Roger Federer and Novak Ddjokovic are masters of playing in the zone. They maintain a laser-like attention for hours at a stretch. It’s all about where they focus that attention – which is the same skill needed of a solutions-focused practitioner. Our choice of where we put our attention is what makes the difference.
 
Now, nobody knows what they do when they play in the zone. Because when they are in the zone they have no bandwidth left over to think about being in the zone. As soon as they switch attention to what’s it like to be in the zone, they’ve left the zone they were hoping to find out more about. 
 
You can reflect before or after on what is was like in the zone, just as you can preview or remember anything else. But just as the memory of pain does not hurt in the same way as the original pain, so a recall of zoning is not itself an identical zone experience.
 
And you can recreate the conditions that help you get into the zone – noticing what works.
 
Perhaps the exception is a philosopher whose experience of being in the zone occurs when thinking about being in the zone. We could always ask one for their insights..

We’re embarking on a new coaching programme with an international company. Our participants are keen to be good coaches, and we’re observing them closely so as to help them accomplish this.  But a question for us and for each of them is this: as coach, do you want your client to perform well in front of you during your session, or in the next critical encounter when you are not there?
 
It’s easy for the client of a sports coach to play a great game during the coaching session or for the corporate client to talk a good game in their hour with the coach. But what’s more important is for them to transfer those displays of skills into the arenas where they count. 
 
To mitigate the effect of looking good in rehearsal but not always peaking when the lights go up, we build project work into our organisational coaching programmes. We want to learn about real results, and in particular the difference that bringing in coaching techniques is making to the important everyday work. We ask for quantitative and qualitative reports. What’s changed? What’s different, and are those differences - on reflection - worthwhile?
 
To be a coach is to be willing to trade control (or the illusion of control, more likely) for influence. And sometimes that influence goes unseen. One consequence is that it’s the coach’s job to trust the player more than the player trusts themselves.
 
It’s relatively easy for a solutions-focused coach, as we already take the view that the client as expert in their own performance. Sure, the coach brings something, including helping the client to identify their critical variables. We may also know stuff from our experience, which we can share if the client demands information, even though it may be detrimental for them compared to figuring it out for themselves.  There’s a balance here if a client wants to pay for transfer of knowledge. One solutions is to tell them what they want to know, and ask if it is working to improve their game.
 
If you are a more traditional coach, whose main role has been to transmit your technical expertise to your client, you could convert what you are telling people to do into elements you can direct their attention and awareness towards.  A 'doing instruction’ becomes an ’awareness instruction'. We invite our clients to learn from testing and experience, not from (our admittedly expert) hearsay.  
 
Then your client goes off to do the work between your sessions. And we may or may not see how they perform, but they can report on progress - and their own recipes for managing to succeed - when they choose to return.

Way back in 1972 in his book The Inner Game of Tennis, Tim Gallwey said he was sure adults could learn like children, with very little technical instruction.
 
In his recent lecture in the UK, he called this approach,'not trial and error, but trial and correction’. To do it successfully, he says, you have somehow to deal with the inner voice that loves telling you what to do - while judging you as you do it, usually unfavourably. When you listen to the inner voice - 'Self 1' as Tim calls it - with its predictions and instructions, it can interfere with your performance. A preferable alternative is to have a go and see what happens,
 
Gallwey proposes an equation: “Performance equals Potential minus Interference".  Thus we can aim to remove or get away from any interfering chatter in our heads, favouring quietness or calm as a route to improved performance and by releasing the powers of ‘Self 2’. 'Self 2' is that part of us that knows unconsciously what to do, and will do it well if allowed to do so.
 
When 'Self 1’ is talking unhelpfully to 'Self 2'. you can see it manifesting in over-tightening of the muscles. In sports, that typically leads to poorer timing of shots, visibly less elegance. When in doubt, in sport, socially or at work, we tend to tighten. We think the antidote is to relax, but ‘relax’ is a clumsy, blunt instruction. The older part of the brain looks after muscle coordination, and the brain doesn’t speak in English ('Relax!') to the hand. Linguistic instructions at best operate in a parallel universe to that of our chemistry and physiology. Even if we were capable of making a translation across those dimensions, that linguistic message - if it's to do any justice to the complexity of the operation - is going to struggle for accuracy and will end up being too long and too slow.
 
The brain speaks in neuro-chemicals. This is a profound insight, harnessed by Gallwey and also (amongst others), Applied Improvisers (AI), Solution-focused practitioners (SF) and exponents of the Alexander Technique (AT). 
 
Working in theatre, Improvisation guru Keith Johnstone realised that if the aim is for an actor to appear natural on the stage, then trying too hard impedes rather than helps that actor. Hence his injunction to ‘be obvious’ or ‘be average’. An Alexander Technique trainer can’t teach you explicitly all the elements of walking - there are too many to hold in our limited consciousness, and we can't describe if fully or fast enough with our limited language. But she can assist you in directing your attention to greater awareness of certain critical variables, such as the degree of freedom in your neck muscles.
 
Similarly, smart sports players and solution-focused coaches prefer to practice not-knowing until the last moment what shot to play or question to ask. By delaying such decisions by an instant, you give yourself the maximum amount of  topical information, at precisely the moment it’s most needed.
 
That’s the theory, and each of the fields I mention has its methods for turning theory to practice. My favourite contribution from Inner Game is that the best way to do this is by focusing on critical variables. Variables are elements that can change, have different values. Critical means the ones that matter in the topic under discussion. 
 
We stiffen when we perceive pressure; pressure is one of the concepts that invites Self 1 to get involved, to the detriment of our Self 2 abilities. Pressure seems real to the commentator and even to the player, even though ‘pressure’ is a constructed concept with no visible reality. If you asked a player how they would  play that shot if rallying or in a practice game, rather than in the heat of competition, they could show you - and it's better. It’s only a perception of ‘pressure’ that results in them not doing it in this match too.
 
It may be possible to fight Self 1 or ignore Self 1, and much energy goes into those efforts. Inner Game sidesteps brilliantly and says give Self 1 something useful to do, namely pay attention to relevant, useful aspects - that is, the critical variables. It’s the job of the coach sometimes to enable the performer (on the field, on the stage, in life) to bypass Self 1 and communicate with Self 2. You might, for example, ask your coachee ‘How would you like to do this task some day? OK, show me. And now choose between these different options'.
 
And if that’s all good - and I think it is - then the question for us is this: How do we go about discovering the critical variables in each of the arenas in which we wish to improve our performance?