When You’re Hot You’re Hot, or How to Live in the C Zone

You’ve just closed the deal of a lifetime, gotten your kids to stop fighting for three days in a row, been asked to speak at your high school reunion and cornered a metered parking place in Westwood. Funny thing was, it seemed so effortless . . . and the feeling continues . . . everything’s clicking . . . you appear to be on a roll. . . .

Before it all vanishes, meet Bob Kriegel, possibly the first scholar of the roll.

Of course, he doesn’t call himself that. Self-respecting Ph.D. psychologists like Kriegel don’t label themselves in a way that might suggest they conduct their research in Las Vegas.

Choice, Not Chance

Kriegel calls the subject of his work--and the title of the book he wrote with his wife, psychologist Marilyn Harris Kriegel--”The C Zone, Peak Performance Under Pressure” (Anchor Press/Doubleday).

But he is the first to admit that what the C Zone is about is how you get on rolls, how you fall off them, how you can jump back on and how all this can happen by choice instead of chance.

The subject of Kriegel’s work is named C Zone, rather than roll zone, because in the course of working as a “jock shrink” for several Olympic teams and as a consultant to thousands of corporate champions, Kriegel has found that peak performers typically exhibit behavior that is neither the classic Type A (workaholic, super-pressured, heart-attack prone) nor Type B (laid back, underachieving and bored to death).

A and B Undesirable

Kriegel, who is based in Muir Beach in Marin County but was recently in Southern California to address a group of Pacific Bell staff trainers, insists that both Type A and Type B are unhealthy, unnatural and undesirable behaviors.

But when people suddenly find themselves in the C Zone--where work is fun and effortless and where they are extremely productive and positive--most of them think it happened by chance, Kriegel said. Or if they live in California, he added, they may well attribute it to receiving a fine acupressure massage, or the favorable conjunction of the sun and the midheaven of Pluto at an auspicious moment of the lunar cycle.

It’s none of that, Kriegel maintained.

“In every field, there are people who seem to thrive under pressure, who remain high for their work and don’t get burnt out,” he recently told the assembly of Pacific Bell training instructors meeting at the Marriott Hotel in Irvine. “Were these people born cool under pressure? Was Joe Montana cool when he came out?”

The answer didn’t matter. What does, Kriegel emphasized, is that nearly everyone has had at least some experience in the C Zone and having been there once, they have the ability to return again and again and more and more often until the C Zone is where they wind up spending most of their time. As Kriegel said: “You can program your day so you can start off on a win and be on a roll all day.”

How, then, is this non-elusive roll initiated and maintained?

First, Kriegel advised, it’s helpful just to stop and notice which zone you’re in at the moment.

Inhabitants of Kriegel’s “panic zone” (his name for Type A) are characterized as facing too much challenge without possessing enough mastery for the tasks at hand. He sees these people as overcommitted, overconfident (taking too many risks), out of control, nervous, scattered and hyper. In his experience, panic zone Type A’s are always telling themselves “I gotta” and commonly have trouble sleeping at night.

By contrast, Kriegel’s “drone zone” dwellers (otherwise known as Type B’s) have trouble getting out of bed in the morning. They typically have too much mastery in their lives and not enough challenge. They are uncommitted, underconfident (fearful of risk) and overcontrolled, not to mention lethargic, sluggish and bored. Their motto is “Don’t chance it.”

Full of the Three C’s

As might be deduced, C Zoners have deftly avoided all of the above; they’ve balanced the amount of challenge and mastery. They love what they do because they do what they love. And they’re full of Kriegel’s three C’s: confidence, commitment and control.

Now, as Kriegel pointed out, there are hundreds of techniques in the mental marketplace for improving one’s lot on these scores. As the former director of Esalen Institute’s Sports Center, he has seen nearly all of them, from the esoteric to the now mundane.

Some of them he’s impressed with, some not, such as positive thinking. As he put it, “I think positive thinking is like putting on a clean shirt when you really need a shower.”

Mental rehearsals or visualizations, however, Kriegel likes enormously. And for those who disagree with his view that “we mentally rehearse for every situation in our life,” he flashed on a screen a cartoon of a salesman about to ring a doorbell and thinking, “I wonder if the jerks are home.”

“The 49ers now have a visualization coach who has the linemen think that they’re steamrollers,” said Kriegel, a former all-American swimmer. “And when you have Frank Gifford, the world’s straightest man, talking about the importance of mental training, you know it’s in.”

So his listeners could experience a bit of the power of what he was talking about, Kriegel asked them to do an exercise and to note how far they were able to stretch. Then, he asked them to repeatedly imagine the same stretch in their minds, but to mentally perform it with a slightly greater range.

When it finally came time to repeat the stretch physically, a sudden hush came over the room. Most participants noticed that their stretching ability had suddenly been substantially improved, dramatically so in many cases.

Other techniques Kriegel suggested for moving into the C Zone included frequent timeouts for deep-breathing exercises and “reality checks” to reduce unreal fears.

“Fear is what gets you out of the C Zone,” he claimed. “When you’re afraid, fear makes mountains out of molehills. It makes everything seem worse and your abilities seem less.”

To conduct a “reality check,” Kriegel instructed his audience to ask themselves if they had ever performed well in situations like the ones they were afraid of now. In most cases, people have, in fact, previously excelled in what they’re about to do but they’ve forgotten that and started to panic.

“Peak performers check out their fear,” Kriegel said. “They always ask themselves, ‘What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen?’ If the answer is that you really would die, you might want to think of some alternative to what you’re doing.”