When you feel you are at your best, fully functioning, productive, happy, working well, alone and with others, you are In The Zone. You smile, feel energetic, know you are at the top of your game and can stay there by remaining relaxed, balanced, flexible and focused. It is about Internal Locus of Control, built on a solid foundation of acquired performance skills, knowing you have what it takes to succeed. You are In The Zone, Making Winning Moments Your Way of Life.
Peak Performance occurs throughout your day, not just during moments of super excellence such as reported by athletes and musicians when they are in the special place where everything flows and comes out right. It’s a personal place, something within you declaring you are special because you have prepared yourself for higher challenges, adaptability, and capacity for change when the plan fails to work as anticipated. Being special doesn’t mean you are better than someone else. It means you are achieving your goals at your highest level, not limited by tension, strain, constraint and distractibility.
Internal Locus of Control is the result of work you have done in preparation for your best performance, from your basic performance skills to high levels of productivity and personal excellence. Feeling good about yourself does not come through self-deception, make-believe and wishful thinking. It results from realistic goal setting and acquiring the skills you want and need for success in your endeavors, whatever they might be. It is about strategy and making plans for your future, working to achieve them and knowing what situations you are most likely to enjoy success.
The Mulry Method builds upon your strategy for best performances related to the goals you have set for yourself on the job. This may mean feeling capable, respected and valued. At home, it may be the smiles and love you receive from significant others, expressing their appreciation and what you mean to them as they seek to accomplish their dreams. We are in this together, and being in the zone is something you can share as a form of positive leadership as a reliable team player and manager who listens and facilitates others toward achieving shared goals. While feeling in the zone may be thought of as an individual experience, which it certainly often is, it is also a high performance on a team, whether this be basketball, football, hockey, special assignments on the job, or even routine eight-hour days where you return home feeling good about the day and what is forthcoming in your personal life.
If you are not in the zone, where are you? Well, how about being tense, strained, tight, and distracted? When things go wrong, you feel overwhelmed, are inclined to blame others for your troubles and externalize your locus of control. You are inclined to say, “If management had more vision and respect, my co-workers just don’t get it; there is nothing further I can do because irresponsible others always sabotage me. You feel overburdened, stressed, angry, and reactive as you become increasingly incapacitated in a zero-sum game. You start thinking about redoing your resume and how things could be better elsewhere, where escape seems to be the better strategy. “Who needs this?” becomes a familiar phrase, experienced as a personal dilemma and sometimes shared inadvertently with co-workers or your spouse.
Are You Living Your Best Life?
Attitude is how you look at things and are observable in your behavior. A negative attitude devastates most, making success virtually impossible or undoubtedly tricky. It is a general expectation things will not work out, so why bother? Just complain and see where that goes. A positive attitude is another kind of expectation. One is declaring that things will work out for the best when I do what is needed, where I welcome possibilities and conflict resolution resulting from my forward-moving actions. I am a rewarding person to be around and typically bring out the best in others. I am a model for hope, success and valuable leadership. Knowing “attitude” is mostly a matter of how you look at things, and it frees you to quickly alter a negative view into a positive one. You have to participate in conflict resolution and goal attainment or blame others and remain in a state of felt defeat. It changes on a dime if you can greet conflict as something to be expected and overcome when you can approach conflict with a can-do attitude and do the work required by yourself and with others.
If you would like to explore in depth how you, your family, and your workgroup can benefit from In The Zone Self-learning and how our free content can help you and others, browse through the site. We can explore how In the Zone Skills Training, Internal Locus of Control, Positive Attitude and Focused Action can change your life. Learning the skills of In The Zone Performers might very well become a pivotal issue, where you and others find that “cool spot” where everything flows, problems are solved routinely, and smiles replace frowns. Satisfaction replaces frustration, and success is viewed as what you do to progress – making winning moments your way of life.