By Dr. Marta Adelsman
Life Coach in Communication and Consciousness
www.DrMartaCoach.com
(February 28, 2018)
When I first began to write this article, I ran into inner roadblocks. As I attempted to put words on paper, I couldn’t make anything work. I enjoy it when my writing flows, and this wasn’t flowing!
As I struggled, my son, Ethan, sent me an article in which the author interviewed a sports consultant named Garrett Kramer. “Mom,” he wrote. “I think you’ll enjoy this. It sounds like stuff you write and talk about.”
The article provided me with some insight about my writing dilemma. I realized I had been attempting to generate column ideas from my intellect. I had forgotten my usual practice of becoming still and centered, allowing an idea to arise from a place deeper than my mind. Once the subject matter arises, I can then use my mind to shape the writing as a sculptor shapes clay. The mind is not in charge. It is simply an instrument in the hands of that deeper awareness.
In the article, Kramer advocates something he calls “stillpower.” For athletes, getting in the zone requires, not trying harder, but becoming inwardly still. The stillness, instead of narrowing their view into a specific focus, opens them to possibilities. Then training does not take place from intense struggling toward a goal. It happens from un-attachment to whether they win or lose, and it becomes fun instead of work.
Stillpower is about stopping the frenzy in all arenas of life. It means ceasing to grind out solutions and to force performance results. It involves letting go of the instinct to control outcomes. Kramer coaches people to take their foot off the gas and to stop trying to be “in the zone.” When we stop controlling, we begin to tap into a success mindset that has given up striving for success. Sounds counter-intuitive, doesn’t it?
The result is a true “in the zone” mentality that manifests as the ability to become absorbed into the present moment, without regard for past or future. It feels easy, effortless, and free from force.
Our society has trained us to view the mind – with its logic, its rationality, and its tendency to label and control – as the highest state from which to operate and move in the world. However, says Kramer, it really represents a lower-quality state of consciousness that makes life more complicated. When I operate from this lower state, I feel like I’m paddling a canoe upstream against the current, and everything seems like a struggle.
So in writing this article, I stopped paddling. I quit struggling harder from that lower mind-state, and I became still. I allowed the current to turn the canoe around into a downstream direction. Then the writing became effortless, with no more wrestling to get ideas on paper that went nowhere.
I had found The Zone.