On Process and Outcome

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ph.D. describes flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost."

Sounds like playing tennis in the zone, and what I find fascinating about the process of flow is that it has a direct relationship to the Parallel Mode Process because of the Parallel Interface and creation of the temporal and spatial dimension of the present.

Players who are in the zone are:
1. Completely involved in the activity for its own sake.
2. They are in an egoless state.
3. Time flies.
4. Every action, movement, and thought follows from the previous one.

When you are playing tennis in the zone you are playing tennis strictly for the sake of playing tennis. It’s not about winning or losing – it’s only about the game and your relationship with and within the tennis environment.

The act of doing something just for the sake of doing it is very childlike in nature. Ask a kid why he does something and he’ll say, “because it’s fun!” Ask an adult why he does something and he’ll say, “because it makes money or because it’s my job.” In the case of tennis he might say, “because I want to win or because it’s good exercise.” Very seldom do I ask that question of adults and get the answer, “because it’s fun.” But one of the first things people say to me after a lesson in playing tennis in the zone is, “that was fun!”

For me, if people aren’t having fun when they play tennis, then what the heck are they playing for? And yet so many of the people who play tennis seem to be having such a miserable time because they are playing to win rather than playing to have fun. Consequently, unless they are winning, they are not having fun. It’s all about massaging the ego rather than connecting to the game at its deepest level.

The deeper level of connection you experience in the zone requires that you be in an egoless state, a selfless state, and that means you cannot have as your objective the outcome of winning or losing. The outcome can’t be a part of your value structure because outcome is not the process, it is the result of the process, and if you are not in the process, you are not in the zone.

The point being that you can lose your match and still be a winner if your goal is to be in the zone. I play in the zone all the time and because that is my only goal, I come out a winner every time I play, and it has nothing to do with the score. It has nothing to do with the outcome. In essence, because I am in the zone a great percentage of the time, that means I am totally absorbed in the process a great percentage of the time. Almost as if the process itself is my outcome.

There’s one for you. When does process become outcome and outcome become process? By staying in the process you are achieving the outcome you desire, which has nothing to do with the traditional outcome of the score.