We’ve all heard of being in the zone and many of you may have experienced being in the zone at some point. I know have. The first time I truly felt in the zone was in High School. I was playing football my senior year on homecoming. I felt invincible. No one could stop me. I felt like I had speed, strength, clarity and almost psychic abilities like I knew which play the other team was going to run next. It was amazing! However, it was inconsistent.
It wasn’t until many years later when I was in the Air Force that I experienced being in the zone at a similar level again. I often wondered why I was able to play and be in the zone that night on my homecoming and not others or at least more often? Why was that night so special and not other nights? What did I do (or didn’t do) that allowed me to feel and play at that level?
To be honest, I’ll probably never know why that night I felt so good. However, one of the things that I come across years later after learning about Flow from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was that there were two things that were at play when I was in the zone that night and I’m going to share with you why this is important for you to understand in your personal life and business.
First, your skills have to be so good (or at a level) where you’re not thinking about them. You are not thinking about your next move or what comes next as a rookie/newbie would do, you just do it. There is almost no thinking involved. You’re so trained you already know what to do and you know the next steps that are coming. Any challenges or monkey wrenches/hiccups you may face you know how to handle them with ease. In athletics, this is often referred to as muscle memory, but the same is true with your business skills such as sales, marketing/advertising, accounting, etc.
When I was in the military they train you to operate under stressful situations such as a gunfight without even thinking. When you come under fire your “muscle memory” kicks into play and your training takes over. You’re not thinking about taking cover or firing back you’re just doing it. The problem I see with most people is that they don’t even make it to this level. They give up before they even allow themselves to get good. You have to allow yourself to get the proper training. You have to be the correct information and then allow yourself to have learning experiences and often that simply takes some time, focus and practice.
Second, your skills have to match the challenge. If the challenge does not match your skill set then you become bored. When you’re bored and the task at hand is too easy you get complacent. Or worse yet, if the challenge is too great it can cause anxiety. When you have too much anxiety and no skills you fail or won’t take action.
So what do you do? The solution is to understand what skills you need to take yourself to the next level. You do this by figuring out what your goals are and then laser focusing on them and cutting out distractions. I talk about becoming more focused in my other blog post titled “lost in the noise”. Once you get on track and have a routine setup you then conduct a quarterly review or 90-day audit.
You do this by working really hard for 90 days and then take a break to reflect. I know some people who are even fortunate enough to take a week off or so and really rest and reflect. During this break, you look back on the last 90 days/quarter. The reason why you do that is so you can see what has been accomplished in accordance with your goals. A year is too long and you can’t always remember exactly what happened and a month can be too short to see any tangible results, but a lot can be accomplished in 90 days or a quarter.
You do this by breaking down your goals. So, for example, let’s say you have a revenue goal of $100,000 per year. You then break that down by quarter. So it would be $25,000 per quarter. And then by month: $8,333 per month and then by day: $416.65 (20 work days per month). For weight loss, for example, let’s say you wanted to lose 40 lbs in a year. So, 10lbs a quarter. 3.33lbs per month and then 0.11lbs per day. Do you see how this works? You start to chunk everything down and then it becomes more tangible.
Hopefully, this gives you a new perspective to looking at your goals and getting into the zone. If you found this article to be helpful please share it with someone you like.