How to improve performance with Mind Maps – In The Zone

Posted by Faizel Mohidin on Aug 16, 2009 in Mind Mapping, Mind Maps at Work, Mind Maps in Education, Personal Mind Maps | 2 comments

As a South African, I am so pleased when I pick up a book and find that it can compete with the best the world has to offer. One of those books, is ‘In the Zone’ by Michael Cooper and Tim Goodenough.

The book uses successful South African sports heroes to illustrate how to achieve top performance in sport and life.

Athletes often talk about being in the zone and how being in the zone is the key, the secret and the power. What they have not known is that there are techniques to get you into The Zone consciously and intentionally. They often relied on superstition, lucky charms, cheering of the crowd, rituals and other ‘strange’ behaviours.

The writers have done a lot of research in this field and have come up with a set of principles, which they believe can get you into the zone, whenever you want to. They also use the stories of South African sports heroes to illustrate their points.

While I can’t necessarily help to get you into the zone everytime with this article, I hope the Mind Map Summary of the principles will inspire you to explore this topic further. You can also use the Mind Map as a guide and a checklist to see how many of the principles you apply in your life. You could also use it for inspiration when you feel violated or underperforming at home, at school, at college, at university and even in the workplace.

While the book uses sport people as examples, it has actually been written as a motivational book for all of us. I think it’s simply brilliant!

I will list the principles in order of maturity, Level 1 being at the bottom and Level 4 at the top. In the book, this is depicted as a pyramid. Each level has a number of skills, which are listed on the Mind Map. Being skills, each and everyone of us can acquire them with the correct work ethic.

Base Skill: Work Ethic

This skill underpins all the other skills. This is the foundation skill as every other skill takes effort and commitment to build and apply. You may have fantastic mental, physical, or other skills, but if you don’t do anything with it, you won’t achieve high performance.

Level 1: ‘Being’ Skills

Performing from one’s highest intentions.

Simply put, if you know WHY you are doing something, everything else falls in place. You should find a big enough WHY in your life, then you could do any HOW.

I’ve written many articles on finding your passion and spending your life following that passion. You will find many of them on MindMapTutor.com.

Internally referent

Psychologists call this ‘internal locus of control’.

I describe this as my circle of control. If you were to draw a circle of the things that control you, would you be standing inside or outside the circle? Successful people generally feel that they are in control and they work within their circle of control.

While successful people are internally referent, the most successful people have external checks. To do this they often seek the services of a coach or mentor. Even though they may use a coach or a mentor, they still believe that success ultimately lies within.

Distinction between self confidence and self esteem

This simply means that you should never confuse what you do with who you are.

To illustrate the point, imagine you are a soccer player and you’ve been honing your skills for years? As your skills grew, so did your confidence. Now, ask yourself how good are your ballet skills?

If you are purely ‘confidence driven’, you will be afraid to make mistakes, as your confidence is based on your ability to perform well. If you have a high self esteem, you won’t mind making mistakes as you can separate who you are from what you do.

In the sporting world, athletes with high self esteem continue to grow their careers long after they no longer can perform on the field.

Level 2: Career Skills

Resilience

Life is full of setbacks. Do you see setbacks as an opportunity to grow, or do you tend to dwell on the negative aspects of what has happened?

Resilience is the ability to experience a setback, disappointment, defeat, trauma or other ‘bad thing’ and still have the motivation to do your best and believe in your recovery.

Michael Jordan is remembered as one of the greatest basketball players of all time. If you search YouTube, you will find numerous clips of his brilliance and match winning shots. Yet this is what he has to say:

‘I’ve missed over 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty six times I’ve been trusted to take the winning shot… and missed. I’ve failed over and over in my life. And that is why I succeed.’

Managing anxiety and confidence

Strangely enough, overconfidence kills peak performance as much as anxiety. This can be seen as the anxiety/confidence see-saw. If the see-saw is tipped far over to any one side, performance will suffer.

Michael Johnson, set a new world record in the 200m at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. When asked how he felt before the race, he had this to say, ‘Well, I was nervous… But I felt comfortable. Actually, if I hadn’t felt nervous, I would have been uncomfortable.’

Your ability to keep the confidence/anxiety see-saw balanced is therefore the key to performing well under high pressure situations.

Un-insultability

In the workplace, this skill is most needed during performance appraisals. If you see the feedback as input only, you will maintain your self esteem and continue to improve.

For a sports person, this is required nearly everytime they step on the field. For those of you that remember Zidane’s famous head butting incident in the 2006 Soccer World Cup, can you see how important it is that you need to be ‘UN-INSULTABLE’ to perform at your peak?

Level 3: Advanced Skills

Practice makes perfect

Engaging in meaningful and high quality practice is often the result of having a strong work ethic and being internally referrent. Great athletes carefully plan, track and record their training. Each session fits into a bigger picture of skills development.

Your ability to focus on something and work at it until you perfect it, will not only get your performance up, it will also improve your learning. Tony Buzan, the inventor of the Mind Map, says that each trial should not be simply to get better, it should be to learn. He proposes a method he calls TEFCAS, which I wrote about on MindMapTutor.com.

Mental Preparation

Do it in your mind first! There is nothing like rehearsing for creating something great.

I have written quite a bit about visualisation and how you can use Mind Maps to build vision boards on MindMapTutor.com.

Meta-Detailing – The ability to simplify

‘In the Zone’ mentions that attention to detail is the hallmark of a champion.

My response is, ‘The ability to simplify is the hallmark of a great leader’.

A Mind Map is the most amazing tool you will ever come across to simplify complex subjects. Once you’ve read this article, go back to the Mind Map above and look at each branch one by one. You will be amazed at how much detail you can recall from the Mind Map.

Mind Mapping has given me the ability to take complex topics and simplify them with the greatest of ease. You can achieve this too, if you continue to work on your Mind Mapping skills.

Level 4: Elite Skills

Active Identity Shaper

All of us have many identities. We wear many hats. How many roles do you have? What are the labels you give them?

Are you a teacher, programmer, father, mother, son, daughter, tennis player, swimmer?

These are just labels, but does your performance depend on the label you give yourself? Let’s assume you swim well at school and practice very hard. You begin to do well and start breaking some school records. Later on you begin to break provincial and national records.

At what point will you start calling yourself a swimmer, versus somebody that just swims well? The difference in how you label yourself can be the difference between success and failure!

This is often referred to as the ‘Pygmalion effect’, where students perform better than others simply because they were expected to do so.

Elite athletes often decide early on in their lives that they are going to be world class and start shaping their identities actively to meet this goal. That is how ‘sporting families’ continue to deliver top class sports children decade after decade.

Regular Zoning

Most athletes and coaches interviewed felt that getting ‘in the zone’ happened co-incidentally or by chance. Many felt that it would be great if it could happen more often, but were unaware of how it could be done.

People who have the skills mentioned above will naturally ‘Zone’ more than others. The more of these skills you acquire, the better your performance will be.

So, off you go. Memorise my Mind Map and practice those skills daily. Success is sure to follow!