Performance Bubbles - Part 2 šļøšØ
The Neuroscience of Locking In
Hey there!
Networks of Care:
I keep a lot of voice memos. I listened to one over the weekend that was from a session with my therapist, recorded in Feb 2025. We were just getting started with the current administration, and she said something that stood out. I was struggling with living in a red state as a very blue dot, but also in a male-dominated industry where I started to feel like there was shrink wrap tightening around my whole being. Every day, it seemed and felt like I was trying to conform. I had to make some hard but fucking freeing choices in 2025, and I made them, including learning to protect and free the younger parts of me taught to conform, shrink, and play small. During my review, I found this wisdom about how we blend our soulās work with our linear professional work buried in the transcript: āThis is what the universal message needs to be, given what the political state of the world is anyway. Itās no longer about individualism, itās about the collective - really holding and being part of the collective space for everyone. Thatās how things can change and how you can do good work for yourself and meaningful work.ā
Last August, I attended a professional networking gathering in Bozeman where a newly minted AI billionaire, whose company had recently IPOād, mentioned to the audience, āI believe that in the next 5 years youāll see us move deeper towards individualismā¦ā That is when it hit me - I was in the wrong room and ready to build, move towards, and fight for the complete opposite (authoritarianism thrives on the idea of individualism). I was ready to do what I could to join the collective that would build new rooms for bold and rebellious entrepreneurs. That said, I hand this wisdom passed onto me last year, to you, so that when you jump on your next Zoom meeting for a meeting with your team or meet with your friends, āholding and being part of the collectiveā rings in your mind and hearts. We will go much further, together!
Please DM, comment, or send me an email if you would like to share your idea or new company with our network of care. Would love to help you brag about your world. xx
Taking an idea, starting a company. Thatās hard.
The Coach platform makes it easier.
š Start like you mean to finish š
Letās talk about what is actually happening in your brain when you build a bubble, and what I learned when my phone faced the green screen of death in February.
In Part 1, I introduced performance bubbles - the practice elite performers use to protect their mental health before top-priority events. To recap, the purpose is to remove cortisol and negativity to protect your mental health. Technology is limited. The right people close to you and in your corner. Quieting the noise.
But I wanted to go deeper into why this works. Not just the practice, but the neuroscience behind it, and how Iāve been using it not only as an aging athlete, but as a founder building a company.
In 2016, I was building my last company in a market that didnāt exist. This was pre-influencer, pre-creator economy, and early social media. I had no idea what a performance bubble was at the time, even though I had been an athlete for decades. I was on my phone a lot - it was distracting, stressful, and overwhelming. My ability to tune out the noise was limited, and inefficiently, I was reacting to every ping, every notification, and uffdah.
I swung hard and fell on my face.
Fast forward to today. Iāve spent the last five years practicing performance bubbles as an endurance athlete. I know what it feels like in my body when the noise drops and the focus sharpens. When I was 27, I won second place in my first 50-mile race. For the month before the race, I would do laps up a mountain, and at the top of the lap was a bench. On the last lap, Iād sit down and look at the range across the valley Iād be running the race in. Using visualization, Iād cross all 50 miles in my mind, finishing under a goal time. Without even knowing what I was doing, this small practice was putting me in a performance bubble. We did only have flip phones then, and texting was barely a thing, so it was easier to quiet the noise.
Midwifery was a performance bubble as a professional career choice, so involuntarily, I was practicing it during that phase of my career. However, I hadn't applied the practice to building companies until recently. Three times in the last four months, Iāve built small performance bubbles around my work. Each one taught me something different.
November/December: Building The Coach.
I put myself in a bubble for about a month. Deep creation mode. I was building the entire framework, six weeks of diagnostic methodology, deliverables, and clinical parallels from scratch. The bubble let my prefrontal cortex quiet down. Thatās the part of your brain responsible for complex planning and self-criticism. When it deactivates, overthinking stops. Subconscious, automatic responses take over, and ideas connect without force.
Neuroscientists call this transient hypofrontality. Athletes experience it as flow. I experienced it as the most productive month of building I've had in years. The framework came through me, not from me.
That framework became The Coach, the 6-week diagnostic framework for starting a company. And, if you're someone who downloads things and never gets to them, try this: buy The Coach, build a performance bubble around one weekend, and work through the first two sections. You'll be surprised by what comes through when the noise is out, and your mental health is protected.
January: Bringing The Coach online.
A shorter bubble. I was dog-sitting at the SkyBoat, which meant my environment naturally supported being off my phone. I launched The Coach on January 19th from that quiet space. No doomscrolling. No refreshing stats every ten minutes. Just the work, the launch, and the stillness around putting the first product of a bigger vision out into the world.
What I noticed: entering a launch from calm instead of cortisol changes everything about how you show up publicly. Elite performers display higher alpha-wave activity in the left temporal region during peak performance - a calm, focused, relaxed mental state. Thatās the zone. You canāt manufacture that if youāve been doom-scrolling for an hour before you hit publish.
February: My phone died after I yardsaled (literally falling on my face running).
This one wasnāt voluntary. Green screen of death, and instead of rushing to replace my phone, I chose to wait for a week.
This accidental bubble was the most transformative one.
Not having my phone, I realized how much of my relationship with social media was reactive and habitual, not intentional. When I got a new phone, the relationship had shifted, and I could be intentional about being online. Now, when I feel triggered or my eyeballs are exhausted, I put my phone or computer away. Also, I take Sundays fully off social. Itās literally in my calendar on repeat.
Neuroscience backs this up. Elite brains are better at managing stress. They use short bursts of adrenaline and cortisol for enhanced performance without triggering a full threat response. Thatās the difference between channeling pressure and choking under it. My phone was triggering a full threat response many times a day, and I didnāt even know it.
What Iām learning right now.
I just wrapped up a performance bubble, but it was a short burst as I learn to work with my human design professionally. Starting and building a new company, creating content, and preparing for a push month to get The Coach further out into the world. The practice is the same whether Iām on a start line or on a launch day - quiet the noise, protect the environment and my Self, trust the subconscious processing to do its work, and move forward confidently, small action by small action. Day by day.
Neuroscience says elite performers develop something called a āQuiet Eye,ā a long-duration focus on a target that allows for better planning and execution. I am learning that this is one of my superpowers. Visualization stimulates the same brain regions as physical practice. I love that they're human tools for everyone to use.
If Part 1 gave you the practice, this is the why behind it. Your brain is already wired for this practice. It is up to you to build the conditions to let performance bubbles work their magic, if it is something that calls to you.
Thank you for geeking out with me! I love this kind of stuff and wish I had had this tool earlier in my life.
Sending hugs!
Becca
notes/resources:
The Quiet Eye in Sports: Unlocking Peak Performance
Neural Efficiency in Athletes: A Systematic Review, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 2021.
How Elite Athletes Handle Performance Pressure, Stanford Report, 2026.