Building The Muscle: Mindfulness & Performance (Part 1)

(Part 1) A conversation with Luke Doherty, former elite athlete and founder of Mindful Peak Performance (MPP), a non-profit created to bring mindfulness into elite athletics and the business world.

In this first part of our conversation, Luke shares his journey to founding Mindful Peak Performance and the intentions behind it.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Back to Being podcast,

Where I speak with experts,

Practitioners and everyday people about living a more healthy,

Active and mindful life.

My name is Kareem Rushdie,

And I've spent over a decade learning to transform my own chronic pain and stress so I can lead a life worth living.

Now I'm using what I've learned along the way,

As well as the knowledge and experience of my guests to share unique perspectives that can help you do the same.

Thank you for tuning in today.

Today I'm speaking with Luke Doherty,

Founder of Mindful Peak Performance,

MPP,

A non-profit created to bring mindfulness into elite athletics and the business world.

Luke trained as an elite rugby player and was capped for England under 18s.

He went on to study law and then spent seven years living and working at the London Buddhist Centre before founding MPP,

Which has a strong social vision to make mindfulness more accessible not only to professional athletes and business leaders,

But to disadvantaged young people as well.

MPP's BAM boxing programs received the UK Mindfulness Initiative's inaugural Innovations in Mindfulness Award,

And MPP is now part of a consortium which advises the UK government's Department of Health and Social Care.

Luke shares the challenges he faced as a young person aspiring to be an elite athlete,

How he discovered mindfulness and even came close to walking a monastic path.

We also speak about performance and wellbeing being two sides of the same coin,

And how sports people,

Leaders and young people can benefit from cultivating and training their awareness.

There were some minor issues with the audio at the start of our recording,

A good opportunity to put your attentional capacities to the test and focus on the dialogue rather than the tech glitches which are now part and parcel of our modern lives.

Now it's time for you to listen and hopefully enjoy this conversation with Luke Doherty of MPP.

Okay.

Great.

Luke,

Thank you so much for being with me today.

Thanks for sharing your time with me.

Yeah.

Thanks for the invite.

Looking forward to seeing where we go with this podcast.

Never quite know where it's going to go.

So I mean,

I think a good starting point would just be a bit about you.

I mean,

How do you go from playing rugby for England under 18s to training to be in law to becoming a meditation practitioner and now you're doing well,

Tell us a bit about that journey.

Well,

It's a,

Yeah,

I'm still working out how this has kind of happened.

I was,

I was teaching this morning,

A business leader and the end of the session,

I was like,

It sometimes surprises me how my life has got to this point.

But looking back,

It's,

Um,

Yeah,

I spent a good 10 years training to be an elite athlete.

And that was my kind of pure goal as a 12,

11,

12 year old,

That that's all I wanted to do.

Um,

And had an amazing time and then did play for England when I was 18,

Um,

And then kind of got quite disenfranchised by rugby.

And really it was the fact that I've been so driven towards this goal that I had achieved that and I just lost motivation.

So rugby just fell away.

And then I went into law,

Did two degrees in law,

And I took the same discipline and the same drives.

And after I'd completed those degrees,

I just kind of had a burnout and I'd realised that there was so much of me that was just seeking external validation through these successes that I'd lost touch with or never really found what I wanted to do.

So I then took a U-turn and started working in social care and working with people with learning disabilities,

Mental health issues,

Started managing social care projects with quite complex need into living independently.

And I guess at that time I found meditation and it just immediately clicked for me.

I was very sceptical.

I was like,

This is not for me.

I was getting a meditation class for a friend and I was dragging my feet,

Went along to London Buddhist Centre.

And as soon as I came out the door,

I felt like a different person.

And then a week later,

I went on a retreat and I came back and there was a huge shift in my outlook.

And I guess the side of me,

The receptive,

Open,

Emotionally aware side of me started to grow from that point.

And I was like,

This is going to change my life.

I had this strong feeling that this is part of my life now.

And then from there,

I started managing breathing space,

Which is secular in London Buddhist Centre.

And then I started training mindfulness in that context and other contexts and went through the ordination process to become an order member within the three rapid Buddhist order.

And at the end of that training,

I realized this isn't for me.

I am not a monk.

I'm a rugby player.

I'm a lad.

And so I guess part of the departure,

I learned so much in that seven years,

But then setting up mindful peak performance is how do I learn to teach mindfulness in a way that relates to my life?

And how do I make it accessible to people that perhaps don't want to go down that kind of religious monastic way?

How can this be relatable to athletes,

To business leaders,

To young people in a way that's like meeting them where they're at?

And so that that's kind of my journey.

And yeah,

The interest to go back into the sports world was also fueled by two friends who commit suicide in the sports world.

You know,

And seeing the pressure that I put myself under that environment and others do and the underlying mental health issues that I had and how sport was masking that in a way.

So I thought that mindfulness is a really cool tool that can go into those environments and help relieve that pressure and also bring more balance to athletes.

Yeah,

Beautiful.

Yeah,

That's a big story.

I don't know what.

Yeah,

Yeah,

No,

There's a lot.

There's a lot there,

Isn't there?

I mean,

There's there's like that that pattern emerging of once you'd achieved your goal interest levels,

Weigh in and motivation started to weigh in and you kind of moved on to the next thing.

And then,

As you said,

That you went that kind of monastic route and then realized that that's for you at least was not the one less relatable to everyday life,

I suppose,

In many ways.

And then coming full circle,

Coming back to sports,

Back to that elite environment.

I mean,

I'd love to hear how do you that sports journey,

What would it have been like?

How might it have been different?

Had you discovered mindfulness and had your practice back as a 16,

17,

18 year old?

How do you think it could have changed?

Good question.

Just one quick caveat on the I still take a lot of influence from Buddhism and the religious context that I was in,

But it's sort of making it accessible in the work I'm doing now.

So I feel like I feel part of that lineage,

But it's like I haven't quite done.

I'm not I'm not going down the ordination route,

But there's something really important about what I've learned that we might be able to pick up on that later.

Yeah,

No,

I'd love to come back to that.

According to your question,

You know what?

I've learned some hard lessons through not having mindfulness and not having these tools and techniques.

So those hard lessons have given me an insight into how to help people that are in that same position.

So I've not tended to think about it in those terms.

But when I'm working with academy athletes,

For example,

Young athletes,

I can see that I'm passing on a really important skill around appreciating not being driven,

Even if it's just an hour or 10 minutes and appreciating that there's another way to be that isn't about running after a goal.

It's like learning to have the confidence to be OK with yourself,

Be OK with the feelings that are emerging and seeing athletes start to get it in terms of how there is another way to be.

There's another way to show up as an athlete.

It doesn't have to be always about driving for success and learning to appreciate that meditation practices and these practices that cultivate stillness can really amplify how you are as an athlete.

But it's often counterintuitive for athletes to sit and think there's anything in these kinds of practices.

Once they start to feel the nervous system,

The parasympathetic nervous system coming in,

The calmness,

It's like,

Oh,

There's something in this and that's planting seeds.

So when they go through transitions later,

When they go through changes,

When they get deselected,

When they have bereavements,

Breakups,

All these things that happen and create pressure.

Once people have got the feeling of like this cultivates a stillness in me,

Then the seeds are planted and that's the primary bit of my work.

It's like planting those seeds and making the practices directly felt as an experience,

Not just as an idea or like I should try this mindfulness thing.

It's like,

Let's see if you can learn to connect and feel the power that meditation could bring.

Yeah,

Yeah,

No,

Really interesting.

I mean,

I would have I would have thought that athletes would be.

In some ways,

An advantage,

Because,

You know,

A big part of cultivating,

Practicing mindfulness is being embodied,

Right,

Being in our body,

Being in tune with it,

And that is an area where athletes are strides ahead of the rest of us just because they are so connected into their body.

Their body is their instrument that they're tuning all the time.

But then from what you're saying,

That doesn't stop them from being kind of carried away with this driven doing mode of being and goal orientation and the pressure and all of that.

Yeah,

I mean,

Back to feeling the body in a different way.

Do you know what?

You're absolutely right.

And that was one of my biggest insights working in the sports world was I did a year at Harlequin's rugby team and they took to it so quickly because of that point.

They're training seven,

Eight hours a day.

They're not behind a screen.

They've got this natural level of embodiment,

Which means that they're like,

Well,

OK,

This is not just an idea.

This is a really so this is an experience.

But I guess the challenge is,

You know,

Being embodied and practicing mindfulness means that when you hit up against resistances,

Typical emotions,

Pressure,

You really feel it.

So it's developing the understanding that mindfulness isn't this fluffy cloud thing where you sit and you relax.

Actually,

It's quite confrontational and it's about learning to be with difficult experiences and,

You know,

Make choices around how you're acting and not just playing out,

You know,

Reactive patterns.

And so there's a massive benefit in athletes getting meditation.

But then it's like with everybody.

Once you start coming up against challenges,

It's like,

How do you then relate to your practice?

It doesn't feel good.

Yeah,

Yeah,

I love that.

Luke,

I'm going to suggest we switch off our videos,

Which I'm not happy about because I'd love to be looking at you.

But every now and then I'm getting a bit of a delay.

And yeah,

So we'll go back to the old.

Well,

The way until a few years ago that we used to have all remote conversations.

Yes.

So you alluded earlier when you talked about that journey that the the qualities or characteristics that you started to become more in touch with or that started to emerge a bit more when you discovered mindfulness and meditation.

Maybe you could speak a bit more.

To that,

I mean,

Broadly speaking,

What mindfulness kind of means to you,

I mean,

How do you describe it to a room full of athletes or business leaders and then how it shows up in your life specifically on a day to day,

You know,

And you've talked already about some of those changes that it facilitated.

But I just wonder if you want to elaborate on that a bit.

Yeah,

I guess the changes I saw were very,

I guess I am I've got a background of an athlete,

So I did take to it very viscerally.

And I just know it's an immediate reduction in anxiety and feeling this connection to my body that I'd lost,

I think,

Through striving.

And so it wasn't just the qualities were recognized by I was managing a team at the time and I went in the retreat and I'm like,

What's happened to you?

Why are you suddenly listening to why are you opening?

They know it's very viscerally like I changed in me.

So there was just there was just more awareness and other people,

There was more connection to myself.

So it was a bit it was quite a big contrast what happened after that first retreat.

And so that that was my kind of that was my impression of mindfulness.

And then to tell you a bit about my own practice at the moment,

It's these kind of walking meditation for a couple of hours in the morning and being in the park and allowing myself to slow down and then going into a period of just accepting how I feel and accepting and allowing emotions to be there and and then finding a kind of stillness each day.

And that's what that's my practice each day.

And I try and then,

You know,

Pass on some of that stillness to the people and help them connect in the same way.

So when I'm working with athletes,

I use the language of learning how to train your mind,

Showing some of the clear science around mindfulness,

You know,

Make it quite sports related language,

Like learning how to train your mind using mentors that are connected to physical training.

When the mind wanders off,

You come back to the breast of the body.

That's the same as when you're building muscle through doing repetitions in the gym,

You know,

Helping athletes understand it as a physical training principle and how that can be related to mindfulness.

That's been a really good way into both athletes and leaders,

Actually.

But the most powerful thing is actually giving athletes and leaders an experience of what it is like to feel still and calm and connected amongst the immense pressures that they can be under.

That's the only way that someone,

In my opinion,

Really takes on mindfulness practice when they get it experientially and they're convinced on some level that,

All right,

There's something in this.

This is not just an idea.

Yeah,

I can see I can see how that would resonate,

Because we use we use the sporting or physical exercise analogy a lot when we're teaching mindfulness,

Right?

We talk about going to the mind gym.

We talk about training and building that muscle of awareness.

And,

You know,

In the same way you go to the gym so that you can,

You know,

Not so you can.

Well,

Some people do just so you can be looking good at the gym.

But you go to the gym so that when you're outside of the gym,

You're less prone to injury.

You can do the exercises you want to.

You've got more.

And it's exactly the same with mindfulness,

Isn't it?

I mean,

We go to that that mind gym so that when we're in our day to day life,

We can notice when we slip into unhelpful patterns of thinking or emoting,

When we're mental time traveling rather than being present.

So I can see how that that sporting metaphor they probably take to it quite,

Quite quickly.

Yeah,

Yeah,

That's spot on.

Yeah.

Tell me now about Mindful Peak Performance.

So the culmination of that journey you described earlier was starting this incredible organization.

Tell us about kind of its origin stories,

Why you started MPP,

What you're doing,

How you make an impact.

And I guess MPP came out of two years of chronic back pain and that its origins are in that.

I'd come to the end of the ordination training stuff that I'd spent five years at the time at the Buddhist Center and something wasn't clicking in.

At that point,

I developed chronic back pain and I actually then trained at some training at Breathworks with Vidya Mala one weekend that really helped me relate to how to kind of work with chronic pain.

And what I realized was that I was afraid of taking my next steps and a lot of the pain I was experiencing was connected to the fact that I needed to make a change in my life.

So it took me a couple of years to come to terms with that.

And out of that period,

I was away on retreat.

I just had this,

I was having a really difficult retreat.

And then I had this,

I just had this idea of like,

What about taking mindfulness to athletes?

And I just had this,

I don't know,

I was like,

I was blissed out for like six hours.

I just,

I just started,

It was like,

This is what I need,

This is what I need to do.

I need to now make it relevant to my conditioning,

My life,

So I can help people in my own particular way and take the learning and all of the experiences I've got from,

You know,

The amazing time I had at the Buddhist Center and all these retreats and all this learning.

I need to now make it my own.

So after I came back from that retreat,

I decided I'm going to do this.

And then it just fell into alignment quite smoothly once I'd actually made that decision and started working with Saracen's Rugby Club first.

Funnily enough,

I was researching somebody who was teaching philosophy to Saracen's Rugby team.

I think it was Jules Evans,

An academic from Queen Mary University.

And I,

I watched,

I watched a video with him on the Friday and on the Monday he turned up at the Buddhist Center and I was like,

What?

And then I bumped into him and he introduced me to Saracen's and I started doing some work there.

And then Harlequins took me on more,

More permanently for quite a long period of time.

So that was where,

That's where Mindful Peak Performance got initiated,

Teaching mindfulness at Harlequins and then rolling out to different individual athletes and teams since then.

Wow.

So for any listeners that either might not be in the UK,

Even for some in the UK,

I mean,

Unfortunately,

The great sport of rugby is not as popular as it should be.

But Saracen's and Harlequins are both top tier rugby teams in the English Premier League.

Tell us a bit more about what work were you doing with them?

When you say you were working with them,

What did that entail?

Well,

With Harlequins,

I tried to develop a program.

I got a lot of freedom to develop the program how I wanted to.

So I wanted the first three months of working with them,

Not being about mindfulness,

It being about building relationships with the players,

Spending time at the club,

Doing a bit of one-to-one work with some of the players,

Like not making them feel like they had to do this as a thing,

But actually started to build a relationship that,

You know,

I know that environment,

I know the sports environment,

So,

You know,

Create some safety that they could trust me.

And then we started doing one-to-one work.

So working with individual players that wanted to give it a go,

With the captain at the time and various people,

That went really well.

Then other players started talking about it to each other and,

You know,

Had quite a few players who wanted to learn mindfulness with me.

Marcus Smith was someone I worked intensively with during that time.

And then we started doing group work.

Then we started doing group work,

Meditating together,

Doing inquiry together,

Looking at how mindfulness relates when they've been through a loss or a failure.

And judgements,

And yeah,

Really trying to make it relevant to sport.

And then it culminated in doing a gratitude circle with the team,

Where I sat next to Chris Robshaw,

Who was the England captain at the time,

And just said,

This is what I really value about you as a person,

Chris.

I've got to know him a bit over that time.

And then he went round to the person next to him.

And,

You know,

That was the culmination of,

I think,

The trust the players had in me,

That they started to be able to communicate in that kind of way.

And yeah,

That's the sort of journey I went on.

It was really cool.

I had a lot of freedom to develop the program how I wanted to,

And really learn quite deeply how mindfulness can relate to this high-pressure environment.

Yeah,

I mean,

I've got no doubt that what they learned with you,

You know,

Benefited their lives in many different ways.

I'm not sure,

And I'd love to hear from you,

How that translated to kind of their on-pitch performance.

Of course,

In their,

You know,

Relationships,

Personal relationships,

Other professional relationships,

And the way that they relate to themselves,

There's going to be a change.

How did that translate into the way they played their game?

Well,

It's a difficult one,

Because I think all of the stuff around how they relate to each other,

How they manage their reactions,

Their stress levels,

How they show up to training,

I think mindfulness was directly helping quite a few of the players to turn up in a better way.

So I think indirectly that that had quite an impact on the team cohesion and how they're relating to each other.

They did go on to win the premiership the following season.

So I'm not saying that my work.

.

.

It's down to you.

No,

We are saying that,

Luke.

We are saying that.

We can say that,

But it was definitely,

It's very hard to quantify,

But I think it did help them in terms of how they relate to their own stress and pressure,

And then how they relate to each other.

And then with certain players,

Like developing routines,

Like when there's anxiety before a performance,

On match days,

The night before,

Looking at how they can really tailor their mindfulness practice to really help them show up and convert that anxious energy or nervous energy into a more channeled way.

So I did quite a lot of work with players around that.

So I think that that did feed into match day.

And yeah,

We did surveys and looked at impact in more data-driven ways,

But I was just very confident in the influence I was having on a very human level,

And just kind of intuitively knew that was feeding something really positive within the club.

Yeah,

Yeah,

No,

No doubt.

And so when MPP first started,

The focus was on athletes.

It was a world you knew very well.

When did working with non-athletes come into play?

Working with leaders,

Working with teams outside of sport?

Yeah,

It was never my intention.

And it just happened that a business leader approached me and was like,

I like the work you do with athletes.

Do you want to come and do some work with me?

I'd like to try and adopt this.

And I started working with a very high level business leader for about a year and realised that I was able to pass on mindfulness in a similar kind of way.

You know,

Leaders are often very driven.

They have a lot of specific pressure points.

They don't always have the chance to slow down.

Also,

It can be quite a lonely place being a leader,

And actually having that quality of awareness brought to you in a mindfulness session can be a real relief to actually come down into how you're actually feeling,

Away from all of the pressure and sometimes all the projection you get as a leader.

So I started to realise I'm good at this.

I enjoy this.

And it really relates to the athlete work that I've been doing.

So then we built in a leadership coaching programme within the organisation,

And then that's just steadily been expanding since then.

And that's culminated in us developing an away day where we take leadership teams through a process of learning how to practice mindfulness.

But we also bring in other elements of the team building exercises that me and my colleague have taught,

Premiership football,

Rugby and Olympic teams to get people understanding how mindfulness can help you relate to each other as well.

So,

Yeah,

We sort of developed a leadership strand of the organisation that's just organically come from the sports work.

Yeah,

Yeah.

And,

You know,

We all get stuck in our practice,

In our journey with mindfulness from time to time.

Where do athletes,

And at least in your experience,

Where is it that elite athletes and business leaders tend to get stuck?

And are they getting stuck in the same places because of some of the similarities you mentioned earlier?

Or are those blockages in very different areas,

Aspects of life?

What are the similarities and differences between working with them?

Well,

I think that there's one of the universal difficulties,

If you like,

Across both,

Is that there's not a lot of time and mindfulness can seem like it can be hard to value a space where you're not being active.

You're not doing anything.

Yeah,

Where you're not doing something.

It's kind of quite freaky for someone that is very doing mode orientated and has to be a way given that given the kind of pressures and complexities that the leaders in particular say,

It's like,

How do I take an hour out here and sit with this mindfulness teacher and value that?

So that's on a mental level,

Because it's like,

It's not it's not being productive.

It's not getting something done.

It's not solving a problem.

But often what happened,

And same with athletes,

But often what happens is that the direct experience of the practice starts to break that belief.

Because when a leader and athlete realizes what it's like to feel connected and what it's like to be in a space,

To start trusting a space that isn't about doing,

That's kind of undeniable,

If you like.

It's like,

I feel connected.

I feel different.

I feel more aware,

More aware.

And then from that place,

That then starts to have an impact on the pressure moments on the pressure points within the high pressure athlete or business leader world.

And it's like,

OK,

This is making me calmer and more clear minded and aware where I need it,

Where I need to be.

So,

Yeah,

That's the challenge.

But I have not really experienced a huge amount of.

Yeah,

That that transition seems to happen very naturally when I'm working with athletes and leaders.

But there's there's a resistant part that's like,

This is nonsense,

Like busy.

But when they start to get it,

It's like,

Oh,

There's something in this.

And it keeps them coming back to the practices.

And I suppose they're coming with a bit of an open mind to begin.

I mean,

No one's being forced to work with you.

They're there because,

You know,

They're also seeking something there.

They're interested.

They want to learn a bit more.

So maybe that first barrier,

Which is usually the biggest one,

Has been crossed already.

Yeah,

But I also find myself working with,

You know,

Working with an organization and there's a few business leaders who actively weren't sure at all about mindfulness.

They were like quite resistant.

And I like working with that.

I like working with with resistance.

I like the challenge of that.

I like making it relatable to to people that think it isn't for them or very skeptical.

That was how I came across it.

I was like,

This is a load of nonsense.

That edge of working with resistance is is important to acknowledge as well.

Yeah.

You'd said I suppose that's the new strengths training for you,

Right?

I mean,

You're attracted to those challenges just because of the way you're you're wired.

Yeah.

You use the phrase doing mode a few times.

And I just want to touch on that,

Right?

We talk about these modes of mind.

And,

You know,

It's a neuroscientific,

It's a psychological science area.

But we talk about doing mode being very heady.

It's about conceptualization and judgment and elaboration and analysis.

The term being stuck in your head is kind of the epitome of doing mode,

Which is a really,

Really important mode of mind.

I mean,

Without doing mode,

We can't strategize.

We can't reflect.

We can't problem solve,

You know,

Move our thoughts between past and future.

So it's very good for solving problems in the external world,

Right?

Getting from point A to point B.

There's an end goal,

Completing a project of whatever nature.

But doing mode can be very dangerous when it's turned kind of inwards on thoughts and emotions,

Which are not problems,

You know,

To be solved.

The mind takes the same approach to it.

And then on the other hand,

We've got being mode,

Which is,

You know,

Mindfulness in many ways.

And I think there's,

I'd like to get your take on this,

Because all the time I hear,

And I'm sure you hear this a lot in the early days from the business leaders and the athletes,

I don't have time to be in being mode.

I've got so much that I need to get done.

And there's kind of a misperception that being mode means sitting in a lotus position in a temple somewhere,

You know,

Blissing out or meditating.

And one of the things I've been talking about a lot recently is the fact that,

You know,

Yes,

Being mode is embodied.

It's about tapping into all our senses.

It's those visceral sensations within as well.

But it doesn't exclude the mind.

And then I'm coming back to Buddhism.

This might be a nice little segue back to Buddhism.

The mind is considered a sense organ in Buddhism,

Right?

We don't talk about the five senses.

So it's really important to dispel people of that notion that they can't get things done.

They can't think,

They can't strategize,

They can't problem solve in being mode.

If anything,

You can be more effective in doing one of those things when you're in being mode,

Because as well as accessing the mind and the cognitive abilities,

You're tapping into those other instruments as well and getting a much more accurate readout of reality around you,

Which can only help you with decision making and productivity and all of those things.

Have you come across this in your work?