Into the Zone
The kind of mental conditioning that makes athletes into superstars also helps ordinary folks become extraordinary
Kid stuff. But back in Orlando, Neil Clausen is on the court for his daily tennis lesson, nailing one perfect backhand after another. Just 10 years old, this pint-size player already has a clear idea of his goals ("I'm here because I'm trying to go to Wimbledon") and an even more pronounced conception of what it's going to take to get there: "I need to work on my racket preparation, but things like concentration are very important [too]. I see players throwing their racket around . . . and I just don't think it really works, I don't think its very nice." His mother brings him to LGE six days a week. "We will go to matches and whether it's professionals or 12-year-olds, you have some incredible athletes, physically blessed people, who are just not able to pull it off during a match, all because their mental strength lets them down, or they couldn't focus, or they got distracted," she says. Neil is a quick study. In a pretend match, in between points, he quietly, solemnly goes through his own rituals: He adjusts strings on his racket, for one thing, and works on his breathing.
In an interview last year with Psychology Today, Richard Suinn, who in 1972 became the first sports psychologist to serve on the U.S. Olympic sports medicine team, listed the mental skills that modern sports psychology focuses on, including "stress management, self-regulation, visualization, goal setting, concentration, focus, even relaxation." Sound good? It's clear why so many who are outside sports respond to what sports psychology offers. "If you attack work, family, spiritual life the way you attack a game, it all works the same way," says Peter Cathey, chief operating officer of XPO Network Inc., a start-up interactive marketing company. Cathey has faced several challenges recently--moving across the country to start a new company, dealing with his mother's death, and putting his father in the hospital. But he says he's never felt more mentally fit, thanks to skills acquired at LGE. "There's no emotional hit in the face I can't deal with."
"If Tiger goes out to play and doesn't take a good relaxing breath or relax once in two hours, then that tension shows up as a bogey," explains stay-at-home mother Caryn Rohrbaugh, of Lemoyne, Pa. Rohrbaugh went though LGE so that she could perform better in the home and enjoy her time there. "For me, two hours of not taking a breath, not eating right, not being in the right mind-set turns up as impatience, forgetting to schedule something, a general feeling of being overwhelmed. It's still a bogey, though."
There is no question that the mental toughness developed by world-class athletes has pulled them through trials off the playing field as well as on--another reason why so many people are drawn to the peak performance ideal. Perhaps no sport is more mentally demanding than competitive cycling, and champion Lance Armstrong demonstrated some of the mental grit he acquired over years of fierce competitive racing by struggling back from testicular cancer. Diagnosed with the disease in 1996, he not only survived the surgery and debilitating chemo treatments but came back to win the Tour de France in 1999, a story recounted in his book, It's Not About the Bike.
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