Sure I will share my zone experiences. I have been searching for the zone since I read the inner game of tennis as a kid in the 70s. I realized I played great in the zone and wanted to repeat it. I tried staring at the ball, I tried being the ball, I read rotella, I talked to pros the whole deal. Conclusion, under pressure most people perform worse than they play in practice. Guys making a living seem to play as well as they should. Top guys allow the pressure situations to sometimes force them to play better than they should. Of course everyone throws in a little zone now and then. But the top guys because of their confidence and preparation probably zone out a little more. Some guys like Connors could even trigger the zone fairly routinely. Now as a zone hunter I tried other activities, golf is intersting because you do not need a quality opponent. Arguing in Court sometimes triggers the zone, doing spiritual activities, and I suppose for artists, creating must trigger the zone. It is obviously a byproduct of concentration or focus. Now, the most zonned out place on the planet, the activity that triggers a zone like experience more often than any other: Surfing. When you are on a good size wave you are so in the moment it borders are insane happiness and the funny thing is it happens almost everytime you are on a good wave you do not need to spend hours working on your mind meditating doing NLP or anything else. I suspect there are many surfers who are in the zone more often than any zen master or monk. In fact the toughest choice of my life was whether to be "productive" or be a surfer. For me it was a choice because a surfer must avoid all commitments in order to be ready to surf ideal conditions. The zone has little influence on my profitablity because I believe the market only flows when there is a great deal of volume and participation. Most of the time trading is hard work and discipline. John
One source that you might want to look into, is "Flow", either the book or audio tapes, by Mihaly Csikzentmiahli. It deals with the flow state, or zone, and the conditions that best foster it. Kevin