Switching It On: Building a Peak Performance State

Case study: a Victorian Premier Cricket Club (Session 2)

Every cricketer knows the feeling of a day when everything just works. The ball looks like a beach ball. The feet move without being told. The mind is quiet and the game feels slow. And every cricketer knows the frustration of not being able to find that feeling again the following week.

The unspoken assumption is that those days are luck, or that form is weather, and you take it when it comes. The second session I ran with a Victorian Premier Cricket Club was about dismantling that assumption. A peak performance state isn't weather. It's a state you can learn to switch on.

A state is something you own

We started with a simple idea: a state is just a way of being in a particular moment, built from your posture, your body, and your thoughts. States vary in intensity, they never last forever, and significantly, they're created internally. As in, you own them.

That reframe is incredibly important. If your best performance depends on the crowd, the conditions, the coach being nearby, or happening to feel good that morning, you're at the mercy of all of it. But if the state is generated inside you, it becomes something you can build deliberately and access on demand.

The players who appear naturally composed are usually running a strategy they've stumbled into unconsciously. Ask them what they do before they perform and they probably can’t explain it. The aim of this work is to make that strategy explicit so every player in the group has access to it, not just the ones who found it by accident.

The building blocks of a state

To build a state deliberately, you have to understand how the brain codes experience. We take in the world through our senses and we replay experience the same way, running little movies in the mind, talking to ourselves internally or feeling sensations in our body.

Here's the key: it isn't “what” you focus on that determines how you feel, it's “how” you represent it internally. The size and brightness of the mental picture, whether it moves or stays still, the tone and pace of the internal voice, where a feeling sits in the body and how intense it is - these are the dials. Once players learn they can adjust these dials, they realise they have far more influence over their state than they'd ever assumed.

The Circle of Performance©

The centrepiece of the session is a technique we call the Circle of Performance©. Each player draws a circle on the ground with its own colour, its own qualities, and then recalls a recent playing experience where they were genuinely in the moment and playing exceptionally well.

Holding that memory, they step into the circle, and we work through the sensory detail: what the picture looks like, what the internal voice sounds like, what the feeling is and exactly where it lives in the body. We turn up the dials that intensify it. Then we anchor the whole state to the act of stepping into the circle, so it can be reactivated later without all the analysis.

What each player builds is entirely their own. One needs calm at the crease. Another needs controlled aggression. A third wants belief when the contest is genuinely on the line, or sharp focus in the moment before they bowl. There's no correct state only the one that unlocks their best work.

Because we ran the session just before training, players could take it straight out and test it: stepping into the crease, standing at the top of their mark, settling into a fielding position. The anchor is portable and invisible. It doesn't need me, the coach, or anyone else to know it's happening.

The bit that does the real work

I'm always honest with a group about this: the session doesn't embed the skill. The rehearsal does.

I asked this club to run their state at least five times a day for a week whether while brushing their teeth, waiting for the train, before dinner, after dinner. A couple of minutes each time. It sounds almost too simple, but it's how the neural pathway gets laid down, and it's the difference between a nice experience in a workshop and a tool that holds up under pressure in a final.

The players who treated it like a skill drill the way they'd treat throwdowns or a fitness routine were the ones telling me, weeks later, that they could find their state at the crease when it mattered. The ones who only thought about it when I was in the room moved slowly. That's exactly why accountability is one of our four principles, and why I keep coming back to it. 

What players took away

The shift I look for isn't a highlight-reel innings, although that is certainly nice. It's a player who can walk out to bat on an ordinary day, step into a state they've built for themselves, and give the contest their best self on purpose rather than by chance.

By the end of the block, this group had that. Not perfectly, not every time, but they'd stopped waiting for the good days to arrive and started building them.

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If you'd like to talk about building the mental side of your players' game, get in touch.

 

More from this series

This is the second of three case studies from a season with a Victorian Premier Cricket Club, each following one session of the mindset program.

→ Cultivating Composure: How Breathwork Became a Pre-Season Ritual — why we start with the breath, and how one club made it a shared pre-season ritual. https://www.neuralnetworks.com.au/blog/cultivating-composure-how-breathwork-became-a-pre-season-ritual

→ Letting Go of the Last Ball: Dumping Strategies — a fast, personal way to clear a mistake and get back to the next ball. https://www.neuralnetworks.com.au/blog/letting-go-of-the-last-ball-dumping-strategies