Positivity II – Performance and the Player’s Mindset

 

‘In the Zone’

In the next two pros emails we’re going to explore the issue of being ‘in the zone’.

 

One of the mental states that elite athletes strive to achieve is what is often called ‘being in the zone’. The legendary football player Pele described the experience, "I felt a strange calmness... a kind of euphoria. I felt I could run all day without tiring, that I could dribble through any of their team or all of them, that I could almost pass through them physically." Another example of this type of extreme focus was given by the Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna, "I was already on pole, [...] and I just kept going. Suddenly I was nearly two seconds faster than anybody else, including my team mate with the same car. And suddenly I realised that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension. It was like I was in a tunnel. Not only the tunnel under the hotel but the whole circuit was a tunnel. I was just going and going, more and more and more and more. I was way over the limit but still able to find even more."

 

This concept originally stemmed from an unpronounceable psychologist called Csíkszentmihályi who proposed that when this ‘flow’ (as he called it) is achieved then a person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing and they have a feeling of total focus, energy, and will perform what they’re doing to their maximum ability. Subsequent sports’ psychologists have suggested that what being in the zone achieves is a clearer pathway between our subconscious and conscious such that coordination, decisions, and movement are quicker and more accurate than normal.

 

Focus as a function of performance

Whether or not there is such a thing as the zone, it’s certainly well documented that the more focused an athlete is on the activity they’re engaged in then the better they perform. Proper mental focus is really important.

 

However, most athletes find focus very difficult to achieve because it requires blocking out all other concerns that occupy their thoughts. So concerns about off the pitch issues – such as who is in the stands, or what’s going on at home prevent them from being totally concentrated. Similarly issues arising in the game can often burst the bubble of focus; ‘What is my opponent doing? Why did the referee make that bad decision? I can’t believe I made that mistake’ etc. John McEnroe was masterful at disrupting the game to break his opponent’s concentration, and often exposed the other players’ mental fragility.

 

The strong mindset of the Christian

It seems to me that Christian players’ should be the mentally strongest players out there, because of the unique nature of the Christian mindset. Paul writes in Philippians 4:7 ‘the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus’. He is describing the way that God’s Holy Spirit guards or protects our minds from outside influences that threaten to determine our mental state and feelings.

 

We’ll explore this in more depth next week – but what he’s saying is that normally circumstances determine how we think and how we feel; so if things are going well then we feel energised and if things are going badly then our flow is broken and we can feel demotivated. However Paul is saying that our feelings and mindset as Christians are determined by ‘being in Christ’, which guards us against the disruptive influence of outside circumstances and in sports’ psychology can help us to keep our focus.