are capable of and have clearly defined, visualized, and are confident that you can and will deliver.

If you want to be your best when you get to the meet, you need to begin practicing this skill from the beginning of your training and try to use it in everything in which you participate.

The mistake many people make is that they don't learn the skill of performing at their best from the beginning. They wait until their best is at a level they are proud to display (usually just before the big meet) and then "hope" it actually happens. There is no hope in competition. You make it happen or you don't.

To be able to deliver our best when it counts, we need to have three things:

1. Knowledge of exactly what our true best is 2. A clear understanding of what we need to do to deliver that best performance 3. Confidence built on sound evidence that we can and will deliver our best performance anytime we choose to

Defining Your Best

The first step in developing the skill of performing at our best is figuring out what our "true best" really is.

All of us have a certain "safe performance" level. This is the level that we normally aim for, a degree of speed, aggression, and confidence where we are sure we will not make any big mistakes. Although we usually perform competently and consistently here, it is certainly less than our best, and aiming to perform here will restrict us from ever reaching our best.

But while operating from that safe performance level, there are those times when suddenly and seemingly, out of nowhere, we perform better than ever. We are smoother, faster, sharper. Where did it come from? It was almost like magic.

These unexpected magical moments happen maybe 5 to 15 percent of the time and are usually brushed off as having just been luck. But the reality is that these were our true best. There is no magic and there is certainly no luck. We performed at a new level. That was our best, and if we did it once, we can do it every time. We just need to understand what makes those moments happen. With that knowledge, we can structure a training plan specifically designed so that we can learn to create our own magic anytime we want.

Written by Dan BC - To be continued with: "Turning Your Best into Your Average"