What if the difference between your worst performance and your best one had nothing to do with talent, preparation, or circumstance? What if it was simply a matter of what you chose to fill your mind with in the moments before?

Chris Dorris is a peak performance coach who has spent his career helping professional athletes and business leaders find the flow state on command, not by chance but by choice. He calls it instant state control. And the first time he and Clayton talked, they expected to find some overlap between sports psychology and mindfulness.

What they found was that they were describing the same room through different doors.

This episode includes something rare for this podcast: a live demonstration. Chris walks Clayton and every listener through the emotional spectrum exercise in real time, moving from anxiety to serenity to imposter syndrome to world-class confidence in a matter of seconds. Not as a parlor trick. As proof of something that changes everything once you really see it. You are not at the mercy of your emotional state. You are its author.

The conversation also goes deeper than performance. Chris shares his four-step pre-game routine, his hierarchy of certainty that now includes a new rung above knowing called advanced gratitude, and the single most lucrative discipline he has ever integrated into his life: slowing down. He also unpacks an idea that stopped Clayton cold when they first spoke. Your bank account is a direct reflection of your level of service. Not as motivation. As operating principle.

Chris joins from his thinking spot on the Sea of Cortez in Rocky Point, Mexico. The energy of this conversation matches the setting.

Find Chris at christopherdorris.com.

His Daily Dose, mental toughness tips in thirty seconds or less delivered to your inbox every morning, is available at: christopherdorris.com/dd.

Free resources for Magic in the Moment listeners are at: christopherdorris.com/magic.

More than twenty years ago, in a room full of financial advisors learning to breathe before they talked about money, Clayton encountered something that quietly changed the course of his life.

The man leading that room was George Kinder.

Today they are back together.

George Kinder is one of the most original thinkers in the intersection of financial planning, contemplative practice, and human freedom. He spent two years in solitary meditation practice after graduating from Harvard. He built a six-day-a-week practice of meditating from six in the morning until noon for 30+ years, while running a financial planning practice in the afternoons. He wrote The Seven Stages of Money Maturity, built the Kinder Institute of Life Planning, trained thousands of advisors to put a client's life ahead of their portfolio, and then kept going deeper.

His latest work, The Three Domains of Freedom, has led him to something he calls FIAT: Fiduciary In All Things. A single sentence of legislation that asks every organization on earth, business, government, nonprofit, to place the interests of truth, democracy, people, and planet ahead of its own self-concern. Not socialism. Not idealism. A practical, achievable shift in how civilization organizes itself around trust.

But before any of that, this conversation goes somewhere quietly stunning. George shares what science recently revealed about listening: that it is 100 million times faster than thinking. Not as metaphor. As measurable fact. And what that means for presence, for trust, for what actually happens in the space between two people when one of them truly stops thinking and starts to listen.

Clayton and George also explore self-forgetfulness as a spiritual and practical practice, why the deepest virtues become available only when the self steps aside, and what it actually felt like to build a decades-long contemplative life entirely outside of institutional support, following St. Francis and the Zen poet Ryokan as models rather than any living teacher.

Find George's work: fiduciaryinallthings.com.

His books:

The Three Domains of Freedom: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1960044001?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

The Seven Stages of Money Maturity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385324049?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

What if the most important thing about competing had nothing to do with the score?

Emma Allen grew up with a tennis racket in her hand and a philosophy professor for a father, which turns out to be a combination that changes everything about how you approach a game, a loss, a career, and a life. She competed professionally, traveled with her father and brother as her coaching team, and learned something that most competitors never do. The joy is in the gritty incremental growth, not the result. She describes feeling greedy for it.

That career was derailed by injury. And what happened next is where this conversation gets genuinely surprising.

Emma found her way to osteopathic medicine, discovered the profound impact of removing dairy, gluten, and processed sugar from her diet, and never had another sinus infection in her life. She stumbled into Joe Dispenza's work through a stranger in a grocery store who felt compelled to recommend a book. And she began building a framework that now forms the foundation of her Mindset Masterclass, a program she delivers to athletic teams, corporate organizations, and anyone ready to understand why emotional state is the foundation of everything else.

Clayton and Emma explore what the neuroscience of language acquisition reveals about presence and performance, why the affective filter shuts down learning and how the same principle applies on the court, in a meeting, and in a relationship, and what it actually means to sit with discomfort long enough to understand what it is telling you.

They also talk about something Clayton does not often get to explore on this show. Sound money, financial literacy, and why Emma believes that understanding the monetary system is one of the most impactful things a person can do for their own peace of mind and long-term wellbeing.

This one is warm, wide-ranging, and genuinely fun.

Find Emma at mindsetmasterclass.org.