When I'm in there I'm just in my zone. What people think about when they're looking at me, that's their business. If there is a bit of that, I am fine with it, each to his own.
It's so hard to see one of your friends fall, and it's a reminder that you have to be on and in the zone.
From my first fight, I loved being in the ring. I tune everything out - the lights, the smells, the noise - so I'm in this zone where I'm performing only for myself.
It helps to be stupid if you're a relief pitcher. Relievers had to get into a zone of their own. I just hope I'm stupid enough.
I can't believe the ignorance there, so I don't allow it to affect my life, I don't allow it to come into my zone, and it's not in my world, really.
Sometimes I don't know what takes me over during a game. Sometimes I just feel I have moved to a different place and I can make the pass, score the goal or go past my marker at will.
I wake up, and I'm in the zone... My performance is the continuation of my life.
The best thing about football for me is the reacting. It's a lot of instincts. But training, for me, it's more for the meditating. And I spend more time training than actually playing football. So I get into that zone during training more than anything.
There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.
If you play basketball, you get into the zone. You can't miss. That's the expansive mindset we're all seeking. But that only comes when the mind is quiet and separate from the noise. And the greatest tool to eliminate the noise is meditation.
In a way, after you're done directing there is a sense of amnesia that washes over you, you can't exactly remember how you did things. It's a zone, just like an athlete, when they can't remember what they did, but somehow got it done.
The mind is pretty powerful. In skating, you learn to click into that zone and focus not necessarily on what you're doing but if you're doing it well.
I'm familiar with that magical mindset during sporting competition where one feels completely zoned in on what's happening. There are occasional nights in poker when the mists have cleared, and I just know what my opponents' cards are. Everything at the table is slow, loud, and easy. The rest of the world is silent.
