India’s Winning Secret – Exposed

Whichever way you cut it, all the history and stats said an Indian
win was not possible. Especially after the Sri Lankan innings.

So what secret did they have to achieve the impossible?

I’ll come to this, but first lets look at the overwhelming reasons
why winning would – under normal circumstances – have been next to impossible.

1. No team in cricket has EVER won a World Cup at home.
Whereas in rugby and football, playing at home can give a hometown
advantage. Not so in cricket. Cricket is more to do with your state of
mind than any other sport. In a final, you have to perform for 4-6 hours,
not just 90 mins. Unlike rugby and football, one mistake means you leave
the field.

2. Teams batting second in one-dayer finals generally lose. Especially
when they have a poor start – as India did – 2 wickets down after 6 overs.
Out of 10 previous tournaments, only 3 teams batting 2nd have won. You may
think 30% is still a reasonable statistical chance … but it got unreasonable
when Sri Lanka batted first and set India the biggest ever target for a World Cup final.

3. India weren’t just at home, they had the pressure of 1 billion people wanting
victory and demanding no less. As the Brazillian football team will tell you, this
sort of pressure often leads to underperformance not over-performance.

So how did they pull off the impossible?

It turns out that India chose to look within the tradition of their own country
for the tools that gave them the edge.

You may be thinking “India won because they were the most talented team”.
Talented they are. But talent is not the most important ingredient for winning World Cups.

If if were, the All Blacks would have won 6 Rugby World Cups.
and Brazil would never have lost a Football World Cup since 1970.

It’s a sporting truism that when talent is roughly equivilant
(as with India and Sri Lanka), the team with the superior mindset wins.

That’s why NZ’s Black Caps and All Blacks have between them been eliminated
from an incredible 11 semi-finals. That’s the exact point in the tournament
where mindset becomes more important than ability.

It turns out that the Indian team, who faced the most overwhelming and enormous pressure
and prevailed, had together undergone training to help them overcome enormous
pressure and prevail.

It’s not the standard sports psychology stuff – now that everyone is using that, this
no longer provides a team with an advantage.

I’m talking about something much more powerful.

It turns out the entire Indian cricket team did something that other Indian sports teams
did not. They looked to their own tradition and learnt a combination of yoga asanas,
meditation, and breathing techniques speficially formulated to increase performance
under even extreme stress, while raising base-line mental toughness and mental and
physical health.

Of course this might not be the reason they won. It could just be a coincidence. That
stuff couldn’t possibly work could it? India will certainly be hoping that other cricketing
nations choose to view it as coincidence and not worth investigating for their own teams.

But they may not be so lucky. Western Nations are not as quick to
dismiss mindfulness techniques as they once were. Only last year,
the US Marines, recognising the importance of mindset on performance, started
teaching their troops Yoga Nidra (one of the techniques taught on the same course
the Indian Cricket team did).

So congratulations to India – deserving winners, both in talent and the wisdom
of their approach. You have made your countrymen proud around the world.

I can only imagine how unassailable the All Blacks would become if they did the course
the Indian cricket team did. And as a kiwi, I’m very pleased that India don’t play rugby.

Daniel Batten is a serial-entrepreneur, corporate trainer and (disclosure of interest)
Art of Living teacher.

PS: the course the Indian Team did was called the “Art of Living” course. And whether
you want to perform on the sporting field, the corporate world, or in life generally,
it has been proven around the world with every culture, from prisoners to CEOs to
movie stars to cricketing legends to drastically increase mental toughness, performance
and as a nice side-effect: happiness.

You can find out more about it here www.artofliving.org or www.artofliving.org.nz