NLP for How to Get Into the Zone

NLP has ways how to get into the zone. If athletes do it, anyone can do it.  But many people don’t know how to do it. So NLP techniques tell you how you and any mortal human who isn’t a professional athlete can get into the zone in sports and any activity.

Get out of autopilot – get into the zone

He who wants to get into the zone at will must start practising not living on autopilot. The more he practises on any activity, the faster he will learn to be present in the moment, which is the door to getting into the zone. Getting into the zone is a state in which one is totally and effortlessly immersed in an activity. One feels that the activity flows naturally as if it were his second skin or nature. He enjoys it, he feels it in every bone, it goes through him, it surrounds him. It’s concentration and meditation in one. It’s an amazing state. And that’s why so many people want to achieve it. But how?

The first NLP technique that will help to get into the zone

…is knowing the submodalities of being in the zone. What does being in the zone look, sound, feel, smell, taste like? What do you see, hear, feel, smell, taste when you are in the zone? How bright are the pictures that you see? How far are they? And how loud are the sounds? Where do they come from? Is what you feel warm, cold, heavy, light… etc.? Where do you feel it? Does it move? When you know these submodalities, you know the state of being in the zone = you cannot confuse it with another state. You know that that’s it.

The second NLP technique for how to get into the zone

…is setting an anchor. Anchors are all around us. The traffic lights are an anchor for us to stop when they’re red and go when they’re green. A song can be an anchor that transports us to a particular moment… So can be a perfume – you know which person wore or wears it immediately as you smell it. Or someone’s voice can be an anchor which will immediately make you happy or angry. And of course, feelings can be anchors too. That familiar feeling… Or have you ever tasted something which you couldn’t tell what was, but which immediately reminded you of a certain place or person that used to serve that taste? So anchors can be visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory.

As long as the anchor which you set for getting into the zone is unique so that you can easily remember it, repeatable so that you can repeat it at will, appropriate so that you can fire it anywhere, intense enough to evoke the intensity of the state which it is to bring on, and pure so that it can evoke the state in the pure form of which you want to be, the anchor can be whatever picture, sound, feeling, smell, or taste works for you. Practise firing the anchor and getting into the state in which you want to be by firing the anchor.

The third NLP technique that helps to get into the zone

…is practising staying in the zone for longer and longer. Stretching the time when you are in the zone. If you read the article about NLP for breaking vicious circles, you’ll see commonalities with the principle of training yourself to stay in the zone longer and longer. The beginnings are usually shaky, but the more you practise, the more solid things will become. Because you know what it’s like to be in the zone and because you have a reliable anchor which will bring you into the zone, you’ll know when you have been in the zone for the first few seconds at the beginning. When you can be in the zone for seconds, you can be in the zone for a minute. And when you can do a minute, you can certainly do another minute. And so it goes until you find being in the zone for a long time. It’s all a matter of practice.