- Coach Daniel
- Apr 5
- 6 min read
Your show is 90% clean. You’ve been repping it all season. And there’s still something that isn't hitting.
More reps won’t fix it. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but it’s the truth. The last 10% isn’t a technique problem. It’s a mental one. And it has a name.
“Flow state.”
This is a guide to what flow state is, why it matters for your performance, what’s getting in the way, and what you can actually do about it.
Why the Last 10% Feels So Hard
When you were learning the show, your brain was doing most of the work. That was appropriate. You needed to think hard about everything.
But somewhere between early season and now, your body learned the show and your brain didn’t get the memo.
So your brain keeps doing what it was trained to do — monitor, correct, adjust. You hesitate before committing. You react to mistakes instead of playing through them. You’re not performing the show; you’re supervising it.
That’s the problem. Not your technique. Not your effort. The same mental mode that helped you learn the show is now getting in its way.
The performers stuck at 90% aren’t performing. They’re managing a performance. There’s a big difference.
What Is Flow State?
Flow state, aka “being in the zone” is when your body performs without waiting for your brain’s instructions.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying this. His research found that in flow, action and awareness merge — you stop thinking about what to do and just do it. Time distorts. You stop monitoring how you look. The show stops feeling like something you’re managing and starts feeling like something you’re inside.
You’ve been here. Most performers have. That one run where everything clicked and you weren’t watching yourself. That wasn’t luck. That was a specific mental state, and it’s reproducible.
Source: Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.
What flow feels like from the inside:
Skill matches the difficulty. Not bored, not panicked — right in the window.
One thing to focus on. Not the whole show. Not the score. Just what’s in front of you.
No self-monitoring. No internal commentary on how it looks.
Control without force. Capable, but not straining.
Time disappears. You come out the other side wondering where it went.
It feels good. Not like work — like something worth doing.
Your last 10% can only be achieved in flow state.
What’s Happening in Your Brain
There’s an actual neurological reason you can’t think your way to peak performance.
In 2003, neuroscientist Arne Dietrich proposed that during flow, the prefrontal cortex — the part of your brain responsible for self-monitoring and deliberate control — temporarily reduces its activity. He called this “transient hypofrontality.”
What it means in practice: the part of your brain that judges, second-guesses, and evaluates you goes quiet.
When that happens, your training takes over. The thousands of reps you’ve put in finally get to come out without your brain interrupting.
And here’s what this means specifically for you: trying harder, paying more attention, monitoring your performance more carefully — all of that activates the very part of the brain that blocks flow. The path into flow is the opposite of force. It’s release.
Your inner critic doesn’t disappear in flow. It just stops driving. And that’s when your best work happens.
Source: Dietrich, A. (2003). Consciousness and Cognition, 12(2), 231–256.
What’s Blocking Your Access Right Now
Most performers at 90% are dealing with some version of the same three things.
1. Fear of making a mistake
When you’re afraid to mess up, your brain treats the performance like a threat. It braces for criticism. It scans for what could go wrong before it does. That state — hypervigilance — is physically incompatible with flow.
Research on flow and performance anxiety found that fear of mistakes and fear of evaluation are the primary conditions that block flow. You can’t be simultaneously absorbed in a performance and monitoring it for failure. Those two states can’t coexist.
Source: Frontiers in Psychology (2022), PMC9248863 | Frontiers in Psychology (2026)
2. Adjusting instead of committing
Mid-phrase adjustments are a sign. Not always because they’re wrong — sometimes they’re necessary — but because they reveal that part of your focus is still sitting outside the performance, watching for things to fix.
Full commitment to a choice, even an imperfect one, is a prerequisite for flow.
Research on elite athletes and musicians confirmed that a high sense of involvement and control — the feeling of being all the way in — is one of the most consistent conditions for entering flow. Partial commitment gets you partial results.
Source: Swann, C. et al. (2022). Frontiers in Psychology, PMC9009586.
3. Performing for the score instead of the moment
The moment you shift your focus from the performance to how the performance is being received, you’ve stepped outside it. Flow is intrinsically motivated — it happens when the activity itself is the point. The second the judge becomes your audience, you’ve exited the state that produces your best work.
This doesn’t mean you stop caring about the score. It means that during the run, the score isn’t your job. The phrase in front of you is your job.
The Three Conditions for Flow
Csikszentmihalyi’s research identified three things that need to be in place. They’re not complicated. But all three have to be present.
#1 — Skill matches the challenge
Flow lives in a specific range: challenge and skill both high, roughly matched. Too easy and you get bored or coast. Too hard and you get tense. At 90% clean, you’re in the ideal skill/challenge range. This one isn’t your problem.
#2 — One clear goal, right now
Not “perform the whole show perfectly.” Not “fix what went wrong last time.” Just: this phrase, this set, this moment. The more specific and immediate your focus, the easier it becomes to be fully inside it.
#3 — You actually enjoy it
This is the condition that gets dismissed most often, usually because it sounds counterproductive to all of your hard work. It isn’t.
Csikszentmihalyi described flow as autotelic — an experience that’s rewarding in itself, independent of outcome.
If performing feels like a test you might fail, your brain is in threat mode. And threat mode and flow are mutually exclusive.
If you want access to your best performance, you need to actually want to be doing what you’re doing.
Fun is not extra. It is a requirement for peak performance.
Source: Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.
How to Practice It
Flow isn’t something you can force. But you can create the conditions for it, and you can train your brain to recognize what it feels like so it gets easier to access.
Run the show without stopping
The single most useful thing you can do is production runs or full runs from top to bottom with no interruptions. No fixes, no corrections. Let mistakes go. Treat it like you’re already in performance.
This does two things. It gives your nervous system the actual experience of performing instead of drilling, and your brain starts to learn the difference. And it forces you to develop the skill flow requires most: the ability to recover from a mistake without leaving the moment.
Research on elite athletes and musicians identified this kind of full, uninterrupted run as one of the most reliable pathways into flow state. Avoid short chunks with dense information and criticism.
Source: Swann, C. et al. (2022). Frontiers in Psychology, PMC9009586.
Compete with yourself, not the judge
Stop performing for whoever’s watching. Ask instead: am I better than I was last week? That internal reference point is the kind of focus flow is built on. External evaluation pulls you out of the moment. Internal growth keeps you in it.
Give yourself permission to enjoy it
Before a run, find one moment in the show that you actually love — a phrase, a transition, whatever it is — and decide to perform that piece with real joy. Not recklessness. Just genuine enjoyment. Then see if you can let that carry.
This isn’t a warmup trick. It’s the condition. You can’t access your full performance if performing feels like work.
Closing Thoughts
It's time to trust the work. You’ve done the reps. Your body knows this show. The last 10% is not waiting for more feedback and reps.
It’s waiting for you to trust what you’ve already built.
Flow state isn’t mysterious or reserved for elite performers. It’s a defined mental state with specific conditions. The research is clear on what produces it and what blocks it. And the biggest thing blocking it for most performers isn’t talent or preparation — it’s fear.
Fear of mistakes. Fear of the score. Fear of what happens if you commit fully and it still isn’t perfect.
What the research actually shows: the fear of making a mistake is one of the most reliable ways to cause one. The hesitation, the pull-back, the micro-adjustment — that’s where mistakes live. Not in commitment.
Stop managing the performance. Let go and trust.
References
1. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row.
2. Dietrich, A. (2003). Functional neuroanatomy of altered states of consciousness: The transient hypofrontality hypothesis. Consciousness and Cognition, 12(2), 231–256. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1053-8100(02)00046-6
3. Swann, C. et al. (2022). Achieving Flow: An Exploratory Investigation of Elite College Athletes and Musicians. Frontiers in Psychology. PMC9009586. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.831508
4. Zarza-Alzugaray, F. J. et al. (2022). Development of Flow State Self-Regulation Skills and Coping With Musical Performance Anxiety. Frontiers in Psychology. PMC9248863. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.899621
5. Frontiers in Psychology (2026). Mapping the relationship between flow experience and music performance anxiety: a scoping review. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1746749
