You In The Zone

Teaching the zone to people has been the ultimate challenge in my tennis career. Most of the people who have come to my workshops have walked away with a new understanding of the game and what is involved in performing at their highest level. Some have just walked away thinking they wasted their time because I didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear. And many have returned again and again to learn more about the zone – and about themselves along the way.

That’s the part of teaching the zone that turns me on the most. The people who come back are interested not only in playing better tennis, but also in finding out more about who they really are as human beings.

Tennis in the zone is one of those full-potential experiences we can have that demonstrates to us firsthand who we really are as human beings operating to our maximum potential. And to watch as people discover for themselves who they really are on the tennis court has been an amazing journey for me as a teacher.

Some students, however, find the zone too much to bother with. Working on their footwork is much more palatable to them than working on their mind work, so they come out for one lesson or a group session and get in the zone, but when they go back to competing in their league matches they return to using their visual and mental focus the same way they did before they took a lesson on getting in the zone. For them playing tennis in the zone will probably never happen. Or if it does, it will be when they accidentally switch to a fixed-focus state.

But mostly I deal with returnees, players who are interested in learning more about themselves along with learning how to play tennis at their highest level. This is not to say that these players are destined for Wimbledon. That is surely not the case. Most are in the 3.5 - 4.5 category and they play the game for a variety of reasons, one of which is to experience their full potential on the court.

Seeing this happen brings me a great deal of professional satisfaction and fulfillment, but mostly it lets me know there are people out there who are aware enough to realize there is something very special they are capable of doing when they let go of the operational bonds that tie them down to their ordinary performance level. These are the people who realize there is something else in life, something else in tennis that can be accessed only when they access something else in themselves. Only when they let go of who they think they are, will they be able to see who they truly are.

Who you are when you play tennis in the norm is not the same as who you are when you play tennis in the zone. Yes, you are the same person, the same operating system on the outside, but the inner workings of your operating system when you are in the zone are much different from when you are in the norm. And because of the difference in the inner workings of your operating system when you are in the zone, you also experience a difference in the outer interface that is created between your operating system and the tennis environment.

When you are in the zone this core connection, this parallel interface between you and the tennis environment is of a higher order than the serial interface you use in your normal performance state, and it is this higher order, parallel interface that is causal to both your higher level of performance and the higher order behavioral state of flow that you experience when you are in the zone.

In essence, you are the same person but you are not operating in your normal mode of operation, and that’s when you get to experience yourself in your peak performance state. That’s when you get to experience you at your full potential on the tennis court.

And you at your full potential is the real you, the whole you. You in the zone.