You hear athletes talk about The Zone all the time and about the two or three times in their career they were in it. You night think this experience is available only to elite athletes, but anyone can get in.
You’ve been in The Zone many times (OK, I’ll stop capitalizing it now). Have you ever had a 20-foot putt that you just knew was going in before you hit it? You felt as good about this one as a 6-inch tap-in? Or an iron that you knew before you hit it would go straight for the pin? That’s the zone. You have those moments all the time.
Here’s another one. You go to the range, do a bit of stretching to get warmed up, then hit the first ball with your pitching wedge using a lazy, getting-loose swing. The ball takes off right where you were aimed, high, and far — the best PW you could ever hit and you hit it without thinking about it.
There’s the catch. You weren’t thinking about it. What it means to be in the zone is that your mind is quiet and the movements you have trained your body to do just come out.
Here’s another one. You’re on the practice green having indifferent results, and you decide to do something different. It could be anything, like changing your stroke, your grip, your setup, anything. And what happened but you drained three 10-footers in a row, dead center.
Now you thought that this one thing you did was the key to the kingdom, but as soon as you thought that, you started being your old self again. That’s because the thing you did differently took your mind off what you had been thinking, and temporarily gave it nothing to think about. You were in the zone. Then, after the third putt, you started thinking about something again, and bye-bye zone.
So that’s the zone, which I know you’ve been in many times, and you know, once it’s pointed out to you, what it is. The questions that remain are how to get into it at will, and how to sustain it once you’re in. Not so easy to do and not so easy to explain. All I can say is that it takes deep spiritual training which must be continuously renewed. I would recommend reading my book, The Golfing Self to find out how. Good luck.