TRUST SUBCONSCIOUS

Source:Get into the Zone

One of the most powerful terms used in world sport for decades is the mental state called ‘the zone’.

This is the mental state which produces super-human performances, amazing times and winning streaks.

Any athlete who is in this state is virtually unbeatable at their respective level of competition – and at the elite level, you witness records being well and truly smashed.

An athlete who is in the zone experiences an unusual feeling of effortless power, allowing them to feel as if their body is powered by a turbo-charged engine, and they find their body moving with maximum result but minimum energy.

The strange part about this is – this powerful performance does not feel as if it is being controlled by the actual athlete themselves! In fact, they often report feeling as if they weren’t responsible for the result at all – as if their body was being guided and directed by a more powerful force (and this is exactly what is happening).

Almost every athlete at some stage in their career has experienced this feeling to some extent and then wondered afterwards “how did I do that?” This is the mystery that surrounds the zone – why does it appear so fleetingly, and then disappear just as quickly as it came? And most of all – why can’t we access it all the time?

What is the powerful force which is guiding the body during this period? The answer is the sleeping giant that resides inside all human beings – the subconscious mind, the source of all bodily movement which also stores all past sporting memories and experience.

When an athlete is ‘zoning’, their conscious mind becomes quiet (the normally busy, chattering mind we use all the time), and this allows their more powerful subconscious to run their performance on ‘automatic pilot’, in the way a computer runs software.

This allows their movements to flow much easier, effortlessly increasing speed and power in a way that could never be matched by conscious thought.

This means that when you are in the zone, you have virtually no thought going through your mind whatsoever, your body is just moving on instinct and automatic-pilot, powered directly by your subconscious mind.


This is not to say that your body is moving without instruction, on the contrary, it is simply getting its instructions from a more powerful and reliable source.


So how do we get into the zone? Everyone must find the method that best suits their needs, but there are a few threads which run through most ‘zoning’ experiences, such as:

· Swimming, biking and running much more instinctively than normal, almost without conscious direction or thought. The subconscious knows exactly what to do and advises your body constantly on the best course of action. This is most often brought on by a state of mental quietness, which is actually a form of deep concentration.

· Allowing your body movements to flow naturally rather than forcing the movements, very much like the Zen principle ‘less is more’. Power and speed come from synchronizing into the perfect rhythm rather than from necessarily expending huge effort.

ENTERING THE “FLOW ZONE”

Source: Flow Zone

Entry into the flow zone can occur when people find a task they are skilled at, and engage in it at a level that slightly taxes their ability. “People seem to concentrate best when the demands on them are a bit greater than usual, and they are able to give more than usual. If there is too little demand on them, people are bored. If there is too much for them to handle, they get anxious. Flow occurs in that delicate zone between boredom and anxiety.” …

Watching someone in flow gives the impression that the difficult is easy; peak performance appears natural and ordinary. This impression parallels what is going on within the brain, where a similar paradox is repeated: the most challenging tasks are done with a minimum expenditure of mental energy.

In flow the brain is in a “cool” state, its arousal and inhibition of neural circuitry attuned to the demand of the moment. When people are engaged in activities that effortlessly capture and hold their attention, their brain “quiets down” in the sense that there is a lessening of cortical arousal. That discovery is remarkable, given that flow allows people to tackle the most challenging tasks in a given domain, whether playing against a chess master or solving a complex mathematical problem. The expectation would be that such challenging tasks would require more cortical activity, not less. But a key to flow is that it occurs only within reach of the summit of ability, where skills are well rehearsed and neural circuits are most efficient.

A strained concentration-a focus fueled by worry-produces increased cortical activation. But the zone of flow and optimal performance seems to be an oasis of cortical efficiency, with a bare minimum of mental energy expended. That makes sense, perhaps, in terms of the skilled practice that allows people to get into flow: having mastered the moves of a task, whether a physical one such as rock climbing or a mental one such as computer programming, means that the brain can be more efficient in performing them. Well-practiced moves require much less brain effort than do ones just being learned, or those that are still too hard. Likewise, when the brain is working less efficiently because of fatigue or nervousness, as happens at the end of a long, stressful day, there is a blurring of the precision of cortical effort, with too many superfluous areas being activated-a neural state experienced as being highly distracted. The same happens in boredom.

But when the brain is operating at peak efficiency, as in flow, there is a precise relation between the active areas and the demands of the task. In this state even hard work can seem refreshing or replenishing rather than draining. Because flow emerges in the zone in which an activity challenges people to the fullest of their capacities, as their skills increase it takes a heightened challenge to get into flow. If a task is too simple, it is boring; if too challenging, the result is anxiety rather than flow.

It can be argued that mastery in a craft or skill is spurred on by the experience of flow-that the motivation to get better and better at something, be it playing the violin, dancing, or gene-splicing, is at least in part to stay in flow while doing it. Indeed, in a study of two hundred artists eighteen years after they left art school, Csikszentmihalyi found that it was those who in their student days had savored the sheer joy of painting itself who had become serious painters. Those who had been motivated in art school by dreams of fame and wealth for the most part drifted away from art after graduating.

Csikszentmihalyi concludes: “Painters must want to paint above all else. If the artist in front of the canvas begins to wonder how much he will sell it for, or what the critics will think of it, he won’t be able to pursue original avenues. Creative achievements depend on single-minded immersion.”

ECSTATIC SELF-FORGETFULNESS

“In self-forgetfulness, one draws closer to God.” ~Henry David Thoreau

“Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. “Childlikeness” has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think. He thinks like the showers coming down from the sky; he thinks like the waves rolling on the ocean; he thinks like the stars illuminating the nightly heavens; he thinks like the green foliage shooting forth in the relaxing spring breeze. Indeed, he is the showers, the ocean, the stars, the foliage” ~D.T. Suzuki

Flow is a state of self-forgetfulness, the opposite of rumination and worry: instead of being lost in nervous preoccupation, people in flow are so absorbed in the task at hand that they lose all self-consciousness, dropping the small preoccupations—health, bills, even doing well—of daily life. In this sense moments of flow are egoless. Paradoxically, people in flow exhibit a masterly control of what they are doing, their responses perfectly attuned to the changing demands of the task. And although people perform at their peak while in flow, they are unconcerned with how they are doing, with thought of success or failure—the sheer pleasure of the act itself is what motivates them.

“Billy Elliot” is a movie about a boy of about ten years old from a poor Irish family who learns how to dance. He practices incessantly, on the roof, in the alleys, everywhere in his small Irish village. His teacher suggests that he apply for a scholarship at a distinguished arts academy. The most poignant scene in the movie shows him auditioning for the scholarship. In front of a long desk of five stolid judges, the music is turned on and everyone waits for Billy Elliot to dance. At first his nervousness betrays him and he’s uncertain of his steps. But he slowly gives way to the rhythm that he hears. In minutes, Billy Elliot is leaping across the floor, doing the most fantastic numbers. After the audition, amazed by Billy’s prowess, one of the judges asks the boy the question, “What is it that you enjoy about dancing?” And his response: “I disappear. I forget myself completely.”