Are You in the Right State to Get It Done?

This chapter explores how to create an ideal performance state. Building on Gross’s Principles of Emotion Regulation and further elaborated through Multi-states: Theory and Practice, it investigates the biopsychosocial elements of current, trait and meta-states. Performance states (e.g. flow, clutch, disrupted and disengaged) arise through positive or negative emotions, their degree of intensity and activation, together with their functionality and goal-directedness. A contrastive analysis exercise examines what athletes are focusing on when performing at their best and at their worst. With a choice of various race-face states to bring to the start line, athletes are led through a seven-step process to access, deepen and strengthen their performance state in a readily available and repeatable way. The 3Ps Model aligns physiology, perspective and plan so that physical and mental states, personal story and beliefs, strategy and action steps all come together in a powerful way. A demonstration of the 3Ps alignment process in action thoroughly details each step of this powerful process that can be used with all athletes. The chapter finishes with a performance decompression protocol: getting out of high-performance states and, conversely, any negativity around a self-judged poor performance is an important skill for athletes and coaches to master.