3: J Pers 1996 Jun;64(2):275-310 The effect of perceived challenges and skills on the quality of subjective experience. Moneta GB, Csikszentmihalyi M. Institute of Occupational Health, Helsinki, Finland.

This article investigates the effects that perceived challenges and skills in activities have on the quality of everyday life experience. Based on flow theory it was predicted that quality of daily experience would depend on the challenge experienced and skill required in specific situations, as well as on the balance between challenge and skill. The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) was used on a sample of 208 talented adolescents to measure daily variations in four dimensions of experience (concentration, wish to do the activity, involvement, and happiness) in four contexts (in school, with relatives, with friends, and in solitude). The four dimensions of experience were regressed on the predictors challenges, skills, and their absolute difference expressing the balance/imbalance of challenges and skills. Hierarchical linear modeling, explained in detail herein, was conducted on a 1-week sample of experiences. Findings confirm the prediction of flow theory that the balance of challenges and skills has a positive and independent effect on the quality of experience. Yet some differences of parameter estimates were found between dimensions of experience and between social contexts. These heterogeneities call for a further improvement of the flow model. PMID: 8656320 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

4: J Pers Soc Psychol 1989 May;56(5):815-22 Optimal experience in work and leisure. Csikszentmihalyi M, LeFevre J. Department of Behavioral Sciences, University of Chicago, Illinois 60637. Followed 78 adult workers for 1 week with the experience sampling method. (This method randomly samples self-reports throughout the day.) The main question was whether the quality of experience was more influenced by whether a person was at work or at leisure or more influenced by whether a person was in flow (i.e., in a condition of high challenges and skills). Results showed that all the variables measuring the quality of experience, except for relaxation and motivation, are more affected by flow than by whether the respondent is working or in leisure. Moreover, the great majority of flow experiences are reported when working, not when in leisure. Regardless of the quality of experience, however, respondents are more motivated in leisure than in work. But individuals more motivated in flow than in apathy reported more positive experiences in work. Results suggest implications for improving the quality of everyday life. PMID: 2724069 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

1: Am Psychol 2000 Jan;55(1):5-14 Positive psychology. An introduction. Seligman ME, Csikszentmihalyi M. Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 3813 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-3604, USA. seligman@cattell.psych.upenn.edu A science of positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions promises to improve quality of life and prevent the pathologies that arise when life is barren and meaningless. The exclusive focus on pathology that has dominated so much of our discipline results in a model of the human being lacking the positive features that make life worth living. Hope, wisdom, creativity, future mindedness, courage, spirituality, responsibility, and perseverance are ignored or explained as transformations of more authentic negative impulses. The 15 articles in this millennial issue of the American Psychologist discuss such issues as what enables happiness, the effects of autonomy and self-regulation, how optimism and hope affect health, what constitutes wisdom, and how talent and creativity come to fruition. The authors outline a framework for a science of positive psychology, point to gaps in our knowledge, and predict that the next century will see a science and profession that will come to understand and build the factors that allow individuals, communities, and societies to flourish. PMID: 11392865 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

2: Am Psychol 2001 Apr;56(4):337-41 Catalytic creativity. The case of Linus Pauling. Nakamura J, Csikszentmihalyi M. University of Chicago, USA. jeanne.nakamura@cgu.edu This article illustrates how creativity is constituted by forces beyond the innovating individual, drawing examples from the career of the eminent chemist Linus Pauling. From a systems perspective, a scientific theory or other product is creative only if the innovation gains the acceptance of a field of experts and so transforms the culture. In addition to this crucial selective function vis-a-vis the completed work, the social field can play a catalytic role, fostering productive interactions between person and domain throughout a career. Pauling's case yields examples of how variously the social field contributes to creativity, shaping the individual's standards of judgment and providing opportunities, incentives, and critical evaluation. A formidable set of strengths suited Pauling for his scientific achievements, but examination of his career qualifies the notion of a lone genius whose brilliance carries the day. Publication Types: Biography Historical article Personal Name as Subject:   Pauling L PMID: 11330232 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]


 U.S.News & World Report Cover Story 7/3/00 Into the Zone

The kind of mental conditioning that makes athletes into superstars also helps ordinary folks become extraordinary By Jay Tolson

Sometimes you have to kill the thing you love. Pop-psych 101? To be sure. But Tiger Woods's Shermanesque march through the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach gave new force and meaning to the phrase. It's not just that Woods mowed down some of his nearest and dearest competitors, though that he certainly did. Nor is it only that he brought one of his favorite courses–and one of golf's hardest–to its knees. He also seemed to subdue the game itself: to beat it into submission. "Kill them," Kultida Woods used to say when her young son went off to face the competition. It was oddly predatory counsel coming from a Thai-born mother who at other times imparted Buddhist wisdom about inner peace. But if Woods was ever confused by these seemingly dissonant messages, he didn't show it at the Open. He killed 'em, every one, with almost transcendent calm, posting the biggest margin of victory in the history of golf's four "major" annual tournaments. "He's so focused every time," said an amazed Ernie Els, who tied for a distant second place. "That hunger for winning a major championship, it's like 110 percent. To be honest with you, I don't feel like that every week when I'm playing. He's just different. I'm not sure there's a lot of players out here like that."

Focus. Control. Flow. In the zone. Think of any other synonym for mental mastery, and it applies to the level of play that Woods achieved in the Open. And while this state of internal calm and power has different names, it boils down to this: When the body is brought to peak condition and the mind is completely focused, even unaware of what it's doing, an individual can achieve the extraordinary. But this is not a game of chance. Psychologists and physiologists say ordinary people can achieve this state by inducing changes in physiology, including brain-wave patterns and even heart rates, through focusing and relaxation techniques. These might include breathing exercises or using verbal cues or developing rituals (bouncing the ball exactly three times before you take the foul shot). It also might involve visualizing successful outcomes before you make the swing or jump shot, without thinking about the mechanics of the action. The "stay in the present" focus that enables Woods to sink almost routinely those deadly 8- and 10-foot putts for par came in part from what his father, Earl Woods–his best personal sports psychologist–taught him about having a mental picture of the ball rolling into the hole. Today, Americans of all stripes are using mental conditioning not just as a means to a better golf swing but also to make them better corporate competitors, more creative artists, and, some argue, better human beings.

"When you're in the zone, it's so quiet, it's so peaceful," says Harriet Ross, a potter from Hartsdale, N,Y., who uses the lessons of Zen to relax and focus. Julio Bocca, who has been a ballet prodigy since he was 4 years old in Argentina, worried about a decline as his 30s approached. Instead, he has been dancing to acclaim around the world–an achievement reached, he believes, through mental focus. Winning a high-speed car race or coming out on top in a corporate takeover isn't just a matter of skill; it's also about how people handle pressure. The intangible factor, not knowing who's going to buckle or who's going to hit the last-second field goal, is what makes these pursuits exciting–or terrifying. The same week that Woods breezed through the Open, for example, Yankee second baseman Chuck Knoblauch, who has become phobic about routine throws, made three errors in a single game. Golfer John Daly, whose physical gifts nearly match Woods's, took 14 strokes on Pebble Beach's 18th hole and quit the Open after the first round.

Many athletes speak of choking as a failure to be "in the zone." That state is not unlike the "flow" defined by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He began his career-long interest in the early 1960s studying a group of artists for his thesis on creativity. Struck by how so many became oblivious to their surroundings while they worked, he went on to investigate whether other activities and even jobs produced such absorption, such flow. What he found was that any pursuit was an "autotelic activity" if the doing, and not the goal, was the end in itself and if it involved such things as intense concentration, clarity of goals, quick feedback, and a fine balance of skills and challenges. Which is what works for Bocca. "When I do a solo–that's the moment you have to be 100 percent there–my mind is just in the character. I've been doing this for so many years, I don't have to think about what to do with my body. I don't think 'now is my pirouette, now is my jump.' "

Practitioners of Zen, yoga, and many Eastern forms of martial arts have experienced the truth behind these principles without having had them explained scientifically, as Csikszentmihalyi and other proponents of flow-and-peak states well realize. Indeed, the scientists have learned a great deal from those and other premodern disciplines. Folklore about the mental dimension of sport is as old as the games themselves, but the scientific study of that dimension did not begin until the late 19th century, primarily in Germany and France. Throughout most of the first half of the 20th century, researchers concentrated on the description of the character types and personalities of athletes and paid almost no attention to performance. A rare exception was German psychiatrist Johannes Heinrich Schultz (1884-1970), who developed "autogenic training," a form of self-hypnosis that was supposed to boost relaxation. Yet not even Schultz believed that his research into the links between emotional and bodily states should serve to enhance athletic performance.

The coaches of the East bloc nations, including East Germany, are often credited with being the first to use psychology to supercharge their athletes. (Sports historian John Hoberman contends this is largely a Cold War myth, based partly on a desire of Western observers to see athletes from communist countries as programmed robots.) The perception that psychology lay behind the success of East bloc athletes prompted curiosity in the West–and even, according to some leading American sports psychologists, a desire to venture into the field themselves. Such was at least partly the case with Jim Loehr. Founder of a leading sports and motivational training center, LGE Performance Systems, in Orlando, Fla., Loehr began his career in the early 1970s as the head of a mental health center in southern Colorado. But the experience of successfully treating two professional athletes–albeit "under the cover of darkness"–changed his plans. It was not long before he decided to launch his own sports psychology practice in Denver, a decision greeted by derision from his peers. Holy Grail. Some of the challenges he faced continue to plague the field. Prominent among them was Americans' tendency to associate psychology with the treatment of weakness or disorders, even though Loehr was concerned with improving performance, not in administering therapy. Undaunted, Loehr developed his own version of the peak performance state that has come to be the Holy Grail of the larger American sports psychology industry–the "ideal performance state" (IPS), he prefers to call it, or "mental toughness." "The mind and the body are one," says Loehr. "Mental toughness is not just something you can sit in a room and visualize and all of a sudden you're mentally tough. The ability to handle physical stress takes us right into the ability to handle mental and emotional stress." The center that he founded in Orlando in the early 1990s quickly became a mecca for a wide assortment of people who have one thing in common: the desire to be the best they can possibly be. Last week, for example, you could find retired tennis champ Jim Courier (getting in shape for his new career as a commentator), a dozen executives from Macy's department store, a 600-pound sumo wrestler, and various amateur athletes wandering the LGE grounds (box, Page 43). They came to improve their performance on the playing field, in the boardroom, or in life in general–and what they got is an intense workout for both the mind and the muscles.

"When there's no time left on the clock, you're 2 points down and on the foul line, what is that person thinking about before they shoot the shot? If they have one mental thought that says, 'If I miss this shot we lose' . . . within moments, they are secreting negative brain chemistry," says Terry Lyles, LGE psychologist. It's all about taking yourself out of the moment, he explains, about using rituals to transport yourself before the shot or point. "They have to go from the mental side to tap into the emotional side next, which takes them to the physical part, which will be to shoot the foul shot. They've shot thousands of foul shots, but the issue is not shooting the foul shot, the issue is screaming fans, no time on the clock, and your whole team is looking for you to perform. The issue is focus." "All of corporate America has its own form of stress, the same way the athlete has stress," says Rudy Borneo, vice chairman of Macy's West, who was visiting LGE last week. "It's really how you use that stress, how you build a format to make it positive rather than negative, how you can turn it into a growth factor."

Tony DiCicco became head of the U.S. Women's World Cup soccer team in 1994; a year later, he hired sports psychologist Colleen Hacker. He knew that coaches often talk about the importance of the mental game but rarely give it time commensurate with its importance. He is certain that hiring Hacker strengthened both individual and team performance. DiCicco points out that he is not alone in a growing appreciation of the value of sports psychologists: The U.S. Olympic team had only one in 1988, but it had 100 by 1996. There are now over 100 academic programs specializing in sports psychology, at least three academic journals, and over 1,000 members listed by the Association for the Advancement of Applied Sports Psychology. And elite professional and amateur teams and athletes seem to be increasingly using their services. The business. These specialists are taking the lessons of great athletes and coaches and shaping them into techniques that aspiring peak performers can learn to use. Sports Publishing Inc. of Champaign, Ill., whose books discuss how athletes get in the zone, plans to release 112 titles this year, about double last year's number. In the past few years, Simon & Schuster has published and reissued such titles as Golf is a Game of Confidence and Executive Trap: How to Play Your Personal Best on the Golf Course and On the Job. Many professional sports teams have psychologists on call, but that's a largely reactive, therapeutic approach. But another approach is spreading. Baseball's Cleveland Indians have a three-man performance-enhancement program that costs about $300,000 a year and deserves some credit for five straight American League Central Division titles since 1995, two of which led to World Series appearances.

Bob Troutwine, a psychologist in Liberty, Mo., has helped 18 NFL teams decide which players to recruit and how to use them. In 1998, Troutwine urged the Indianapolis Colts to draft Tennessee's Peyton Manning over another quarterback with similar statistics, Washington State's Ryan Leaf. A personality test showed that Manning was confident, but not brash, and Troutwine liked the fact that he was the son of former NFL quarterback Archie Manning. Troutwine was vindicated: Manning did well with the Colts, and Leaf, who was drafted by the San Diego Chargers, has flailed as a quarterback, insulted fans, and wants to leave the team. "In general you want competitive players," says Troutwine, who also consults for such corporate clients as Ford Motor Co. and Sprint Co., "but if a team is in a building phase, a hypercompetitive player may not handle losing very well."

The trend in hiring sports psychologists has yet to trickle down to the lower levels of sport, according to Albert J. Figone of California's Humboldt State University. But that's in large part because coaches view motivation and the mental game as their prerogative, even if they usually give it too lit-tle attention. Stanford University's Jim Thompson, director of the Positive Coaching Alliance, thinks it's absurd to use this stuff on kids. "All the sports psychology in the world isn't going to help the average kid unless he has tremendous skills as well," Thompson points out. "The danger is that parents might think, gee, if I could get my kid a good sports psychologist, he could be Tiger Woods. Well, no."

Kid stuff. But back in Orlando, Neil Clausen is on the court for his daily tennis lesson, nailing one perfect backhand after another. Just 10 years old, this pint-size player already has a clear idea of his goals ("I'm here because I'm trying to go to Wimbledon") and an even more pronounced conception of what it's going to take to get there: "I need to work on my racket preparation, but things like concentration are very important [too]. I see players throwing their racket around . . . and I just don't think it really works, I don't think its very nice." His mother brings him to LGE six days a week. "We will go to matches and whether it's professionals or 12-year-olds, you have some incredible athletes, physically blessed people, who are just not able to pull it off during a match, all because their mental strength lets them down, or they couldn't focus, or they got distracted," she says. Neil is a quick study. In a pretend match, in between points, he quietly, solemnly goes through his own rituals: He adjusts strings on his racket, for one thing, and works on his breathing.

In an interview last year with Psychology Today, Richard Suinn, who in 1972 became the first sports psychologist to serve on the U.S. Olympic sports medicine team, listed the mental skills that modern sports psychology focuses on, including "stress management, self-regulation, visualization, goal setting, concentration, focus, even relaxation." Sound good? It's clear why so many who are outside sports respond to what sports psychology offers. "If you attack work, family, spiritual life the way you attack a game, it all works the same way," says Peter Cathey, chief operating officer of XPO Network Inc., a start-up interactive marketing company. Cathey has faced several challenges recently–moving across the country to start a new company, dealing with his mother's death, and putting his father in the hospital. But he says he's never felt more mentally fit, thanks to skills acquired at LGE. "There's no emotional hit in the face I can't deal with." "If Tiger goes out to play and doesn't take a good relaxing breath or relax once in two hours, then that tension shows up as a bogey," explains stay-at-home mother Caryn Rohrbaugh, of Lemoyne, Pa. Rohrbaugh went though LGE so that she could perform better in the home and enjoy her time there. "For me, two hours of not taking a breath, not eating right, not being in the right mind-set turns up as impatience, forgetting to schedule something, a general feeling of being overwhelmed. It's still a bogey, though."

There is no question that the mental toughness developed by world-class athletes has pulled them through trials off the playing field as well as on–another reason why so many people are drawn to the peak performance ideal. Perhaps no sport is more mentally demanding than competitive cycling, and champion Lance Armstrong demonstrated some of the mental grit he acquired over years of fierce competitive racing by struggling back from testicular cancer. Diagnosed with the disease in 1996, he not only survived the surgery and debilitating chemo treatments but came back to win the Tour de France in 1999, a story recounted in his book, It's Not About the Bike.

The most honest, articulate, and (not coincidentally) influential specialists will tell you forthrightly that they are drawing on the collective wisdom of the best proven minds in the field–the great coaches of past and present. Many of them are or have been coaches themselves, and most are athletes, former or active. Bob Rotella, former director of the sports psychology program at the University of Virginia and now a full-time consultant to golf professionals and other athletes, says that so much of the formal psychology that he read in graduate school focused on dysfunction and problems that he "turned to people like Vince Lombardi or [UCLA's] John Wooden and studied their philosophies."

Rotella has taught what he calls "learned effectiveness" for years, which means, he says, "teaching about being in the best state of mind, basing your thinking on where you want to go, not where you've been." Doing so, Rotella found himself in strong sympathy with the work of at least one theoretical psychologist, the great turn-of-the-century thinker William James. James, whose work is making a strong comeback these days because of its emphasis on the conscious mind and the will, spoke clearly to Rotella. "He seemed to fit with what I learned from the coaches." That might sound like a dubious distinction to some intellectuals, but James probably would have taken it as a compliment. The power of the mind to shape reality was one of his lasting beliefs. Just as James is the quintessential American thinker for having created a serious philosophy of human potential, so the best sports psychologists, and not just Rotella, extend that philosophy in popular form, often in an eloquent popular literature that includes books by Rotella himself (many written with Bob Cullen) and such modern classics as Michael Murphy's Golf in the Kingdom.

Obsession. Proponents of peak performance see it as laudably consistent with the American dream of self-betterment and the pursuit of happiness. "To me, pursuing excellence is why we came to America," says Rotella. But John Hoberman, a University of Texas professor who has written often about the dehumanization of sports, sees the emphasis on performance as part of the contemporary obsession with competitiveness, an obsession that crowds out other human and civilized values, "including," he says, "moderation and balance."

But do critics like Hoberman ignore the possibility that peak performance might entail leading a richer, more balanced life, one that can allow more attention to others, including family, friends, and community? Being in the zone or the flow may be in fact a supremely human value, particularly if it is, as many sports psychologists contend, a state in which our peak capacities are exercised almost without thinking. After all, competition is a reality that cannot be wished away; why not learn to manage it as best as one can? As Woods commented after he'd won, "I had a–a weird feeling this week–it's hard to describe–a feeling of tranquillity, calmness." Csikszentmihalyi, who now directs the Quality of Life Research Center at Claremont Graduate University, sees peak performance state as a concept or ideal that can approach his notion of flow, but only with difficulty. "In my work," he explains, "I'm trying to understand how to make life better as it goes.

The question is, why are you experiencing the peak performance state–for its own sake or in order to win? If winning, the goal, takes over, the pleasure of the doing fades." In other words, if the peak performance state becomes merely an instrument, its resemblance to true flow will vanish. But there is no guarantee, of course, that this will not happen in any discipline or undertaking that one pursues, whether it be the making of pottery in the spirit of Zen or the playing of the piano in the spirit of the heck of it. When and if peak performance ceases to be the kind of activity that another quintessential American, Robert Frost, writes about in his poem "Two Tramps in Mud Time," then it might well become a lesser thing. Listen to the poet describe the state that he aimed for, and consider its possible relevance to our peak performance culture: But yield who will to their separation,

My object in living is to unite My avocation and my vocation As my two eyes make one in sight. Only where love and need are one, And the work is play for mortal stakes, Is the deed ever really done For Heaven and the future's sakes.