(Page Update 1/13/26)
Most of my life, I assumed that coaching was primarily about helping people perform better. I believed, as many do, that if technique improved, results would follow; if effort increased, progress would accelerate; if knowledge accumulated, clarity would emerge. For a time, that assumption worked well enough.
Then it didn’t.
What I observed over four-plus decades, as a player and coach, at first quietly, then unmistakably. Was a widening gap between improvement and coherence (self-orientation). Not only in the bowling industry, but especially, more so now, in college sports. Performance continued to thrive, but mental stability did not. Learning expanded, but directional, perspectival, experiential, and integrative understanding remained as human potentials only. Coaching grew more sophisticated. Yes. But something essential was slipping away: the important capacity of human beings to integrate what they were learning into a coherent way of functioning across time.
That observation did not originate from theory. It awakened in me after my 2010 move to Las Vegas (the bowling tournament capital of the world). Living within this great bowling culture as a player, a coach, a student of coaching systems, and a researcher of my own livelihood development, influenced what I eventually clarified through the Optima Bowling 2026 Iteration, and now articulate: Is The Cycle of Conscious Performance.
Performance, I came to see, is not an outcome to chase. It is a lifespan rhythm through which consciousness learns to function coherently: physically, emotionally, and mentally. When that rhythm operates unconsciously, performance progress can still occur. But when the demands placed upon the player exceed the level of intelligence at which their consciousness operates, unconsciousness is asked to control the performance, resulting in the breakdown mentioned above. At that point, conscious performance is no longer optional; it becomes required.
From this self-realization, not from ideology, reform, or preference, the Bowling Collaborative Coaching Community of Practice emerged.
Communities of practice are not new. For most of human history, learning occurred collectively by default. Skills were transmitted through shared activity, observation, repetition, and imitation. Thinking itself was rarely examined because life did not yet demand that sensible ability. This level of intelligence, understood as the level of thinking at which consciousness had centered itself, was sufficient for the problems encountered in premodern times.
That historical condition no longer holds.
Modern life confronts human beings with levels of complexity, speed, abstraction, and pressure that routinely exceed the resolving power of the earlier forms of intelligence. Performance has become measurable, comparable, scalable, and continuous. Identity has fused with outcomes. Feedback loops have accelerated. Pressure has moved from sporadic to all-encompassing. What changed was not effort. What changed was the intelligence requisite.
Discursive-inference thinking, the level of intelligence associated with effort, repetition, comparison, and physical control, remains highly effective for execution and incremental improvement. But under sustained complexity, it reaches its limit. It cannot reliably coordinate multiple perspectives. It struggles to regulate emotion under constant evaluation. It confuses exertion with understanding and control with coherence. When people continue to rely on this level of thinking, performance may still improve, but human development stagnates, and this is the precise point at which unconscious performance becomes insufficient.
Bowling is uniquely suited to reveal this developmental threshold. Bowling is technical, but not brutal. It is repetitive, yet conditions never repeat exactly. It demands timing, perception, emotional regulation, and adaptive thinking under pressure. Small incoherences in physical, emotional, and mental games accumulate quietly and show up unmistakably.
A bowler can understand exactly what to do and still be unable to do it when attention shrinks from responsibility and moves to superficial thoughts. A coach can explain a solution clearly, only for it to collapse the moment emotions or conditions change. These are not failures of knowledge. They are failures of integration. Bowling exposes a truth that now applies far beyond sport: technique builds capability, but only coherence sustains it.
I feel that one of the most important clarifications communicated in the Optima Bowling 2026 Iteration is the explicit framing of intelligence as a set of levels of thinking, each capable of solving different kinds of problems. Development is not about acquiring more information, per se, but about the level at which consciousness has centered itself, and therefore, which forms of thinking are naturally available under pressure. In the mental dimension, intelligence expresses itself through:
Beyond these lies causal-intuitive intelligence, in which coherence is perceived directly rather than constructed through the four mental levels of intelligence. When consciousness remains centered at a level of intelligence insufficient to the complexity it faces, people do not fail. They overperform at the wrong level. The results are predictable:
This is why many coaching cultures struggle despite sincerity and expertise. The constraint is developmental; it is not simply being moored at the principle-thinking level. Although if you’ve read between the lines, you’ll know that you have to ascend the levels of intelligence. What do you say? There is no other way.
From inside the Bowling Collaborative Coaching Community of Practice, clear patterns emerge. Those who naturally embody the principles of conscious performance tend to be coaches and players who: remain learners regardless of experience; tolerate uncertainty without losing responsibility; treat emotional regulation as part of skill development; ask questions that expand perception rather than enforce compliance; and respect the developmental rhythm over short-term outcomes.
These patterns are tranquil and mostly quieter than the system-level rewards. Their authority comes from coherence, not posture.
Those who miss these principles, often unintentionally, tend to: anchor identity in a method or credential; equate development with immediate results; treat emotion as interference; reward certainty over inquiry; and intensify effort when integration is required.
This is not a judgment. It is a developmental distinction.
Shared learning becomes necessary at the very moment individual adaptation reaches its limit.
This shows up during plateaus, injuries, burnout, role transitions, or moments when success fails to stabilize meaning. These are not breakdowns. They are signals that a higher order of intelligence is being called for. At that point, isolated effort reinforces blind spots. Shared learning becomes the means by which perception can widen without collapse.
A Collaborative Coaching Community of Practice is not organized around profession, hierarchy, or authority. Its primary practice is conscious performance itself: Reflective dialogue, perspective thinking, honest self-research, pattern recognition across lives and contexts, and the transition from accidental, mechanical functioning to intentional, internally guided functioning.
Coaching appears here not primarily as a role, but as a way of relating: asking better questions, listening more deeply, and allowing experience to remain the final authority.
The years I spent in the bowling coaching industry revealed a quiet integration I call the hybrid coach-play perspective. Both coaches and players operate consciously and unconsciously. Both are inside the Cycle of Conscious Performance. Both must regulate attention, emotion, and meaning under pressure. The difference is contextual, not categorical. When this is acknowledged, pressure redistributes: Coaches are no longer required to perform as omniscient authorities. Players no longer must perform only a context-specific competence. Learning becomes visible again. Authority remains, but it arises from coherence and self-orientation rather than certainty.
At the center of the bowling collaborative coaching community of practice is the inevitable developmental threshold of learning how to think.
This is the point (in any community) at which the mental dimension begins to govern the emotional dimension, allowing intelligence to examine its own contents, distinguish perception from reaction, and convert friction into feedback. It is not a stylistic preference. It is integral to one’s perceptual control functioning across the three dimensions of being human. Without this incomparable sensible ability, shared learning collapses into emotional exchange or ideological agreement. With it, dialogue becomes a developmental instrument.
No community remains developmental without guardrails. Image, status, persuasion, branding, and all the other forms of superficiality quietly distort perception. Coaches and players begin performing understanding rather than pursuing it. Clarity, therefore, begins with negation: seeing what is false and allowing that perception to dissolve the disturbances and distortions in one's life. The Bowling Collaborative Coaching Community of Practice is not a platform, a hierarchy, a doctrine, or a persuasion engine. It exists to protect the integrity of conditions under which responsible self-research can occur.
No individual, coach, or player can, on their own, reliably make the developmental shifts required by modern performance environments. That is why collaborative coaching communities of practice are re-emerging, not as innovations, but as a rebirth of ancient human structures that now are required to operate at higher levels of intelligence. We know they distribute perception. They have a slow interpretation timeframe. They restore inquiry. And they allow intelligence to mature through shared reflection rather than isolated effort. This is not a crisis. It is a threshold.