Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Impact Books. Today we're reviewing

the Mindful Athlete, the Secrets to Pure Performance by George Mumford.

This was a surprising gem for me, it wasn't something that I was looking for, I was actually

seeking some more sage words from my boy Phil Jackson. Now while I don't consider myself much of a

sports fan, when Phil speaks, I listen. So when I saw that he had written the intro to this book,

I actually discovered that Michael Jordan credits Mumford with transforming his on-quart

leadership of the bulls, and if you know that story, it's pretty compelling. So Mumford also

famously worked with Kobe Bryant, Andrew Bynum, and countless other NBA players to help them turn

their game around as well. Now Kobe was quoted as saying, George Mumford helped me understand the

art of mindfulness, to be neither distracted or focused, rigid or flexible, passive or aggressive.

I learned just to be. Now those are some seriously like Buddhist-y-woo-woo-y words, and Mumford goes

really deep into that kind of stuff in the book, but he backs it up with neuroscience, and ultimately

this book ended up being really powerful. Now in the book, Mumford details the power that comes from

fine-tuning the mind as much as you fine-tune the body, which is something ironically that most people

don't do, but what really gives this book real weight for me is that Mumford is a former drug addict

who used mindfulness techniques as a way to find sobriety and deal with the pains that he was

struggling with in his life that led him to drugs in the first place, and he actually credits

mindfulness with saving his life. As such, he speaks of the techniques with the urgency and

reverence of the converted, and that really gives the book a lot of energy that I enjoyed very,

right? In the book, he lays out exactly how to develop mindfulness, citing the neuroscience

behind the phenomenon that he's describing, which really, really is key for me, because it gives me

the ability to visualize how it's all working, and when I can visualize something, then I can really

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