Different people find the zone in different ways. For some it comes through intense physical activity, through physically demanding sports, through risk, competition, and maybe a sense of danger. For others it may come through activities that seem physically passive, through writing, painting, math, meditation, and other modes of intense contemplation. As I said earlier, we don’t only get one Element apiece, nor is there only one road for each of us to the zone. We may have different experiences of it in our lives. However, there are some common features to being in that magical place.
Are We There Yet?
One of the strongest signs of being in the zone is a sense of freedom and of authenticity. When we are doing something that we love and are naturally good at, we are much more likely to feel centered in our true sense of self—to be who we feel we truly are. When we are in our Element, we feel we are doing what we are meant to be doing and being who we’re meant to be.
Time also feels very different in the zone. When you’re connecting this way with your deep interests and natural energy, time tends to move more quickly, more fluidly. For Ewa Laurance, nine hours can feel like twenty minutes. We know the opposite is true when you have to do things to which you don’t feel a strong connection. We’ve all had experiences where twenty minutes can feel like nine hours. At those times, we’re not in the zone. In fact, we’re probably zoning out.
For me, this time shift (the good one, not the bad one) happens most often when I’m working with people, and especially when I’m giving presentations. When I am deep in the throes of exploring and presenting ideas with groups, time tends to move more quickly, more fluidly. I can be in a room with ten or twenty people or several thousand, and it’s always the same. For the first five or ten minutes, I’m feeling for the energy of the room and trying things out to catch the right wavelength there. Those first minutes can feel slow. But then, when I do make the connection, I slip into a different gear. When I have the pulse of the room with me, I feel a different energy—and I think they do too— which carries us forward at a different pace and in a different space. When that happens, I can look at the clock and see that almost an hour has gone by.
The other feature common among those familiar with this experience is the movement into a kind of “meta‐state” where ideas come more quickly, as if you’re tapping a source that makes it significantly easier to achieve your task. You develop a facility for the thing you are doing because you’ve unified your energy with the process and the efforts you are making. So there’s a real sense of ideas flowing through you and out of you; that you’re in some way channeling these things. You’re being an instrument of them rather than being obstructive to them or struggling to reach them. Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Eric Clapton describes it as being “in harmony with time. It’s a great feeling.”
You can see and experience this shift in all sorts of performances, in acting, in dance, in musical performances, and in sports. You see that people have suddenly entered a different phase. You see them relaxed, you see them loosen up and become instruments of their own expression.
Grand Prix racer Jochen Rindt said simply that when he’s racing, “You ignore everything and just concentrate. You forget about the rest of the world and become part of the car and track. It’s a very special feeling. You’re completely out of this world and completely into it. There’s nothing like it.”
Aviator Wilbur Wright described it this way: “When you know, after the first few minutes, that the whole mechanism is working perfectly, the sensation is so keenly delightful as to be almost beyond description. More than anything else the sensation is one of perfect peace mingled with an excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost, if you can conceive of such a combination.”
Superstar athlete Monica Seles says, “When I am consistently playing my best tennis, I am also consistently in the zone,” but notes, “Once you think about being in the zone, you are immediately out of it.”
Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (it’s pronounced “chicks‐sent‐me‐HIGH‐ee,” if you’d like to try it at home) performed “decades of research on the positive aspects of human experience—joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life I call flow.” In his landmark work Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi writes of a “state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and [people] want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake.” What Dr. Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow” (and what many others call “being in the zone”) “happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else.”
Dr. Csikszentmihalyi speaks of the “elements of enjoyment,” the components that comprise an optimal experience. These include facing a challenge that requires a skill one possesses, complete absorption in an activity, clear goals and feedback, concentration on the task at hand that allows one to forget everything else, the loss of self‐consciousness, and the sense that time “transforms” during the experience. “The key element of an optimal experience,” he says in Flow, “is that it is an end in itself. Even if initially undertaken for other reasons, the activity that consumes us becomes intrinsically rewarding.”
This is a crucial point to grasp. Being in the Element and especially being in the zone doesn’t take energy away from you; it gives it to you. I used to watch politicians fighting elections or trying to stay in office and wonder how they kept going. You see them traveling all over the world, under constant pressure to perform, making critical decisions with every appearance and living irregular hours in a constant spotlight of attention. I wondered how they didn’t fall over from sheer exhaustion. The fact is, though, that they love most of it, or they wouldn’t do it. The very thing that would wear me out is fueling them up.
Activities we love fill us with energy even when we are physically exhausted. Activities we don’t like can drain us in minutes, even if we approach them at our physical peak of fitness. This is one of the keys to the Element, and one of the primary reasons why finding the Element is vital for every person. When people place themselves in situations that lead to their being in the zone, they tap into a primal source of energy. They are literally more alive because of it.
It is as though being in the zone plugs you into a kind of power pack—for the time you are there, you receive more energy than you expend. Energy drives all of our lives. This isn’t a simple matter of physical energy we think we have or don’t have but of our mental or psychic energy. Mental energy is not a fixed substance. It rises and falls with our passion and commitment to what we are doing at the time. The key difference is in our attitude, and our sense of resonance with an activity. As the song says, “I could have danced all night.”
Being in your Element, having that experience of flow, is empowering because it’s a way of unifying our energies. It’s a way of feeling deeply connected with our own sense of identity and it curiously comes about through a sense of relaxing, of feeling perfectly natural to be doing what you’re doing. It’s a profound sense of being in your skin, of connecting to your own internal pulse or energy.