How to achieve peak performance

What do the highest performing athletes have in common? As well as incredible fitness and dogged devotion to a singular pursuit, they can enter a place called the ‘zone of elite performance.’ If you’re a fan of popular culture or sports, getting ‘in the zone’ isn’t a foreign concept at all. It’s a neat way to describe a period of time or a moment when someone excels beyond what was considered possible.

Athletes who go there describe it in different ways, yet their experiences all share a few hallmark similarities.

Famous F1 driver Ayrton Senna entered the zone while racing in qualifying around the Monaco circuit. Getting faster and faster (and faster) with each lap, he went on to set lap record after lap record. He did this while in a trance-like state. Ayrton described it afterward as ‘almost a religious experience. I looked down and saw myself. I was not driving the car; it was like it was happening automatically.’

The world’s fastest man, Usain Bolt, describes it like going on autopilot. Time skips: the race starts, the race ends, and a world record, seemingly, just happens to break. David Beckham reflects on his incredible free-kick scoring ability: how he can place the ball exactly where he imagines. He says he isn’t consciously aware of how he does it.

When an athlete gets in the zone, he or she describes the experience as automatic, or out-of-body. Have you ever noticed a time when you’ve powered through some work in a calm haze, and the results came out great? You were flowing in the zone.

Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly is the father of ‘flow’ – he first coined the term in 1975. He is unequivocal on its benefits – we are at our happiest when in flow.

It’s called a flow state because reaching a level of extremely high performance, ordinarily demanding and rigorous, happens with ease. Its effortlessness belies an elite level of achievement, and the result transcends athleticism or mental aptitude. Put simply: when you’re in flow, the kinds of things you’ve never done before, maybe only imagined, become possible, accomplishments even beyond your physiology or psychology.

What might come as a surprise is that almost everyone has been in the zone many times in their lives. It can happen while doing everyday things, too, but especially when expressing ourselves creatively. We all enter the zone at some point, and we can work to access it when we need to.

The zone is difficult to get into yet easy to fall out of. The better athletes and individuals that I’ve worked with in my life have their own techniques to get into it and stay there for long periods of time. They all find the zone is at the intersection of three things that make us human.

To get there, you need to visualise, to dream of what is going to take place. It’s essential for high performers to foresee what they’ll be doing. Along with this comes self-belief. You need self-belief to achieve anything in elite sports – and you need it to accomplish in other areas of your life, too. Lastly, the final characteristic is action. Just do it.

Reaching a state of flow in the zone happens when thousands of hours’ practice combines with visualisation, self-belief and, ultimately, action. For an Olympic long jumper, this culminating moment might be when they take that deep breath and hurtle down the track. For a working professional, it might be the moments of deep, slow breath as they begin typing out an important document on their keyboard.

But behind these characteristics are four elements that need to exist to get there. They are resilience, positive mindset, teamwork, and humour. Work on these, and you’re working towards the zone.

The first thing you need to work on to access the zone is your mental side. After all, if your mind frame isn’t in order or you’re stressed, you’re not going to eat well, you’re going to forfeit your exercise for that day and you might be more likely to use coping mechanisms like alcohol or smoking. The mental enables you to change the physical. Seriously, your brain can alter the realities of your body.

I consulted with two guys who wanted to run The Great Wall of China, and in their itinerary was the equivalent of a marathon per day for 90 days. I didn’t think it was possible, but they did it. Their mind overruled their bodies. They were doing it for altruistic reasons, and this is why, I believe, the brain followed along with the commitment.

Then there’s Lewis Gordon Pugh who made it into the Guinness Book of Records for the farthest north and the farthest south swim. To counteract the freezing waters, he’d meditate, imagining in his mind’s eye a fire building in his body. Using this, he systematically – using a technique he calls ‘anticipatory thermogenesis’ – gave himself a fever, raising his core temp to 38.5 degrees before plunging into the briny chill. The mind is powerful.

Since the zone is a combination of the mental, the physical and the emotional, where visualisation and self-belief meet action, working on both your psychological and physiological wellbeing in unison is the way to engage this technique to reach peak performance.

Whether it’s mediation, ballroom dancing or trail running, or any activity you enjoy, getting in the zone to reach peak performance is possible in all areas of your life. And adding in an app like Waking Up – which teaches you to meditate, reason more effectively, and deepen your understanding of yourself and others – or the mind-calming Headspace, will help get you there. The zone's a profoundly productive place to be, whether you are competing in the Olympics, producing an important presentation at work, or just washing the dishes.

Professor Wayne Derman is the director of the Institute for Sport and Exercise Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. His research has focused on secondary prevention of chronic disease of lifestyle, injury and illness prevention in athletes, especially those with disabilities. He was the chief medical officer for the South African team at the Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004 Olympic Games, and medical officer for the South African Paralympic Team in Beijing 2008 and London 2012. In December 2001 to May 2002, he served as flight surgeon to cosmonaut Mark Shuttleworth during the first African in Space mission in Russia. He currently serves on the International Paralympic Committee Medical Commission. Recently, professor Derman was a guest at the third annual AIA Vitality summit, where he shared his insights with an Australian audience.