There are three key variables to peak performance
1. To be fully aware of your true talents and strengths in order to be able to use and build upon them. “Working in the Zone” doesn’t focus on what you can’t do. We don’t try to develop potential that doesn’t exist. We develop what’s really there.
2. To face and appreciate limiting patterns of thought, emotion and behavior. They are barriers to peak performance. But fighting them isn’t the answer. It’s about mitigating their dominance over you.
3. And finally, to know the knack of “Working in the Zone”: an inner state in which you devote all you are willing to give and all that is actually available to you. In sports “the Zone“ means: high performance seems to “happen to you“ effortlessly; inner blockages seem to melt away. “Working in the Zone“ transfers this experience into the world of leadership.
Mindfulness techniques play a key role in realizing this transfer. They support leaders to develop their potential, to mitigate their limiting patterns, and to experience high performance states more often.
”Working in the Zone“ is a mindful mind-set, a powerful “inner posture” (a tendency to think, feel and behave in a certain way). It is about wanting to give it your all, about realizing your inner resources to the fullest, and about taking some distance from your own automatically reactive thoughts, emotions and behaviors.
In this era of pace and pressure from within and without, where one provocative statement can sometimes lead a manager who is already on edge to emotion and impulsive behaviour before he knows it, distance is a decisive factor.
But Mindfulness practice is about more than that: You get to know yourself better. You become more empathic, more attentive. You think more clearly and are more solution-focused. However, this is not an approach which will train you to do even more, to concentrate more, to drain yourself more. Rather, it’s about enhancing your vigilance, giving you a wider awareness of what is happening in both your internal and external environments, so that you can be more effective with less effort.
“Working in the Zone” combines practice oriented towards your strengths with mindfulness and positive communication. This is not a soft approach: When people work together in this spirit they will address what works and what doesn’t without hesitation. They will clarify their expectations. They will work together to find solutions when they initially disagree. And all of this will lead to the best possible performance.
