Getting Into the Zone
Getting Into the Zone
Edson Filho explores human excellence and performance optimization among elite athletes and other individuals
Edson Filho is an associate professor of sport psychology and counseling at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. His research centers on human excellence and performance optimization at both the individual and group levels of analyses.
Filho has worked as a consultant for elite international, college and amateur athletes. He is a Certified Mental Performance Consultant by the Association for Applied Sport Psychology, an Established Practitioner registered with the International Society of Sport Psychology, and a member of the Sport Psychology registry of the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee.
What does your research focus on?
My research is about excellence. I study expert performance, and I am interested in understanding how experts—those who have consistently superior performance under the most challenging conditions—think, behave, and feel. Over the years, I have been fortunate to study high performing individuals, including Olympic athletes, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Cirque du Soleil artists, among other elite performers.
I study performance optimization at both the individual level (how we can take an individual’s performance to the next level) and the group level (how we can improve leadership, cohesion, coordination, and collective efficacy, among other team properties). Depending on the research questions, I utilize different qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate topics such as team cohesion and the physiological responses underpinning “flow-feeling states,” or “being in the zone.” By learning about how experts function in the field, my goal is to develop interventions to help athletes and performers across domains to optimize their performance.
What has your research shown regarding the markers of peak performance? How could these findings be adopted to help train novices?
My research is greatly informed by the expert-novice paradigm. We either compare experts and novices or compare each individual to themselves. What we have seen is that when people are “in flow” or “in the zone,” they are in a state of neural efficacy. These peak performance experiences are reflected in individuals’ physiology and brain patterns. It is almost paradoxical—when people are performing at their peak level, they are very relaxed, yet very focused.
The goal of psychological skills training is self-regulation. People need to develop various mental skills such as self-talk, goal setting, and mindfulness to be able to self-regulate themselves under high-pressure situations. People who perform at the highest level are also positive, in the sense that they believe they can adapt when they face difficulties. It is important to note that there is no one-size-fits-all intervention. We need to take into account individual differences when designing psychological skills training programs.
What are some challenges that you have encountered in your research?
One of the biggest challenges of studying experts is access. In each domain, there are only a few people who perform at the highest level, and sometimes it is hard to recruit these individuals to participate in research projects.
Another challenge concerns the interventions that we wish to implement. Expertise is a multilayered phenomenon. To make sure we are targeting the causes and not just the symptoms, we need to consider the interaction between the individual level, the team level, and the performance context at large.
Where is your research headed?
Expert performance is such an interesting topic, and I will continue to work with individuals and teams in the domains of sport and exercise, music, and the performance arts. I look forward to further investigating the neural markers of flow and the individual zones of optimal functioning. At the group level of analysis, I wish to continue my work on an integrated framework of team dynamics, the Shared Zones of Optimal Functioning, and also study multi-brain interactions. Altogether, I hope my work will lead to the development of psycho-physiological interventions to help individuals and teams perform consistently at peak level.