Awareness Without Grip
Clarity grows when you stop tightening your grip. The path is not force, it is attention.
This year, fall arrived and I saw it. Not as background like I had seen most seasons before. Not just as a nice scene. But as life, like I had never seen it before.
The reds, the yellows, the oranges and other innumerable colors. The surreal leaf rainstorms that felt like a scene made for a movie or a dream. It wasn’t that this fall was more beautiful, so I think. It was that I was finally present enough to receive it. That was the amazement. Not just the beautiful trees and the crisp deep blue sky but the noticing and the feeling it profoundly.
I asked Jessica my wife about it. Am I imaging it or is this season unusually vibrant, unusually special? Or something changed and I just became the kind of person who could see it? Day after day, leaf after leaf, it wasn’t visual, it was visceral. Wonder became available again. Not once. Every day for a few weeks.
And yet, even now, I reach for control. Even now, my system tenses at the edge of peace.
Because for most of my life, calm was only allowed when paired with tension. To feel relaxed meant I wasn’t ready and to breathe deeply meant I might miss something. To trust meant I was exposed.
But this is not unique to me.
Most people live on autopilot. Not because they are unaware, but because their nervous systems were trained for survival, not for stillness. The system learned long ago that danger waits in the quiet spaces. Tranquility, to the high-performing nervous system, feels like weakness or an invitation for sabotage. I know that well. The deep, unguarded breath signals safety, and if safety hasn’t been guaranteed by the environment, the system refuses to take it.
From an early age, we are taught to fear stillness. It feels like a moment where the guard drops, where the next critical demand might sneak in. So we reach for structure, to doing something, urgency, or noise. These aren’t just work habits; they are nervous system defenses. Urgency convinces us we are productive and worthy. Structure convinces us we are safe, that everything is and will be fine. Noise (a podcast, scrolling, the endless WhatsApp group stream) convinces us we are living, when we are simply just reacting.
I see this in my father and many of his peers. Like many people of the so-called Silent Generation, the technology they at first resisted, now dominates big parts of their daily life. He wakes up, enters a stream of WhatsApp messages, forwards the noise to whoever will receive it and moves through the day like a man who believes he is living, when is merely reacting. Don’t get me wrong. He is high-functioning and externally engaged individual and specially for his age, but internally, the engine is rattling because it’s running on outdated fuel: fear of missing out.
I see it in many people I know, entrepreneurs, intelligent women and men, successful on paper and living inside their performance. Not miserable or collapsed, but numb. They are semi-detached. They repeat phrases like “you have to live your life” or “yolo” while outsourcing meaning to consumption. The success becomes a suit of armor that prevents connection both with the world and with themselves.
This is the trance. I call it autopilot and I was there too. Until presence broke through.
There is nothing wrong with the autopilot. Is not a weakness. But most are simply asleep to an alternative they were never shown. They were shown how to build a company, how to win a deal, how to execute a plan, but not how to receive the world without trying to immediately subdue it.
And there is where the deeper challenge emerges:
Can you remain in stillness, even when your system wants to tighten? Can you act from clarity, without mistaking control for presence?
This is the heart of the anchor work. We must understand the mechanism of the grip. For clarity, grip is akin to control.
We often confuse grip with strength. I certainly did and still do. We believe that clenching our focus, tightening our strategy, clenching our jaw, or tightening our financial position is a sign of discipline and rigor. But grip is not strength. Grip is fear in disguise.
Think about important moments in your own life: the college application, the interview, the negotiation, the moment of personal confrontation. When the system grips, it constricts. It limits oxygen, drains cognitive bandwidth, and forces the future outcome into a narrow-desired box. Or tunnel vision as is commonly called. This is the opposite of high-performance. High performance requires flexibility, expansive view, and maximum resource availability. The grip cuts all of that off.
In a relationship, the grip is the need to be right.
In business, the grip is micromanagement.
In trading, the grip is violating your system because you desperately need the outcome to change.
In every case the grip is a rejection of reality in favor of panic with a plan. It’s the illusion that if you just squeeze hard enough you can force the chaotic universe into compliance.
Real quietness doesn’t clench. It receives and responds, not just react. It maintains stability without unnecessary tension.
This is the next evolution of discipline: To do less, not because you are forced to, but because you command it, because you want to.
To attain that, you must dismantle the survival idea that says calm must be guarded.
Stillness that can’t tolerate flow is not stillness but a defense. It’s the moment the trader exits their position too early because they couldn’t tolerate the price moving against them; the moment the leader shuts down feedback because the conversation felt too exposed. True stillness is the capacity to remain centered while everything is moving.
Clarity that requires tension is not clarity. It’s panic with a plan. The panic is the tension; the plan is the desperate attempt to justify the tension.
The challenge is to allow calm to stand on its own. Not guarded or clenched. And certainly not waiting for sabotage.
Just still, clean and ready.
But presence isn’t natural. It is trained and it begins with awareness. Then with practice and lots of it. You lose it and then you return. Repeatedly. Until the return comes faster and then it becomes home.
This training is the core of The Anchor Report work. It is the slow and deliberate work of re-patterning a nervous system designed for the savanna and the jungle, asking it to trust the garden.
The practical work is simple, though neither fast nor easy:
Notice the Trigger: Identify the exact moment the system moves from flow to contraction. Where does the grip start? Is it the quickening of the breath? The tightening of the jaw or shoulders? The tension in the neck?
Name the Impulse: Acknowledge the desire to seize control. The plan will try to build itself. Name it: “I am trying to force this.” or “I am rejecting this moment.”
Choose to Return: This is the moment of agency. You can choose again. You can stay open and you can stay present. This doesn’t mean you stop acting; it means you act from clarity and not panic. You execute the system (the plan), but you release the need to force the outcome.
And even then, the pull to control will arise. It does for me still too often. The shoulders and the neck will tense. The jaw will clench. That’s just the old training kicking in. Your only job is to see it, really see it and then return.
The shift isn’t a single breakthrough; it is the thousands of times you catch the impulse, relax, and choose to trust the underlying safety of the moment. You choose to act from your true strength, which is your capacity to receive the moment as it is.
The destination is not endless, passive relaxation and quietness. It is high-performance mastery. It is the ability to move with the speed of light, when necessary, but to do so from a foundation that remains completely still.
It is excellence without abandonment. Impact without urgency.
It is a life lived with awareness. Without the grip.
Anchor
This was the practice that first taught me how to return to presence. It’s rooted in insight meditation, but it’s not about labels, it’s about attention.
Once a day, sit in a quiet place. Upright. Eyes closed. Breathe.
For five minutes, do one thing: focus and feel your breath. When your mind wanders, as it will, just notice, and return to the breath. Wander again, catch it and return to the feeling your breath. Again, and again.
That’s it. Five minutes. Eyes closed. Attention on the breath. Return when you wander.
With time, this simple act builds the muscle of noticing. It helps you catch the grip and come back to awareness.