Why Mastery Looks Effortless: The Hidden Science of Skill and Self-Regulation

Ep 131 explores a question we all ask at some point: How do people develop abilities that look almost superhuman?

Across disciplines—cognitive performance, emotional intelligence, relationships, athletics, leadership, and high-risk professions—there are individuals whose skills appear effortless, fluid, and even beautiful. But mastery is never accidental. Every advanced skill follows a predictable progression of development, refinement, and embodied awareness.

All skill acquisition begins at the same threshold: conscious incompetence. The moment we recognize what we do not yet know, the learning process begins. From there, progress is not linear—but it is inevitable if effort continues. As long as we engage, practice, and apply a skill in real-world conditions, we do not exit the learning process. Over time, repetition transforms effort into efficiency, and efficiency into elegance.

What looks like mastery from the outside is the visible outcome of thousands of invisible adjustments. Grace is simply skill made automatic. Art emerges from discipline.

Self-regulation is one of the most foundational—and misunderstood—skills in this process. It is the ability to remain aware of physiological reactivity, emotional arousal, mental narratives, and perceptual interpretation as they arise—often within milliseconds. Stress, uncertainty, and threat accelerate these processes, but they do not remove choice. With training, awareness becomes faster. Responses become cleaner. Control becomes accessible even in high-pressure environments.

Self-regulation allows us to move from reactive behavior to deliberate action. It transforms stress into information rather than command. In variable, unpredictable environments, it is the difference between survival mode and skilled execution.

This episode invites you to view self-regulation not as restraint—but as artistry. A craft that can be trained, refined, and expressed with clarity, precision, and humanity.

Let’s become more artful in the skills that govern how we show up under pressure.

Walk well.

Transcript

Welcome back folks to episode 131 of the Running Man Self-Regulation Skills Project Podcast with me, host Dr. Armando Dominguez, Ph.D. Health Psychology, licensed professional counselor and an adjunct professor to local community college. And what we're going to discuss today is a very prominent principle in the development of skill over time. And this is in quotes, art is derived from skill.

Now, if any two terms did not belong in a single sentence, those two would seem to be at first blush, two things that do not necessarily compliment each other within a single statement. But there is a very, very distinct perspective I want to look at here in the development of skill over time and how it relates to self-regulation skill. Cause that is a skill once again, that we grow again, especially we didn't learn it very young. And also it has to do with the way we think and how we do fit.

physical things like the development of sports skill, sort of thing. And it's very much a broad brush stroke application to many aspects of life that if we get really good at something skillful, the art that arises from that is fascinating, sublime in some cases. moving forward into the discussion once again, art

is derived from skill early on in the podcast. There's been several that I have covered, the competence model and it's very popular in their learning theory circles. Wherever we talk about the development of skill over time by virtue of recognizing maybe what we'd like to learn. that's when we become consciously aware of something that we have no competence or skill at now in competence isn't an insult, but if you're incompetent in this model, that means that you haven't learned it.

yet. And the key term here is yet. Not that it's unlearnable, it's just that it's not been learned. And there's a lack of training there, a lack of exercise in that area, therefore an undoing of sorts, or not doing more correctly of said skill that may be developed. can be learning how to volley tennis. And now the big thing, pickleball, martial arts is very closely tied, are very closely tied in the development of skill.

armando (02:59.999)
to this concept as well and Anything that you do sportive anything that you do physical even in the military when you go into basic training There are things that you already know how to do how to walk how to stand But you haven't learned it the military way that means that there is a training a very basic training that helps you plug into The big machine so to speak whenever you do go into the military So you're part of the team and you're not out there expressing yourself individually in a way that would be detrimental to

the team that could get people hurt or killed or get yourself hurt or killed as a result of you trying to show how individual and unique you might be. And there are certain reasons behind why you stand a certain way and march a certain way in the military. In the martial arts, there are certain reasons behind why you stand a certain way and move a certain way. And also, whenever we're learning in academia and you very, very early on in your educational career, learn how

how to sit, how to stand, how to attend to what's being taught, when to speak, how to raise your hand, all those common courtesies that exist within a classroom that help you survive the educational experience. It's an inoculation of sorts. The late Dr. Glenn Morris mentioned in his book, and I've mentioned him often, Path Notes of the American Ninja Master talks about this learning theory and that he actually had a course in the semester that he would teach as an inoculation to the student school and in showing that.

many students based on research that would show not only interest even when they weren't interested, when they would sit up front and they would attend without interruption and allow the teacher to teach and this was at the college level.

that they not only got better responses from the teacher, but they also got better grades because they were paying attention on top of other things. But they were also learning how to navigate the educational field because it is a social field. It is a social scheme. It is a survivability of sorts type of environment.

armando (05:01.468)
where you have to learn how to get along, to get along, how to interact and know when and how. So there was a skill involved there and learning how to be a student, not just the learning how to learn, but how to look as if you were part of the stream that was interested because whenever you go to college is because you want to go. not because it's public education and you have to buy law like here in the United States, go get educated. So those are some ideas to think with. But when we come back to the idea of

Art is derived from skill and this plays very heavily into the learning concepts about conscious competence whenever we are aware of something and I'm skillful at it, but not necessarily highly skilled, but I'm able to replicate that skill. But we start out at the level of unconscious incompetence. One, I'm not aware. Two, if the skill exists, I'm not even paying attention to it and I certainly don't have any skill in it. And I may be on a number line divergent and going in the absolute opposite direction of the flow what this skill may

take me towards. So in that sense, whenever we become more congruent in the line that we're moving in the direction of skill development over time, moving towards a very sharp hockey stick if possible, and a long enough timeline, even if it's gradual, you will gain great skill. Even if it's immediate, you can gain great skill, but you have to be aware of it first, and you have to be working at it. that way, even though I may not be skillful now, the term, the applicable term, yet, is where the

becomes very powerful because that means I've taken a liking to this and I put it in my mindset and it is something that I may work towards over time. And time is the great equalizer of sorts when it comes to developing certain skills minus a few variables such as genetics and age and time and capacity, this sort of thing. But just for the sake of argument today, the idea still remains. Art is derived from skill and is tied to development of competence. if we're at the level of

Now I've picked something that I want to do and I've learned that

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it requires a certain amount of time and involvement in things that I do. And over time, let's say weeks or months, you will get better at it. You may not be masterful, but after several hundred repetitions of a certain skill, you will feel more skillful and maybe be able to replicate it with a greater degree of fidelity, so to speak. It may not be perfect, but it's better than whenever you started, such as learning how to skateboard, learning how to skate, how to ride a bike. And sometimes riding a bike, it gets

a little wonky at first and we wreck into things because we tend to turn.

our body in the direction of where our eyes move until we learn how to differentiate vision and not turn so extremely to where our hands tend to follow. And this is something that even in NASCAR, wherever you look is where you go. So you have to be very careful and stay as calm as possible to maintain peripheral awareness and be able to shoot in the direction centrally that you want the point of your car to go or else you'll be scraping the sides of the wall or wrecking into somebody that's your compatriot that's racing with you.

some important things there. Now, when it comes to getting an elevated level of skill at anything, over time we become connoisseurs of sorts of all the little details. We might get certain type of shoes or clothes to help us feel more comfortable when we're doing this. And these types of things are assistance, their equipment, and they help us develop that skill so we can pass more time repeating what we're doing and therefore gaining more competence and skillfulness of what it is we're doing running

shoes are probably the easiest thing I can refer to. In the 1970s, whenever Jim Fix wrote the book, Run, Running, I believe it was running, he passed as a result of a heart attack from just running. We realized that that kind of long distance running is not really great for your health long term as far as the impact, but not for cardiovascular health either. We've realized that resistance actually plays a larger part in developing heart rate variability, which is key, not just

armando (09:10.415)
having a continuous heart rate that can't trip hammer and then also go down to a very low level of competence or practice rather as far as a heart reactivity goes. But variability once again is the gold standard that we look at. But Jim Fix when he wrote that book, at the time people would run with whatever shoes and they called them tennis shoes, tennis sneakers, and also athletic shoes. But they basically would just wear the same kind of shoe.

Nike came out with a variation of shoe that had a little bit of foam and that took off and it exceeded what Adidas was doing. It exceeded what Converse was doing with court shoes for basketball. There were just flat soles with rubber soles that would stick on a wooden floor a little more effectively but still allow for some spin. So there was some some research that went on to that and they started developing types of wedges and also support for the base of the foot. And now we have all these wonderful options that are barefoot.

foot shoes with wide toe boxes and we've learned an incredible amount of how the foot moves. So we've become much more competent in supporting how a person runs and how not to malleate the structure in a way that's unnatural. We're moving more in that direction, but we've become more competent and more deeply skilled, not more widely competent since we're talking about shoes, but more deeply understanding of what it is that we call shoe now. And the industry has become much more artful at

results. So they became skillful. And this is back to the argument of art is derived from skill. They became very skilled in not only the research, but the dynamics of movement kinematics, dynamics, impact, and also acceleration and deceleration. And also how the bone structure is malleated based on shoes if they're too tight, wide toe boxes sort of thing that we're seeing more of in the individual little spaces that the little grippy shoes have individual weighted finger or toe pieces that are really cool to look at. They look like monkey feet to me.

Duck feet, but they they work really well and these are important things to note that the industry grew and became much more in-depth and then the competition started doing what the rest of the competition was leading with and that's differentiating into the area of the most natural foot stroke and a better shoe. So what does this have to do with self-regulation is the question that I ask and it has a lot to do with self-regulation because as we become more skillful we become much more able to

armando (11:40.013)
to respond to

events that would otherwise make us very reactive, very stressed, very anxious, very afraid, and we do so with a greater degree of a plum. APLOMB for those that are wondering, not the fruit, even though it sounds very close to that. And the reason I use that term is that there's a sense of natural grace and movement that occurs, that arises when we're talking about physical skill. And if you're talking to somebody that's mathematically very skilled and understands statistics, for instance, there are a number of professors

that are very statistic immersed and when they speak they make it easy to understand. It's not that statistics are hard to understand, it's just many people find it hard to describe it in a way that's very simple. And the simpler the better. And it's not so much that they're making it easy because the understanding that comes should be explained in a way that should be layman's terms if you will for academic type things. And somebody that can take a very complex

idea and make it very easily understood to the general layman, then you have somebody that's gained a degree of mastery in the truest sense. They're able to deliver a high level of skill.

also demonstrate a high level of skill, but also be able to speak it and not necessarily that they're talking down or teaching down, but rather making the understanding easy because whenever you know what you're doing, you're no longer stuck at a level where you're trying to make sense of it, but it not only makes sense, but now you've become creative. You understand it so well, you see the ins and out of whatever it is that your discipline is or your subject matter and you're able to share it with somebody and help them find the beauty and the very thing that you're making

armando (13:24.915)
Look easy and that's the artful development that arises from development of very deep skill not broad skill necessarily because you can go broad and become the Generalist you can become the jack-of-all-trades as it were and some like to attach master of none But the thing is of jack-of-all-trades over a long enough timeline will become the go-to person and Will be a very great leader and have enough of an understanding in all areas that they're skilled at

that they can not only lead, but also make judgments based on their level of skill. So these things aren't absolutes where they're mutually exclusive. You have one and get the other, but over time they can become rather mutually inclusive with a long enough timeline. And we'll be talking about types of learning next. When we get to the point of a high level of skill and we make things look easy, so to speak,

for other people that are watching that may be struggling and show them, you can get here. That that's a great boom and support and an idea beacon of hope, so to speak for those that are watching, letting them know it can be done. But also you can realistically tell them, took me time before I understood it this way. That means the timeline is relative to the skill development. And that keeps things not only realistic, but also, in a sense.

something that makes it look more achievable, if you will. And that is a great thing to be able to do when you mentor somebody, especially when they're young, when they're small, and whenever they aren't.

basically filtering through the limitations that we give people especially when they're little and this is kind of like the sins of the mother and father visited upon the children and if we Couch it in the term the limitations of the parents visited from the children We're talking about belief systems not that they shouldn't believe but we should always be willing to question and we should always have the

armando (15:20.917)
propensity for dialogue to question why can't I do this? Why shouldn't we do that versus just doing the how and what and don't question. We want to maintain that capacity to ask questions about why things are done. Now the types of learning I want to look at is that they're different.

mind modes that we use. when we're talking about fast thinking and slow thinking, we're actually leaning on two types of mind, mind being the result of brain, so to speak, that we use our brain to do. And we have a reflective thinking type, and then we have an algorithmic way of thinking about things too. And the algorithm side is more like an assumptive model, one that we run based on what it looks like and what evidence we have, whereas we have the reflective model. And that's a slower mode

thinking but it's also deeper thinking and it's not necessarily a bad thing that it's in comparison to the algorithmic mind and I'm not saying algorithm as in the computer model even though that it resembles it to a degree but rather the algorithmic sense in that we have information and we make assumptions based on what information we have and the reflective mind if we have the luxury of time allows us to look at what the algorithm is using and that is whatever information

and data that we've acquired and being able to question whether or not an assumption will take us to a certain point, that means we start to incite ideas of time, past, time, current, and time, future, expectation, predictive based on said data and whether or not it's going to come out based on prior behavior, this sort of thing, or prior performance, if you will, and that's okay.

But if we understand that these two models aren't mutually exclusive one and so separate that they're categorical and so different that they do not meet, then that would be incorrect as well. Because we have varying degrees and these both exist on a

armando (17:19.655)
on a line, to speak, as a continuum, and we can have a little bleed over here and there. But the higher level of arousal, and this is where we run into self-regulation, the less apt we're able to be able to use the reflective mind, because that uses a lot of resources. It's very resource-hungry in that we have to have blood flow with blood sugar to be able to do said thinking. And in the algorithmic mind, we'll take more sort of the perceptual assumption based on data in the immediate

environment or what we have in our memory versus making new information so to speak as far as reflection, understanding and new connections.

the other, the algorithmic mind is much faster. The reflective is a little slower, but with the luxury of time, we get better results over time. So these two types of thinking and learning, because they're not separate, are very important for us to kind of pay attention to when we're looking at what we were discussing at the beginning, the development of skill and competence and getting to the point of what we would call unconscious competence, which is what we would

Say parallels the idea of mastery not mastery in the sense of the way the the eastern folks do with martial arts Where you never really arrive you always have varying gradations of excellence So you have someone that's masterful at 50 years versus 40 years versus 30 each one of them will have a great degree of skill But there's also a small minute difference that you may not note. You may see somebody that their body is starting to

downgrade as a result of age, but yet they're still able to maintain certain skills that the younger folk may not be able to overcome. And they're not tricks per se, but actually depth of skill that the body has done for so long that it becomes so incredibly efficient that it requires very little energy for the effect to work. And it can look almost mystical if you ever experienced that. And there is definitely something to it. But as far as learning cognitive process,

armando (19:23.972)
We never stop learning. As long as you stay sharp, your brain will always enhance in our IQ.

We tend to lean on that as being like the penultimate equivalence of what we would call the label of smart. And, that is adjustable. Now, do we have a capacity that may stay kind of steady? Of course, but it doesn't mean that you're learning and crystallize intelligence and your magnitude of understanding does not grow. And there are different levels of intelligence that aren't tested yet that aren't testable that we're realizing are very physical first. So that affects our learning models, our learning,

capacity and propensity. So definitely some things to think about there. Now there's some other ideas that I'd like to touch upon here. And that is that in the conscious competence model, whenever we're aware of gaining skill and the unconscious competence, that means I no longer am thinking it. I'm just doing it. That's where we start getting into states of mind that we call flow. And that tends to be where we interpret without any conscious

what I would call higher cognitive interference where we're weighing stuff and labeling and naming and we're just experiencing we're just being the Taoist would say that you're just expressing the great Tao you're just experiencing by doing but it's not a conscious I need to take step A B and C but rather you're just doing it because it's so familiar and there's a flow to it and it's a very graceful thing that's that state of a plum and gracefulness and process that we need to think about it's not always physical it can be cognitive process when

Whenever you see somebody go into that mathematical mode, I've seen it happen a couple of times. I've seen it with coders as well. And it's definitely a flow state. It's a mind state. It's no longer them doing what they were doing moments before where they were iterating based on what's going on at the social level. But they're, they're beyond that. And they're at a level of consciousness that can

armando (21:20.236)
you could say it's spiritual in some cases, and it's deeply fascinating. When we get into that space, we'll call it the sweet spot. We can also call it the Goldilocks zone because everything's just right. Effort becomes much more efficient. We use less energy and we tend to glide into what we're doing. We tend to glide through our thought process. We tend to glide through our weighing things and being able to see more deeply into things because we're not attached to the outcome. We're not categorizing by default and putting things in spaces so there's

and I know they're there, but rather we're just seeing things as they are. And we tend to have a much more open mindset, as much as our physiology would reflect by an open visual capacity, and that we have a peripheral visual open. We're not necessarily fixated with a foveal vision, but yet we're able to use all of that and see things more deeply. Miyamoto Musashi in his book at Five Rings talked about seeing deeply, seeing with the mind, and that's not necessarily an incorrect term.

And yes, we're using the physiology of the eye, but whenever we see we're not looking with the eye focus on focus Distance close up and then changing how we're focusing on things consciously. It's not that whenever we see with the mind We see it all as a whole Ken Wilbur in his books would talk about a term That he named holons when we see things as holons That means we're seeing everything not unlike we do in our peripheral vision as one continuous whole

whenever something moves that's the exception and therefore we attend to it and manage it. And if we're aware of that we realize that our mind does similar things whenever we're scanning. We're not scanning hard focusing but rather we're allowing our mind to be broad and our vision to be broad and take in all the information that we can, kind of like in an algorithmic sense, without engaging the reflective mind and just experiencing, perceiving, truly perception.

being engaged and that being our primary sense of information intake and giving us a sense of what's going on. So the Goldilocks Zone as it were.

armando (23:28.564)
is where we get comfortable, we've gained skill. Now, relative to self-regulatory skill, how I respond to things means I'm mindful and I'm choosing not to react and not to fly off the handle and not to get anxious or panicky by taking time over time along time horizon where I gain skill with learning how to breathe, doing the box breath, the square breath, learning how to do the double sniff technique, learning how to root and center, how to stand more upright,

not to curl up and hold yourself close into a little ball where you limit and restrict not only blood flow, but actually oxygenation and limiting your diaphragm from dropping down and allowing your lungs to draw full lobes of breath, all of these things and being in the peripheral awareness if we can. And it sounds like a whole mess of things to do. And it's really just something that we have to become aware of one bit at a time. It's not that you don't do it already. You may be skilled in some of it already, but the idea is that we become

unconsciously confident and soon you'll just automatically do things and you don't have to do these things multi-thousand times to benefit. You get the benefit the first repetition. You get the benefit the first 10 times, the first 20 times. If you set some time aside to do things wherever you go out in public and you do these methods and you could be pushing a shopping cart, nobody knows you're doing this. These techniques are very ninja. The only way they'll find out you're doing them

Is if you tell them and i'm not saying anything, so i'm just encouraging you to practice these skills If you practice them every day if you share them with your kiddos, it can become like a game But not only that it becomes a very Life engendering tool whenever things are going to get bad when they get difficult for them when they're not In your eyesight when they're in school and they may be dealing with kiddos that may have not had the luxury of learning this At your knees and at your feet when they're little or doing them as a game and playing realize that you

whenever they recognize emotional overload, that they can interpret that and stay away from things early. That would be very preventative. And we can use this as adults as well when we're in the social scheme, when we're at work, when we're out in public or whenever we're with our kids and just trying to stay safe while we're doing things without necessarily being afraid that, the shoe is going to drop and it's going to happen any moment now. Not what I'm saying, but being able to use that in every day. And you will notice that there's a sense of calm and you will be the center. And think about the mirror.

armando (25:55.792)
Neuronal stuff wherever kiddos will mirror what we do and they will do what we do before we See them do what we say and that is a frustrated dad talk right there But just some things to think about but we've quite a bit today and I just want to tell you Thank you for sharing your time with me. I love talking to you This podcast is moving along and the book is almost done being edited I'll let y'all know when that comes out and the running man model soon will be in print and I'm excited about that I want to share that with y'all now

Next thing what I'd like to do is encourage you to hey send me an email at the running man get skills Project at gmail if you will I'd like some feedback I'd like to hear from you from wherever it is that you're emailing me from I'd also like to encourage y'all to go to YouTube like Subscribe and share and if you know somebody that could benefit from that and maybe they don't have let's say a Spotify or an iTunes Membership, please send them to YouTube. It's at no cost and I'd love to hear from them as

Well, and this podcast is available on platforms that podcasts are available at including Amazon Music and Drop me a like and let me know what you're thinking. I'd love to hear from you. Once again, I enjoy talking about this today This is a very pertinent detail as we're coming to the close of many semesters of colleges and now going into the holiday season and People are shutting down and these are all probably experiences that that they may have shared and hopefully this is knowledge that they can take in

to

struggles and for many people they're not going to get a whole lot better so being compassionate kind and patient is a good thing I encourage you to do that thank you for your time once again take care walk well