Hurry Slowly: The Ancient Secret to Modern High Performance

Ep 115. Why Slowing Down is the Secret Weapon for High Performance & Mental Clarity

In a world obsessed with hustle culture, speed, and instant results, it's easy to believe that faster is always better. From survival instincts to corporate boardrooms, speed is seen as the ultimate competitive edge. The faster we move, the more successful we assume we'll become. But what if the opposite is true?

What if slowing down is the real power move?

Practices like Tai Chi Chuan teach us the wisdom of moving slowly with intention. This ancient principle reveals a deep truth: deliberate slowness doesn't mean falling behind—it means rising with clarity, focus, and excellence.

When life or work doesn't move at the breakneck speed we expect, we feel stress, anxiety, and burnout. We demand fast results, fast progress, fast everything. But this constant push actually limits our growth. Slowness, on the other hand, unlocks mastery.

True skill-building—whether in your career, your personal development, or physical training—requires patience. It demands attention to detail, consistency, and presence. Slow, deliberate effort fosters long-term growth, deeper understanding, and sustainable success. Speed may get you there quickly, but slowness ensures you arrive with greatness.

This is more than a mindset—it's a method. It’s not about stopping. It’s about moving with purpose. If you must hurry... hurry slowly and walk well.

Transcript

Welcome back folks to episode 115 of the Running Man Self-Regulation Skills Project Podcast with me, your host Dr. Armando Dominguez, Ph.D. in Health Psychology, licensed professional counselor and an adjunct professor at our local community college. And what we're going to be discussing today is the concept of slowing down to make progress. Now that is something that is rather foreign in a Western sense.

at least to the Western mind I should say. And we understand that by like doing yoga, meditation, and slowing down, that we're actually relieving ourselves of stressors and anxiety and these sorts of things. But what about the concept of slow and slowing down to get faster, to gain skill, and also to make progress? So

going look at the idea of going slow and going slower and also perception of slow and what that does in our mind relative to not only belief but expectation and also how we can predict outcomes a little more effectively whenever we take the slow path.

Now, what I will tell you is that this is going to be a little bit of a meander through perceptual psychology, neuropsych and how we perceive, but also those things that pop up as a result of our experience that result in an outcome of a belief or an expectation that we may run with and tend to guide our lives with that we tend to assume to be somehow or somewhat correct and maybe not accurate, but useful and not such a bad thing.

But we're going to leverage slow and how can slow help me slowing down better me and how can it progress me in the direction that I want to go even as far as gaining skill. So we're going to start off with the idea that a great Grandmaster of Tai Chi here in the United States, the late Grandmaster now, YC Chang, and he taught Quan Ping's Tai Chi in San Francisco for many, many years. And I believe he may have passed away probably about

armando (02:43.476)
or 12 years ago. But my favorite author, Dr. Glenn J. Morris, that wrote Path Notes, wrote in, I believe it was in his second book where he was getting Grandmaster Chang to fashion him some chops, his traditional Chinese stamp that you use in any writings that you would put red ink on and then stamp next to your signature initial, this sort of thing. And whenever he was visiting with him, he spoke very highly of how nicely

manicured his garden was and his home how clean it was and how he was doing little things around the garden that were very very busy, but he was very efficient and effective. But Master Chang, YC Chang, had taught martial arts for many many years. But on top of that Tai Chi was the primary system. He did other things too that he was well known for, for his great flexibility into his elder years. But also on top of that just a steady continuous pace because he was also a

of Chinese medicine, an acupuncturist and herbalist, this sort of thing. But what came away as the most important lesson that he was given whenever he was with Dr. Chang was that he told him that in this hurried world that if you must hurry, hurry slowly. Which sounds like an oxymoronic thing to hear, but in fact hurrying slowly

means not be intense because it will relax and we're actually slowing down.

It's not because we're grinding to a halt or pressing or getting pressured to a halt, but rather we're choosing to make progress in the direction. And it kind of silently implies accuracy and gathering information so that you can go well informed to the direction you're going if it's a cognitive task or even going to, for instance, change a tire, having all your tools there. So that way it's just a matter of going through the steps and having things laid out. So sometimes it's about slowing down enough to have a

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thought out process. And a well thought out process requires that we be a little calmer so that we have the greatest benefit of our blood flow. This is the neuropsychology stuff I was talking about. Whenever we have the greatest capacity of our crystallized IQ, our

prefrontal cortical structures that are firing on all cylinders and we're making the best reasoning and we're actually able to project forward into the future, draw from our past to make our immediate present much better as a result. And whenever we're hurrying slowly, we're not triggering the sympathetic nervous response in the highest sense wherever we default to where our skeletal muscles are not only the priority, but they're in essence

the most important part of what's going on because we have in essence triggered our body to respond as if there is a threat which means I have to be stronger I don't have to be smarter if we get too tense too fast we get anxious we get angry if we get particularly emotional or frightened

we are moving into default option that is skeletal muscle structure first. That is the skeletal muscle dominance in the sense that it dominates where the blood flow is going to go. The organs, yes. The brain, only the lower brain, not the frontal cortex because you don't have to be really smart once again. But

The muscles so you can run so you can flee so you can climb so you can fight if you must and hide if you have to So hurrying slowly is the principle we're working with. So what about slow as a concept? Often slow is Aligned with losing if we think about racing really really fast in a straight line a hundred meter dashes sort of thing the turtle and the hare is the the story that we hear about the the rabbit or the hare runs really fast and

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finishes quickly, but the turtle in the slow and steady makes progress, so it kind of aligns slowness with a sense of virtue.

So slow is not necessarily virtuous by default, but as a concept for progress, it is a virtuous thing in that you achieve the goal in a sense, more effectively with maybe a greater degree of accuracy, but also understanding that not all things must be done quickly. Those things that we want to gain skill in, that we want to encourage great quality in, require time.

Time is the sub factor that we didn't mention initially, but we have to keep that in mind. Think about an hourglass. Whenever you turn it over the sand is at the top and it starts to trickle towards the bottom. That is probably one of the best ideas that you can use as far as a visual idea that you can use to understand the concept of hurrying slowly. Where there's continuous movement, but it's steady.

And if you're letting the hourglass do its job, you're not there shaking and trying to make the sand speed through faster, it actually slows it down because it clogs and it no longer allows gravity to pull it through the little hole that allows it drop to the lower receptacle. But whenever we allow things to unravel, unfurl naturally, we are hurrying slowly because we're moving.

We're in constant motion, so to speak, within the idea of time. Time is a concept that is, yes, an idea. It is something we hold in our mind and they say it really doesn't exist. But yet we bind ourselves by it. We measure ourselves by it and we measure what we call our progress or our egress for that matter. We're leaving so really, really fast by that as well, depending on the level of stress and if things are threatening or not. But all joking aside, so what about the concept?

armando (08:32.725)
of time and how does this relate to self-regulatory skill? If you have the discipline, self-discipline, not somebody imposing discipline upon you, if you have a hang-up about the term discipline, we'll use the term self-discipline. If you want to use the term self-control, that works too. Well, what about self-regulation? I think that's pretty neutral and it works pretty well for this discussion we're having today, but they're all kind of parallel ideas that have to do with how we self-regulate.

measure, self-regulate, and also kind of create a sense of control of sorts of how fast, how slow we may do things and whether or not we progress in the direction we want to go. But it has to do with an idea, also the, not only the idea of what I want to do, but also the commitment to it, where we commit to it versus just kind of involving ourselves with the idea and then just moving forward anyway and hoping for things to work out for the best. Some people do that whenever there are things

are very precious and they hope for the best and things don't always turn out well. Do things always turn out well when we go slowly? Not as an absolute, but do we have better outcomes?

Generally have your facts gathered if you have your tools gathered or if you work on things in a stepwise sense where patiently you work on step one as a building block and then step two the second level of foundation and then step three where we may gain some skill off a foundation one and two Then yes slow will beat fast in that sense and that you might have better outcomes based on the throughput You're putting in it that's gonna be your effort and what it is you're trying to learn with the allowance for time and recovery

maybe. So in comparison we can say that fast is sometimes the thing that we need most whenever it comes to ducking a punch where somebody throws a ball at you and your head's in the way. Probably good to be really fast at that moment.

armando (10:27.412)
And that is more a perceptual sense where things may look really fast or look really slow depending on how you're seeing. And I'm using the term seeing in quotes, because this is back to the neurophysiological things where if a ball is moving directly at you and it's looming, it's getting bigger in your horizon versus getting smaller moving away. If it's getting bigger, it's getting closer. That means I better duck or get out of the way, or I'm to have to catch or intercept it somehow. But getting out of the way sounds like a really good idea, but whenever

we are looking at things with our night vision with our peripheral visual sense and Miyamoto Musashi in his book book of five rings speaks about the two types of side ken site and con site ken is the site that we use that we will call foveal vision that has to do with depth perception also color identification naming and labeling and it's usually tied with the idea of identification and categorizing which is a prefrontal cortical thing and thinking is too slow whenever you're trying to

In quotes keep your eye on the ball which as a commentary on how to hit a ball It's probably not the most effective even though it's been used Incessantly for years to teach people to pay attention to the ball, which is probably more accurate But the peripheral vision if you use that it will seem as if the ball even though it's still moving at the same speed You're able to evade more quickly and you tend to evade it more readily and respond more quickly because you're responding from a lower level of brain But also you're not labeling you're not

naming you're not having opinion about it you're actually moving faster in the first third of the initiation of a ball or a punch or something being hurled at you versus the last two thirds where you run the risk of getting hit unless you're naturally fast but the idea is to understand that things would

perceptually using our neuronal structures, our eyes and our rods picking up motion will seem slower in space. And that is probably the root of being able to hit very fast. If you're a martial artist or to be able to hit with a stick, if you're going to be hitting a ball, like stick ball, a little skinny stick with the ball in the streets, that sort of thing. And we used to play stick ball when we were kids too, or even tennis for that matter. But the idea is that there is a perceptual sense that will give us

armando (12:48.972)
Information that we may opine or have opinions about Based on how things look that move really slow. Sometimes we talk about the term flow This is one of the subcategories not unlike time that stems from slow many people think that you have to be exerting really hard or that you have to be Running really fast to get into the runners higher and then you have this neurochemical release where all of a sudden boom You're at one with the universe and all of a sudden

I'm surfing through this curl in the ocean in California and it's no longer me on the board swishing across the surface of that wave that I'm writing, but it's me. It's all me, which means I have this sense of oneness and it's a very Zen thing. It's not anything that you have to do really fast with it. Something that does require repetition to get familiar with. But whenever we have familiarity, we have less cognitive engagement in the sense of I'm thinking about all the little details.

and just experiencing and it's, it's, it's an immersive quality. So why is this important? Because flow does not always happen whenever high speed or high pressure occurs. It can happen then too. I've mentioned it before on a couple of podcasts, wherever I had kind of a peak experience whenever I was going to college and I make fun of my, my four Ranchero Mobi in 1972, a tank of a vehicle that was white and ugly as sin, but I'll tell you what, nobody got in my way when I pulled into

any kind of intersection to go right or left and My former boss used to call it the tuna boat So therefore I called them Moby after Moby Dick but the reason I mentioned this is this is the cue for me to remember when I got out of that car and I was going to a class and I rounded the front end of my vehicle and I got onto the sidewalk and I was walking under a live oak tree and these are beautiful trees we have here in Texas that put off acorns and All of a sudden there is this

armando (14:57.252)
the I may have been a little tired, but I was going to school before I had to go to work. And here I am on college campus having this mystical experience of time stopping. And I'm seeing this time distortion of sorts and I wasn't doing anything. I was moving kind of slow. I wasn't running.

running in a hurry. I was just kind of sauntering around the front end of the vehicle so I could start moving in the direction of class. So the idea of peak experience and having a perception of time slowing down does not require once again great exertion. But it makes the point that how we perceive sometimes is turned on by necessity and sometimes maybe just for entertainment. Who knows what my body was doing. But it's one of my favorite experiences I've ever had as an adult.

the idea of slow, the fact that we can perceive and shift how we perceive through our eyes. And this isn't the cognitive, I'm thinking about it a certain way. So therefore it slows down. It's not a trigger in that sense, but sometimes it's a result of what's going on in our environment. Maybe there's a sense of ease. Maybe there's a sense of practice. If I've done that many, many times, that's why it happened. Not sure I don't have that perfect answer, but I will say that it certainly has changed how I see things because

when I look at things in my mind, as if they've slowed down or been suspended, I pick up more detail. So the virtue of slow is that you're able to perceive more, you're actually able to think more and remember more as a result, because you have greater cognitive capacity to your benefit at that moment. And that's cool that that's what we want. So the next part of this isn't just being in a state of slow to stress less, but rather to gain more

quality and progress more effectively to put good foundation in place and do things in a stepwise manner and not rush through things. Sometimes we rush through things and we wonder why we're so dissatisfied with the results. This is especially true in the martial art and gymnastics in tennis, wherever you do things into the multi thousands. Then, then you realize, well, that's easy. But yet whenever you're put under pressure and you may be matching someone, you're happy with the results because you don't have to think about it. You just kind of respond. And

armando (17:17.071)
that is kind of exciting too. There's definitely some payoff there, but there's definitely work involved. There's investment. This investment often in Tai Chi and also in the Tao Te Ching is the term that's usually used as in the it's in quotes investment in loss, but it's used as an idea to understand that sometimes it's not about the zero sum perspective competitive, even though you can use this investment in loss in principle, but understanding that it's not that you

losing anything, but rather that you're suspending what it is would be the expectation of the result. Not unlike whenever we see that kiddos are able to suspend that desire to want to have a marshmallow, but yet if they tell them, if you wait a little while that you'll get to being able to get that variable payoff.

not the variable period but one that is suspended for about in time and gained the benefit of that and this is kind of like skill building these are psychological principles yes but they're also very seriously ingrained biological things programs within us as humans that we all share so i like talking about this sort of thing now we're going to move into well what does slow get me if we're looking at the long term if i'm gaining skill and i'm making progress as a result of not rushing through

things

during the Korean War and also He had trained with some of the preeminent masters in martial arts But very humble very humble and the people that I've met that have spoken with him trained with him say as much but one of his books that he put out had to do with How do you make things better skill wise? He's incredibly fast at age 84. He just turned years this this month last month actually and The thing that he said as far as a principle in training is that slow is fast

armando (19:37.68)
Fast is smooth, smooth is lethal. Now that just means that whenever you get something that becomes incredibly natural, like when a baby is learning how to walk, when it becomes natural, you don't have to think about it, then it becomes very hard to stop. But also by default, it becomes incredibly fast. And that is where we gain a mastery of skill in the truest sense of the word, to where it becomes so natural, we don't have to think about it, it just occurs. And then the permutations of that natural

movement come out. So what does slow have to do with self-regulation?

Well, it has to do a lot with not moving in fear, not moving in the state of my environment is somehow threatening to me, not moving in a sense where I have anxiety responses because I don't know what's coming next. And I start fearing the unknown and my mind thoughts start going in a loop wherever I start going into these little fantasies as mental loops of what could happen and trying to predict based on my experience. And I've had bad experience. I'm probably going to have some really bad thoughts that aren't particularly helpful.

but also could negate some of the benefits I could get and maybe make me a little irritable because I'm turning on my fight-flight response. So what's the benefit of slow? One of the unspoken ideas behind this whole idea of hurrying slowly is harmony. Being harmonious with your environment. I will give you an example. It's not this ooey gooey woo woo thing.

and

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walking and drawing nature and this kiddo was so innocent and harmonious and that whenever we'd walk the little squirrels that were on the trees would come out and jump at him and taunt him and want to play with him and they would play the huge herons that are very very much motion sensitive

the big beautiful blue herons that we have in the area that we live in West Texas and they would come by and a light on the tree above him when we were walking armadillos that are very skittish we didn't touch them would come out and greet him and they usually don't come out to see humans they usually run from anything that moves they're very predator verse but even butterflies and it sounds almost like a Disney story I'm speaking but butterflies would come a light around him whenever we would sit

And it was just one of those things that I learned to appreciate but he was just in that child sense Appreciating his environment. He felt safe. He felt like he was just enjoying what was going on He was just adventuring and exploring but he was in a state of discovery that was very lovingly open He was in harmony, but on top of that he was moving slowly not stalking but just

wonder.

And whenever we're in that state of wonder sometimes that sense of slow and slowness Can help us feel that and experience that sense of harmony and it doesn't just have to be out in nature Sometimes it can be with the people that I work with don't worry about those arguments first thing that comes up Well, I don't like someone so I don't look this like this and what they say don't go there The idea is to go elsewhere and see the bigger picture a good neurological trigger to get you there is to use your peripheral vision stick your arms out to your sides wiggle your fingers without turning your head left

armando (23:26.936)
and right and looking forward towards the wall and just kind of soften your eyes. If you can see your fingers wiggling your peripheral vision, but you're also slowing down your cognitive process. You're at perceptual input and interpreting at the neural level without having opinion. That is one of the first states of feeling that can move in the direction of slower and in the direction of harmony at the end. And that's a good idea. So for now, I want to tell you thank you for sharing some time with me and for your listenership.

And what I'd like you to do is if you have friends or know people please share this podcast with them. I encourage you to subscribe I have quite a few listeners that listen to me on YouTube, but I have very small number of subscribers, please subscribe I'd love to see the subscriber percentage go up because that will help the algorithm of course and get me further out across this webosphere of sorts and I'd love to hear more people tell me what they'd like to hear me talk about and maybe they'll give me some

good feedback it'll give me some better ideas to work with but for now once again I just want to tell you thank you take care and if you must hurry hurry slowly be harmonious work towards that walk well