Stillpower: Excellence with Ease in Sports and Life by Garret Kramer - Book review

Stillpower

Excellence with Ease in Sports and Life

By: Garret Kramer

Published: June 5, 2012
Format: Hardcover, 224 pages
ISBN-10: 1582703884
ISBN-13: 978-1582703886
Publisher: Atria Books/Beyond Words











"Stillpower is pain free,yet so dynamic it has the potential to change your life - both on and off the playing field", writes high performance coach, and founder and managing partner of Inner Sports, LLC, Garret Kramer, in his success building and transformational book Stillpower: Excellence with Ease in Sports and Life. The author describes how external strategies for achieving top performance in sports, business, and life are not only ineffective, but also counterproductive. The author offers an alternative approach that focuses on the person's state of mind.

Garret Kramer understands that true source of developing excellence is through one's own internal mental processes. High performance individuals, ranging from leading executives to professional athletes have long searched for that elusive formula that leads to peak achievement levels. The author provides evidence that the search for answers and techniques outside oneself is insufficient to gain the desired results. Indeed, Garret Kramer considers these external components are usually ineffective or even result in frustration and worse results. The key insight presented by Garret Kramer is that willpower, long thought to be the rod to success, is precisely the wrong approach. Instead, the author shares the internal concept of stillpower to replace the failed concept of willpower.

Garret Kramer (photo left) recognizes that the personal experiences of athletes and executives is very often not in alignment with the demands, strategies, and coaching of business and sports leadership. The result is a lowered performance level as the individual finds themselves fighting against their own innate skills and personality. The external applications of goal setting, willpower, and more work and practice fail when they fail to work with the person's inner state. To replace these external remedies, the Garret Kramer guides the individual inward with the concept of stillpower.

The author provides the keys and insights found within, through the principles of stillpower. Those principles as discussed in the book are as follows:

* The misconception: Athletics teach life lessons
* Unbounded effort, willpower, and insight
* Coaching, wisdom, and success
* Clear thinking, resilience, and life beyond the scoreboard
* The ultimate coaching dilemma: An athlete's state of mind versus behavior
* The neutrality of the outside world
* Sports, judgment, and life outside from the inside out
* Mind, body, and performance
* Every athlete's birthright
* The freedom to win

For me, the power of the book is how Garret Kramer makes the powerful connection between the athlete's or executive's state of mind with their overall performance. The author takes a holistic approach to coaching and leadership that considers the mind and body as one complete whole. The traditional approach worked against this mind and body unity by emphasizing external forces and approaches that neglected the person's internal state of mind.

Garret Kramer considers that misaligned approach to one of attempting to achieve success through the pain and suffering of sheer willpower. In its place, the author guides the individual toward the internal journey of stillpower, where the person calms their mind and enters into a zone of calm success. Garret Kramer also provides stories and examples of the stillpower principles in action to illustrate their effectiveness in the real world of high level sports.

I highly recommend the mind and body aligning and internally calming book Stillpower: Excellence with Ease in Sports and Life by Garret Kramer, to anyone seeking a proven and effective guide to establishing a very high level of performance without the pain of externally applied misalignment nostrums. This book will change the way you think about achieving peak performance and success.