Into the Zone
The kind of mental conditioning that makes athletes into superstars also helps ordinary folks become extraordinary
Such was at least partly the case with Jim Loehr. Founder of a leading sports and motivational training center, LGE Performance Systems, in Orlando, Fla., Loehr began his career in the early 1970s as the head of a mental health center in southern Colorado. But the experience of successfully treating two professional athletes--albeit "under the cover of darkness"--changed his plans. It was not long before he decided to launch his own sports psychology practice in Denver, a decision greeted by derision from his peers.
Holy Grail. Some of the challenges he faced continue to plague the field. Prominent among them was Americans' tendency to associate psychology with the treatment of weakness or disorders, even though Loehr was concerned with improving performance, not in administering therapy. Undaunted, Loehr developed his own version of the peak performance state that has come to be the Holy Grail of the larger American sports psychology industry--the "ideal performance state" (IPS), he prefers to call it, or "mental toughness."
"The mind and the body are one," says Loehr. "Mental toughness is not just something you can sit in a room and visualize and all of a sudden you're mentally tough. The ability to handle physical stress takes us right into the ability to handle mental and emotional stress."
The center that he founded in Orlando in the early 1990s quickly became a mecca for a wide assortment of people who have one thing in common: the desire to be the best they can possibly be. Last week, for example, you could find retired tennis champ Jim Courier (getting in shape for his new career as a commentator), a dozen executives from Macy's department store, a 600-pound sumo wrestler, and various amateur athletes wandering the LGE grounds (box, Page 43). They came to improve their performance on the playing field, in the boardroom, or in life in general--and what they got is an intense workout for both the mind and the muscles.
"When there's no time left on the clock, you're 2 points down and on the foul line, what is that person thinking about before they shoot the shot? If they have one mental thought that says, `If I miss this shot we lose' . . . within moments, they are secreting negative brain chemistry," says Terry Lyles, LGE psychologist. It's all about taking yourself out of the moment, he explains, about using rituals to transport yourself before the shot or point. "They have to go from the mental side to tap into the emotional side next, which takes them to the physical part, which will be to shoot the foul shot. They've shot thousands of foul shots, but the issue is not shooting the foul shot, the issue is screaming fans, no time on the clock, and your whole team is looking for you to perform. The issue is focus."
"All of corporate America has its own form of stress, the same way the athlete has stress," says Rudy Borneo, vice chairman of Macy's West, who was visiting LGE last week. "It's really how you use that stress, how you build a format to make it positive rather than negative, how you can turn it into a growth factor."
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