Into the Zone
The kind of mental conditioning that makes athletes into superstars also helps ordinary folks become extraordinary
Winning a high-speed car race or coming out on top in a corporate takeover isn't just a matter of skill; it's also about how people handle pressure. The intangible factor, not knowing who's going to buckle or who's going to hit the last-second field goal, is what makes these pursuits exciting--or terrifying. The same week that Woods breezed through the Open, for example, Yankee second baseman Chuck Knoblauch, who has become phobic about routine throws, made three errors in a single game. Golfer John Daly, whose physical gifts nearly match Woods's, took 14 strokes on Pebble Beach's 18th hole and quit the Open after the first round.
Many athletes speak of choking as a failure to be "in the zone." That state is not unlike the "flow" defined by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He began his career-long interest in the early 1960s studying a group of artists for his thesis on creativity. Struck by how so many became oblivious to their surroundings while they worked, he went on to investigate whether other activities and even jobs produced such absorption, such flow. What he found was that any pursuit was an "autotelic activity" if the doing, and not the goal, was the end in itself and if it involved such things as intense concentration, clarity of goals, quick feedback, and a fine balance of skills and challenges. Which is what works for Bocca. "When I do a solo--that's the moment you have to be 100 percent there--my mind is just in the character. I've been doing this for so many years, I don't have to think about what to do with my body. I don't think `now is my pirouette, now is my jump.' "
Practitioners of Zen, yoga, and many Eastern forms of martial arts have experienced the truth behind these principles without having had them explained scientifically, as Csikszentmihalyi and other proponents of flow-and-peak states well realize. Indeed, the scientists have learned a great deal from those and other premodern disciplines. Folklore about the mental dimension of sport is as old as the games themselves, but the scientific study of that dimension did not begin until the late 19th century, primarily in Germany and France. Throughout most of the first half of the 20th century, researchers concentrated on the description of the character types and personalities of athletes and paid almost no attention to performance. A rare exception was German psychiatrist Johannes Heinrich Schultz (1884-1970), who developed "autogenic training," a form of self-hypnosis that was supposed to boost relaxation. Yet not even Schultz believed that his research into the links between emotional and bodily states should serve to enhance athletic performance.
The coaches of the East bloc nations, including East Germany, are often credited with being the first to use psychology to supercharge their athletes. (Sports historian John Hoberman contends this is largely a Cold War myth, based partly on a desire of Western observers to see athletes from communist countries as programmed robots.) The perception that psychology lay behind the success of East bloc athletes prompted curiosity in the West--and even, according to some leading American sports psychologists, a desire to venture into the field themselves.
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