I love putting that shit on silent and generally can see the relief filter into my game lol
Something I need to work on right now, the quiet mind. I try to make an entire inning feel like a continuous action and the only way to do that is to plan the inning in it's entirety and then have the highest level of the mind shut up! Many benefits starting with flow. A quiet mind and flow may well lead to the highest known level of the zone. There it is possible to function very very close to 100% of our maximum ability.
Talking to everyone: There are a lot of misunderstandings about the zone and different people use the word to refer to different things. "Flow" isn't normally the zone although some use the words interchangeably. The zone I am interested in is a higher state of consciousness. Our senses and even senses we didn't know we have start working at a much higher level. As an example, although hard of hearing I might hear every word of a conversation across a crowded room.
The subconscious is not the same as the unconscious and the unconscious is what we are interested in. It controls things like our heart beat and normally walking, running, and breathing. All of these things including heart beat can be brought under voluntary control with practice.
I have been in the zone many times. Repetitive motions that aren't quite the same seem to help induce it, think bouncing a rubber ball or using your hand to roll a cue ball around the table or across it over and over.
Short track racing a car was perfect to enter the zone. Each lap was very similar except when flowing through traffic. Pool is one of the more difficult things to enter and stay in the zone due to the constant interruption of racking. However, the longest I was ever in the zone was shooting pool on an old challenge table. Other people served as my rack boys and I played all night going into the place in daylight and leaving in daylight the next morning. I knew I had played ten or twelve hours but subjectively I felt like I had played two or three hours and I felt fresh enough to play another twelve hours.
I had a chance to set a pistol record one dark and stormy night shooting outdoors. Just past the halfway point I realized I had just shot the toughest stage for me and I was still clean, perfect score on all targets.
We used an electronic timer with a starting buzzer to start each stage. I decided I would use the sound of the buzzer as my cue to drop into the zone. The buzzer would sound, my hands would sweep from the surrender position to the draw. By the time I drew my pistol, less than a second, I was in the zone each stage.
That particular record had stood uncaptured for fifteen years. I took it in my second season shooting although I had been competing at something literally all of my life and I was in my thirties when I set this record. A perfect score so like a perfect in snooker it could never be surpassed, only matched.
The more often I entered the zone the easier it became to find it. It isn't a narrow focus but some find that a narrow focus can lead to the zone and consider narrow focus to be the second level of the zone with no focus being the third and highest level of the zone. I found it possible to jump directly into third level.
My sister had her first baby and it had just started rolling over. She lay the baby on the couch as usual and went to grab a diaper. The baby rolled over and fell off the couch towards a concrete floor covered with the old tarpaper linoleum. I was about ten or twelve feet away from the baby leaning in a doorway and my sister had just entered the other end of the living room so she was about twenty feet away but saw everything. With a rolling dive I landed under the baby on my back and caught it. I even kept from banging my own head on the floor. This was the type of stunt action heroes in movies pulled off, not half drunk adolescents. My sister asked how in the world I did it. "No choice."
Under the weight of pure necessity I had snapped into the zone in a split second, the baby was already starting to fall when I saw the danger.
Shooting an old half inch steel plate rack it was possible to watch them all fall in the zone. Five plates and the first would be at about a forty-five degree angle when I shot the last and I could watch them all fall in an effect that reminded me of a waterfall.
The zone is a magic place where we can have a 100% performance, even above what we thought was 100%!
I suspect that the zone will be fully understood by sports medicine professionals in fifty or a hundred years. Until it is understood it can seem like magic.
Hu