Meditation and perfecting the mind: How Patrick Mahomes handles the Super Bowl stage

Patrick Mahomes takes the film home with him. The beginning of every week is something like a college kid cramming for a final exam, except tens of thousands of people will hover over his shoulder to watch him take the test.

Somewhere around once per week — sometimes less, sometimes more frequently — Mahomes pauses for a moment before he digs into the film. He’ll open an app on his phone, close his eyes and attempt to think about virtually nothing at all.

And meditate.

“It kind of clears your mind,” Mahomes said in an interview with The Star on the topic. “There’s a lot going on in the NFL season. It’s not just football. If you can just refocus on the main thing, it usually helps out.”

On Sunday evening, Mahomes will walk onto a field here in Glendale, Arizona, the star of a Super Bowl for the third time in the past four seasons. Four days earlier, he won his second NFL MVP award.

He is the most visible football player on the planet, and I mean that literally — his games have attracted more viewership than any other quarterback in the NFL since he took over as the Chiefs’ franchise quarterback in 2018.

Which prompted my curiosity.

How do you perform your job at maximum capability while knowing that just one small mistake — like, say, a ball slipping out of your hands for a turnover in the biggest game of your season — will be seen by hundreds of millions, shared by even more and locked on film forever?

That’s how the conversation drifted into the topic of meditation, and that alone doesn’t make him unique — nearly one in six Americans are thought to use meditation in their lives, according to the CDC.

But that’s just the surface level of his mental performance. We talk so habitually about the talents of the Chiefs’ quarterback on the field that we too easily disregard that doesn’t just happen by accident. And that’s not a reference to hard work but rather a reference to the type of work.

This is another layer of the latter. The answer to the aforementioned question, on how he deals with the pressure of visibility, for example: “You just don’t think about it,” he replied.

If you think that sounds easier than done, well, you’re right. This is a learned trait. A perfected trait. A trait he didn’t even know he needed until he had it.

Before he even started a college game at Texas Tech, Mahomes was introduced to Paddy Steinfort, a mental performance consultant for the school. The two haven’t kept in touch since Mahomes left for the NFL six years ago, other than the occasional text message or direct message on social media, but Mahomes has preserved the education.

And one piece of education in particular that he internally references often.

“He used to talk about how your mind can only think about six things at the same time,” Mahomes said. “And if you were focusing on the crowd, and then you’re focusing on how big the game is, then you’re not thinking about what coverage is the nickel (cornerback) playing, or how’s the nickel going to adjust versus this coverage and stuff like that. So I kind of just keep it in that perspective.”

That’s a reference to the “working memory,” Steinfort said in a subsequent phone call this month, and its space is generally limited to 3-6 items at any given time. By saying his mind can hold six things at once, Mahomes has volunteered himself at the end of the spectrum, and, frankly, I’m not going to be the one to dispute that.

But I’m going to use the full Steinfort example of working memory, because it’s enlightening to the type of teaching Mahomes once used — and the type of teaching he still implements, simply on his own now.

“You hear my voice right now, and you might be taking notes, and you might be staring at your desk, and you could be thinking about what you had for lunch,” Steinfort said. “But you’re not thinking about your left foot. You’re not thinking about the heater in the background. You’re not thinking about whether the Chiefs are going to wear their home or away uniforms at the Super Bowl. There’s literally a thousand things our mind can have in our working memory.

“But as soon as you bump in the Chiefs away uniforms, the idea of your left foot has left your mind again. So it really is just this rotation, almost like a carousel, where there’s only a few things that can sit front and center. And our job as a lead performance is to deliberately put what we need there.”

That latter piece is not a one-size-fits-all solution for athletes. Steinfort has worked as a coach — that’s the term he prefers, since high-performing athletes already have this skill, and this is about optimization — for the Red Sox, Blue Jays, Eagles and 76ers since leaving Texas Tech. Most recently, he worked for the Australia men’s national team, which played in the World Cup in Qatar.

He was once an athlete himself, a first-round pick in Aussie Rules football. A slew of injuries derailed his intended career, and he fell into this one by accident, as he frames it. He was working with the Texas Tech program, overlapping for three years with Mahomes, while taking college courses.

His methods differ by the person, but they do require some buy-in, to be sure, to reach that objective of enhancing focus and confidence — of selectively picking the subject matter you want to be front and center.

The concept of athletes using mental performance instruction has grown in recent years — Steinfort talks about this on his podcast, “The Toughness Podcast,” and NFL running back Raheem Mostert, one of his players, felt comfortable enough to join him on it to talk about what worked for him.

Steinfort, of course, did not delve into specifics with his sessions with Mahomes years ago. But generally speaking?

“Pat was a standout,” Steinfort said. “I don’t think it’s isolated to his work on the mental game — anything that was put in front of him that he would see value in or think could help him in his career, he would use. He never left any stone unturned.”

And immediately.

“I was struck by how vulnerable he was ready to be relatively quickly,” Steinfort said. “It was very clear that he would do whatever it took to get the clearest mind possible going into the game and whatever it took to make himself better. There’s a fearlessness on the field, and we see that all the time, like him playing two games with a (high-ankle sprain). But in that sort of work, he was fearless as well. He attacked it with the same mentality — I’ve gotta do this to get what I want.

“And off we go.”

And off the quarterback went.

Mahomes doesn’t meet individually with a mental performance coach any longer, he said. Steinfort is struck, though not entirely surprised, to learn that Mahomes has stuck with what worked long ago. That’s the objective, after all. Find what works for each person.

So if it seems like the fact that more than 100 million people will watch him play a game has virtually no effect on him — and it certainly does have that appearance, at least — that’s by design.

On a dry-erase board in his office, Steinfort would chart the six items required to enter Mahomes’ mind before any given play — the “non-negotiables,” he labeled them.

Play call, read defense, progressions. And so on.

If the mind can only embrace 3-6 items at once, it leaves room for little thought about things such as the game’s magnitude or things that might be natural to you or me. Like, man, what if I screw this up?

We frequently hear athletes talk about treating every game the same. Some of it, to be frank, prompts an eye roll. Super Bowl LVII on Sunday is not the same as a Week 15 date with the Houston Texans.

So how is that you — one of those 100 million — can be pacing back and forth in your living room, and the guy at the center of the story can act as though the ensuing play has the impact of a preseason game?

Coaching.

Well, embracing the coaching.

Preserving the coaching.

“I feel like especially now that I’ve played in a lot of big games, now it’s just (about) going out there and playing like it’s another game,” Mahomes said. “Just going through your checklist every play, making sure you get whatever tells you can that the defense is giving, and trying to execute.

“Whenever you’re playing, I feel like you don’t think about that type of stuff. I think it’s going to be cool when I look back and see these big games that I played in. But at the time when I’m playing them, I’m not really thinking about how big that game is in that perspective.”