Meditation teaches you how to cultivate qualities and skills that naturally contribute to making you better at your favorite endeavor, whether it's sports or business, gardening or studying, or simply washing the dishes or sweeping the floor.

1. Flow experience. In sports they call it "the zone": moments or extended periods when you feel totally in sync with your body and your surroundings. Time seems to slow down, feelings of well-being and enjoyment increase, you see everything clearly as (or even before) it transpires, and you know exactly what you need to do next. By cultivating your powers of concentration in meditation, you develop the ability to enter the flow more easily in every situation.

2. The ability to see things multi-dimensionally. In meditation, you practice witnessing or observing your experience without getting lost in the details. This more expanded, global awareness naturally allows you to step back and see the whole picture, which can be extraordinarily useful when you're trying to solve a problem or scope out the opposing team (in sports or business) or just evaluate and improve your performance.

3. Mindfulness of self-defeating behaviors. When you expand your awareness in your meditation to include sensations and mental processes, you begin to notice repetitive patterns of thinking and feeling that cause you stress or inhibit your full self-expression. By extending this mindfulness to your performance (at work or play), you can catch self-defeating patterns and then replace them with more productive, effective alternatives.

4. Self-acceptance and freedom from self-criticism. Nothing dampens enthusiasm and inhibits effective performance more than the tendency most of us have to put ourselves down, especially under pressure. Through regular meditation, you practice accepting yourself the way you are and noticing the judgments as they arise. Then, when the going gets tough, you can use your meditation skills to gently defuse the self-criticism as you focus on doing your personal best.

5. Compassion and teamwork. In his best-selling book Sacred Hoops, Phil Jackson describes how he forged a world-champion basketball team based on the principles and lessons he learned in his study of Zen meditation. In addition to focus, mindfulness, and the other factors listed here, Jackson emphasizes the role of compassion. "As my meditation practice matured," he writes, "I began to appreciate the importance of playing with an open heart. Love is the force that ignites the spirit and binds teams together."