Mindfulness for High Performance with George Mumford: The 5 Superpowers of a Mindful Athlete

Show Notes and Highlights:

Who Is George Mumford?

If you follow basketball, mindfulness, or both, you may already know George Mumford as Phil Jackson’s “secret weapon.”

George is a globally recognized mindfulness and performance teacher who has worked with the Chicago Bulls, Los Angeles Lakers, and a long list of elite athletes, executives, and organizations.

A few highlights of his story:

• He was a standout basketball player at the University of Massachusetts, where he roomed with Julius “Dr. J” Erving.
• Debilitating injuries and pain medication led him into heroin addiction.
• Recovery, chronic pain, and a desperate search for relief eventually brought him to meditation, yoga, and mindfulness.
• Since the late 1980s, he’s been teaching mindfulness in “locker rooms to board rooms, Yale to jail.”
• He distilled much of his approach in his book The Mindful Athlete: Secrets to Pure Performance and later developed The Mindful Athlete Course, an online program designed to help people unlock their “inner masterpiece.”

George’s work doesn’t separate performance and wisdom. He’s just as interested in how you live, love, and lead as he is in how you shoot free throws under pressure.

The Five Mindfulness Superpowers

Throughout the conversation, George returns to one of the central frameworks in The Mindful Athlete: five spiritual powers or “superpowers” that support mindfulness and high performance.

He notes that people often load everything onto “mindfulness” as if it alone will fix life, anxiety, and performance. Without its four companions, mindfulness can become unbalanced or even weaponized.

The five superpowers are:

1. Faith / Confidence / Trust
2. Effort / Energy
3. Mindfulness
4. Concentration
5. Wisdom / Insight

Let’s look at each briefly through the lens of this session.

1. Faith: From Cynicism to Confidence

George talks about faith not as blind belief, but as confidence born of direct experience.

When Amy shares that she sometimes feels cynical and overwhelmed by what she sees in the world, George gently suggests that cynicism is often too much insight, not enough faith. We see clearly what’s broken, but lose touch with what’s possible.

Faith grows when:

• We have small, lived experiences that “this actually works.”
• We notice the mind change from scattered to settled, from reactive to responsive.
• We remember our own “spiritual bottom” and how we made it through.

For teachers, this means that every little shift we help someone experience – a tiny moment of calm, a kinder thought toward themselves – is an opportunity to build genuine confidence, not just in us but in their own capacity.

2. Effort: Right Effort, Not Harsh Effort

George jokes that he’s a “recovering perfectionist.” Many of us in mindfulness and helping professions can relate.

He describes right effort as being more like the tortoise than the hare: steady, consistent, and kind.

Right effort means:

• We keep showing up, even when it’s not glamorous.
• We adjust how hard we’re pushing, like in yoga: easing to the edge, then softening and breathing there.
• We notice when effort is driven by fear or greed (“I must be perfect or I’m a failure”) and gently correct course.

He loves the line: “Slow motion gets you there quicker.” You’ll hear that spirit throughout his stories.

3. Mindfulness: The Heart of the Practice

In this tradition, mindfulness is bare awareness – knowing what’s happening as it’s happening, without adding extra story.

In the arriving practice at the start of the session, George guides everyone to:

• Feel the body sitting
• Notice contact points with the chair and floor
• Sense the whole body as one field, from feet to crown
• Rest in the natural rhythm of breathing

This kind of body‑based practice is closely related to body scan meditation, a foundational technique MindfulnessExercises.com teaches in many forms, including a comprehensive body scan guide, short scripts, and audio practices.

For George, mindfulness is what allows us to:

• Recognize when we’re lost in thought
• Catch the first spark of anger before it becomes a forest fire
• Stay with the raw sensation of emotion long enough for it to pass

But on its own, mindfulness can tilt toward cold detachment or nitpicky self‑analysis. That’s where concentration and wisdom come in.

4. Concentration: Resting the Mind

Concentration, as George describes it, is the ability to “rest in the breath” or “rest in the body.”

It’s not rigid focus. It’s more like:

• Letting attention settle on one thing (like the breath),
• Staying there with some continuity,
• And returning kindly when the mind wanders.

This stable attention allows us to notice more subtle patterns – like the exact moment an external sound turns into an internal story.

His prison story illustrates this beautifully: instead of trying to eliminate the guard’s voice over the intercom, he helped men stay at the level of raw hearing. The intercom became a meditation bell rather than a trigger.

5. Wisdom: Seeing What’s Really Going On

Wisdom shows up in this conversation as George’s constant invitation to ask:

• What’s actually happening right now?
• What’s my relationship to it?
• What belief is underneath my reaction?

He quotes Gandhi’s chain from beliefs → thoughts → words → actions → habits → values → destiny. If we trace our behavior back, we can often discover a belief that needs updating.

For mindfulness teachers and leaders, wisdom is what allows us to see:

• When we’re secretly trying to “fix” our students so we can feel useful.
• When our desire to help crosses into control.
• When we’re clinging to how our teacher taught, instead of how we are built to teach.

Wisdom doesn’t mean we stop making mistakes. It means we learn faster, with less self‑attack and more curiosity.

Motivation, Readiness & the Limits of “Helping”

A central theme in this session is motivation – specifically, how little control we actually have over other people’s motivation.

When Sean asks how to “light someone’s ass on fire to practice” in a wholesome way, George smiles and says:

“You don’t motivate somebody. They have to want it.”

He describes two important ideas:

1. The “Ass‑On‑Fire” Principle

His own commitment to practice came when his life had essentially fallen apart: addiction, chronic pain, nothing working anymore. At that point, spiritual practice wasn’t a hobby. It was survival.

He calls this the AOF method of motivation: Ass On Fire. Most of us don’t change deeply until the old way becomes unbearable.

That doesn’t mean we need to wait for rock bottom. But it does mean we can’t skip over people’s lived experience.

2. The Readiness Principle

Drawing on his work with coach Tex Winter, George talks about the readiness principle: some people simply aren’t ready yet.

You can:

• Plant seeds (like Johnny Appleseed).
• Set the table and invite people to sit down.
• Offer your experience, strength, and hope.

You cannot:

• Force someone to eat if they’re not hungry.
• Control when a seed sprouts.

He shares the story of a man he taught in prison who showed up 20 years later at a meditation center art exhibit. At the time, George had no idea what impact he’d had. The seed took decades to ripen.

For mindfulness teachers, this is both humbling and freeing. Our job is to:

• Practice deeply ourselves
• Offer what we’ve learned
• Let go of the timeline

If a student practices for a week and disappears, it doesn’t mean we failed. It may simply mean their “elevator” hasn’t gone down far enough yet, to use George’s metaphor. When it does, they might remember something we said years before.

Working with Difficult Emotions: Anger, Cynicism & the Four A’s

Amy’s question about emotions opens up one of the most practical parts of the session.

She shares that, especially in the current world climate, she feels anger and cynicism bubbling up – and finds it hard to embody the teachings with others when those emotions are strong.

George’s response is clear:

“The emotion is not the issue. The issue is the unpleasantness of it.”

He offers a simple, workable process:

The 4 A’s

1. Awareness

   • Notice what’s actually happening: tight jaw, clenched stomach, racing thoughts, “I can’t believe this.”
   • Put it in simple language: “Anger is present.” “Cynicism is present.”

2. Acceptance

   • This is often the hardest part.
   • Acceptance doesn’t mean we like what’s happening; it means we’re willing to let it be here long enough to learn from it.

3. Compassionate Action

   • Once we’ve truly felt what’s there, we can choose what to do.
   • Maybe we set a boundary. Maybe we take a walk. Maybe we speak up clearly but kindly.

4. Assessment

   • Afterward, we reflect: What worked? What didn’t? What did I learn?
   • This is where growth happens over time.

He also connects emotions to the five hindrances in Buddhist psychology and to the superpowers. For example, persistent cynicism may signal not just clarity about injustice, but also a deficit in faith – in ourselves, in others, in the possibility of change.

For teachers, this framework can be used:

• Internally, when we’re triggered by students, institutions, or global events
• Externally, as a teaching tool to help others befriend their own emotional life

Flow, the 4% Edge, and High‑Pressure Performance

When Stefan asks about flow states, George’s answer lands somewhere between sports psychology and Dharma talk.

Key points:

• Mindfulness doesn’t guarantee flow, but it makes you available to it. It helps you be fully present when the conditions arise.
• Flow depends on high challenge and high skill. If challenge is too low, we’re bored. Too high, we’re overwhelmed.
• He references the idea (from performance research) that we function best when we stretch ourselves just a little – roughly a few percent – beyond our current capacity.
• Elite performers often feel intense arousal before they hit flow. Non‑experts tend to back off at that point. Experts stay with the discomfort.

For mindfulness teachers and coaches:

• We can help students reframe discomfort as a sign of growth rather than failure.
• We can design practices and challenges that push people just enough – not so much that they shut down.
• We can emphasize process over peak experiences.

George is very clear that chasing flow for its own sake is counterproductive. The point is to:

• Love getting better
• Love being present
• Let flow arise as a side effect of good training and clear intentions

Daily Life as Practice (Not Just Retreats)

George spent years living in a meditation center, doing long retreats, and immersing himself in traditional practice. Those experiences changed him.

But in this conversation, he’s very pragmatic about what most of us need now:

“Your practice is your life.”

He notes that:

• You can practice from the moment you wake up until the moment you fall asleep.
• You can track your mind all day: is it full of fear or love, greed or generosity, confusion or clarity?
• Short, consistent “pockets of stillness” may be more realistic – and more transformative – for many householders than long silent retreats.

For teachers, this dovetails beautifully with the resources on MindfulnessExercises.com that support integrating practice into everyday life, from short guided meditations to complete courses on how to become a meditation teacher while living in the world, not apart from it. 

Bringing These Practices into Your Teaching

If you’re a mindfulness teacher or coach, you don’t have to become an art therapist to integrate creative expression.

You might:

• Open a class with 5 minutes of sensory awareness, then invite people to jot down five raw sensory details from their day.
• Add a brief movement exploration—one small impulse, then let it spread—to a session on working with anxiety.
• Offer a creative closing ritual: a mandala circle people can color in silence at the end of a day‑long retreat.
• Use the “I am…” free‑write as a way to explore heart qualities or identities people are ready to loosen.

Mindfulness Exercises already hosts a growing library of talks and resources on this theme, including a podcast episode on the link between mindfulness and artistic expression and another on bringing mindfulness to our creative nature.

You can also point students to gentle, body‑based explorations like Wisdom to Dance, which reminds us that movement practice can be prayer, play, and meditation all at once.

Bringing It Home

If there’s a single thread running through this whole conversation, it might be this:

• You don’t have to wait until your ass is fully on fire to practice.
• You can begin exactly where you are:
  • With a two‑minute body scan while the kettle boils.
  • By watching your self‑talk between meetings.
  • By noticing when anger flares and applying the Four A’s.
  • By stretching yourself just a little more than is comfortable in your teaching or your life.

And if you feel called to teach – whether you’re working with athletes, executives, kids, elders, or your own family – remember George’s words:

“The world needs you to be you.”

May this conversation, and the practices it points to, support you in unlocking your own masterpiece and helping others do the same.

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