As a professional darts player, you’ll realise there are many reasons, specific uncontrollable situations, that will impact or have the potential to derail and affect your natural flow state, where you produce your best quality darts. Exposure to these events tends to ramp up as your career progresses. So, you might find that the heating in the local pub is unbearable. You might find that you end up on a stage with the TV cameras, the lights, the crowds, the banter, and the abuse, the support and the hate, unbearable. You might find that the other player is trying to derail you and coming up with all sorts of slight little tricks, and that is unbearable.
There’s a whole host of things that you will find that are unbearable until one day when you’ve been exposed to them often enough, they become bearable. You start to find a solution. You are, after all, human, and humans evolve. We can survive in the hottest climates on the planet and thrive, and we can also thrive and survive in the coldest places on earth. If we can do that, we can do it in the silence of the quietest parts of the planet, and we can thrive in the noisiest parts of the planet. So, your ability to evolve and emerge within your own lifetime, within your own career, becomes a super strength.
However, one of the first things you have to do is choose to unhook from the judgment that this is unbearable all the time. Your brain is saying it’s too hot, too noisy; you’re adding a level of struggling to your suffering. Let’s be clear about this: to be a human is to suffer, and radical acceptance is when we lean into our suffering and go about our values regardless. We might be in pain because of what other people are doing, but the struggle is when we choose that unbearable. If we unhook from the judgment, the thinking brain, the comparing, the critical brain, and if we were to accept the heat that we’re feeling, the sweat on our brow, the cold hands, and all the reasons why, we might, then, we can get busy adapting to that. How do I play the best of my ability, the best version of me when my hands are cold? How do I do it when the crowd is against me, noisy, when the other player tries to derail me?
We get to put a solution before a problem, and when the brain’s engaged in that, often it just comes down to the simple idea of unhooking from the judgment brain, trusting in your ability, taking a breath, and radically producing the style of play, the commitment, the courage, your values, your principles, your ethics, what you stand for, your liberated self, in the here and now.
