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By Michael Allison, Performance Coach and Developer of The Play Zone™ Reviewed by Unyte Editorial Team |
We’re living in a world that moves fast, compares constantly, and rarely pauses long enough to ask: What does it feel like to be you right now?
Pressure is everywhere. In performance. In parenting. In leadership. In our social feeds and in our bodies. Many of us are doing our best to succeed in environments that reward urgency, image, and achievement — but rarely prioritize the physiological conditions that support trust, connection, or real growth.
We live in systems that encourage us to compete to conquer rather than collaborate, communicate, or care for one another. That’s not just a cultural problem. It’s a biological one.
What if high performance didn’t have to come at the cost of our health or humanity?
What if we could shift from protection to presence — from pressure to play?
That question lives at the heart of my work, and has for decades.
How Did We Get Here?
In 1999, I opened Physical Focus, a wellness and post-rehab facility in Santa Barbara that bridged the gap between healthcare and fitness. Long before I knew of Polyvagal Theory (PVT), I was already creating an environment rooted in its core principle: safety. We prioritized relationships, consistency, and belonging. People often said it felt like the TV show Cheers, a place where “everybody knew your name.”
What we were really doing was creating a physiological atmosphere of acceptance. Clients felt safe enough to heal, train, grow, and connect. Looking back, we were fostering co-regulation and physiological trust before we had the language to describe it. Although it was my job, it was play, not work.
Over time, my play evolved into performance coaching. I began integrating Polyvagal Theory into movement, breath, habit change, lifestyle, and real-time regulation in high-stakes environments and teams. By the time I became a Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) provider in 2019, I realized I’d already been practicing the principles of PVT for years.
At the end of 2023, after 25 years of running Physical Focus, I sold the business to commit full-time to coaching, helping high performers not just “do more,” but feel safe enough to be who they really are. Today, I use the Play Zone™ methodology and the Safe and Sound Protocol to build Autonomic Agility™: the capacity to relate to, shift, recover, and regulate under pressure. I’ve since trained over 375 coaches worldwide in this methodology, which is grounded in the work of Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D., and personally endorsed by him. I’m also an educational partner with the Polyvagal Institute and the author of The Pressure Paradox on Psychology Today.
What Is Coaching? A Polyvagal Lens
Coaching begins in the body, not the mind.
It starts by meeting clients exactly where they are in their physiology. Whatever they’re experiencing, whether it’s anxiety, withdrawal, self-sabotage, or a stuck habit, we help them understand why their actions, reactions, and interactions make sense. These patterns aren’t signs of failure, weakness, or not being good enough. They’re adaptive, reflexive responses from a nervous system doing its best to keep us alive.
In this way, coaching becomes a relational and physiological process. We help clients recognize that trust, safety, and confidence aren’t traits — they’re states. And those states are always just an autonomic shift away.
As coaches, we become a reliable cue of safety. We guide our clients’ integrated brain, body, and nervous system through real-time shifts between protection and connection, disruption and presence, movement and stillness. And once a foundation of trust is established, we offer clear guidance that challenges just enough to stretch and integrate, not overwhelm or reinforce patterns of protection.
That’s where capacity builds. That’s where lasting change begins.
When Safety Feels Too Far
In my work, I’ve found that for some high achievers, feeling safe isn’t just unfamiliar, it’s too far to go. For people whose success has been forged through vigilance, control, or high-stakes competition, the idea of relaxing into safety can feel like vulnerability. Or worse — weakness.
Sometimes this comes from past experiences of being hurt, outperformed, or shamed for letting their guard down. Other times, it’s cultural: they’ve been conditioned to believe that the only way to win is to fight, to attack, and to treat the opponent as a threat. In those moments, safety isn’t accessible. And pushing for it too soon only reinforces the nervous system’s defenses.
So we don’t start there.
Instead of chasing a state their body can’t yet welcome, we start with what is available. Sometimes that’s control. Sometimes it’s confidence. Sometimes it’s simply intensity with purpose: using anxiety as fuel, not something to suppress. It’s not about pretending to feel calm or safe. It’s about helping the brain-body system work with itself, not against itself.
Over time, this flexibility is what builds Autonomic Agility™, not by forcing a shift into softness, but by expanding the range of what is possible.
In the second of this two-part blog, Michael will explore how the Safe and Sound Protocol fits into this work, not just as a tool for nervous system regulation, but as a foundational practice for building Autonomic Agility™ and embodied performance. He’ll share how physiological trust takes shape in high-pressure environments, and how coaching, when grounded in Polyvagal Theory, can help turn protective patterns into powerful pathways for growth.
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