By MaryEllen Tribby

Today I’d like to talk about winning.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge sports fan, as is everyone in my family.

My husband and I both played collegiate sports, my oldest daughter plays college softball, my son is the quarterback of his high school football team, and my youngest, Delanie, is being groomed to be a professional tennis player.

I don’t tell you this to brag about my children (though I’m obviously very proud of them). Rather I want to demonstrate that I’ve given a lot of thought to the subject of winning over the years. And one burning question has tugged at the edge of my brain the whole time:

What separates the occasional winner from the consistent champion?

After all those years of wrestling with this question, my dear friend, colleague and mentor Bill Harris (who passed away just this past May) answered it for me in one word: Meditation.

Meditation offers a competitive edge that no amount of training, drills, coaching, weight lifting, or determination can match. While these things are obviously critical to success, meditation takes your performance (in sports, business and even your relationships) to a whole new level.

First, meditation will give you sudden breakthroughs, ah-ha! moments that let you see a situation or an obstacle with a new vision, an unexpected solution. (Ask anyone who is being thumped on the tennis court by an “unbeatable” serve how important a breakthrough idea can be!)

Also, meditation enhances your ability to perform in high-stakes situations. Meditators are consistently calmer in critical “winner take all” moments. Say you’re shooting a 3-pointer at the buzzer when you’re two points down in the basketball championships. Now, that’s pressure!

Food For Your Brain

Just as in life, in business and in relationships, not every situation carries same weight. Not every decision has the same potential for success or failure. Every action doesn’t have life-changing consequences. But some do, and when these situations arise, the more “optimized” your brain is through meditation, (especially meditation with my secret weapon), the better your responses–your thoughts, feelings and actions–will be.

We all face pivotal moments in our lives…times when what we do or say has a serious impact on our future, and on the future of others. A consistent practice of meditation clears the path for you to make the best, clearest, highest moves in these all-important moments.

Meditation teaches your brain how to remain calm and to focus in the moment. It helps your brain get into what athletes, artists, and entrepreneurs often call “the zone.” When you’re in the zone, you’re firing on all cylinders, you’re getting divine inspiration, everything seems effortless, time passes joyfully, and creative solutions to difficult problems seem to appear out of nowhere.

Here’s another important thing that champions know, and that Bill Harris said over and over again: Focus on the outcome you want.

Focusing on obstacles is poison to your dreams. Your brain is a heat seeking missile and it will attract to you whatever you focus on with the most passion and emotion. So, if you let your mind obsess about missing the shot, losing the game, choking in those pivotal moments, then that is exactly what will happen.

Let me give you a specific example. As I mentioned earlier, my daughter Delanie is an up and coming athlete in USTA junior tennis. But at 11, she suffered from stress and anxiety. While she loves playing tennis wholeheartedly, competing in front of a crowd made her extremely nervous. She lost her focus, her brain seemed to betray her, and her body followed suit. She got the “yips.” Shots she “owned,” serves she aced, backhands that rocketed low and fast across the net, all abandoned her. Why? Because her brain was off the rails (focusing on all that could go wrong).

Secrets Are to Be Shared

So, I had Delanie start listening to my secret weapon – Holosync every morning, first thing, before she did anything else. To put the results in Delanie’s terms, “It was AWESOME!” Even her coach saw an immediate improvement in her focus and diligence. Instead of crying before a big match, as she used to, now Delanie charges onto the court full of confidence and determination.

The change in her after only a few months of using Holosync has been truly remarkable. But don’t take my word for it, or Delanie’s for that matter.