Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode Thirty-Seven – Understanding the Importance of FOCUS for Athletes
HHello and welcome back to Brain in The Game. Brain in The Game is a podcast that's been specifically designed for athletes, coaches and parents who are out there looking to do their sport just that a little bit smarter. Brain in The Game is a fun yet smart look at mental preparation for athletes and I’m your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode 37 we’re going to take a look at focus. Now focus is one of those terminologies that gets bandied around so frequently and especially in a sporting environment. I remember when I was a competitor my coaches said to me, “you need to focus more” or “focus on this and you'll get that”. So, focus is one of those things that we hear frequently but probably don’t understand the reality to focus.
Now I want to start by telling you a very short story: I was lecturing recently and there were many different speakers at this clinic and there were probably around about 70 athletes and about 25 coaches all in this environment and we were learning different aspects. My role was to focus on the mental and emotional preparation for competition. I got through the first couple of groups that came past me and we were working on the actual strategies designed for competition preparation and readiness and I started to recognise the deviation in the ability to focus. What I mean by that is what I was asking them to do was different to what they had been honed and trained to do.
So I called over one of the coaches and I said, “Hey what I'm trying to get these athletes to do is become really focused on what they want. I said, “However, every single one of these athletes are very quick to tell me what they don't want. They don't want to fall off; they don't want to miss parts of their routine; they don't want to forget something.”
And the coach said, “That's what we tell them. We make sure they know exactly what we don’t want to do; we don't want them to go there; we don’t want them to have accidents; we don't want these kids to forget things.”
So, I got everybody together and I sat all the athletes down in the centre of this room and got all the coaches around me as well and said, “I want to do an exercise for all of you. And the exercise is around focus.” And I asked them, “What does focus mean?” And what I got was a very random description of what they thought focus was, but it wasn't necessarily what was going to give them the most productive outcome. So, I asked one of these smaller athletes to come forward and I chose a younger athlete because they are less influenced by their environment. They hadn't been quite so indoctrinated into the way of believing and thinking. So I got this young athletes – she would have been about 10 years old and I got her to sit on a chair in front of everybody. And I asked her to hold her hands out directly in front of her at 45 degree angles. And in her hand I placed a five-cent coin which is as an Australian five cent coin which is a very small, very light silver coin.
In the other hand, I placed a two-dollar coin which is a gold looking very heavy very thick coin so very different coins to look at it to feel. And I asked her, “Which one of these is of more value to you?
And of course, she looked at the two dollar coin and said, “The two dollar coin.”
And I said, “Okay. So, it's more important to you, holds more value for you?”
She said, “Yes.”
I said, “I want you to focus only looking at that two-dollar coin. And I want you to tell me what it is you see, what it is you feel, and what it is this two-dollar coin can do for you, what it can give you.”
So, this young athlete was looking at me quite bewildered. But she did as I asked and she looked very intently at the two-dollar coin. And she started off by saying, “Ah you know it's round, it's thick, it's quite heavy.” And then the more she got into it the more she described it, what the imagery was on top of the coin, what she could get with that coin, why it was so important to her, the value that she saw in that. The more focussed she became on the coin the less attention she was paying to the rest of her environment. When she started off she was a little bit nervous as she was sitting in front of around about a hundred people. She was obviously very conscious of what I was asking her to do and what she thought I wanted her to say.
But as she got into it and she got more focused on describing this coin the emotional buy-in to this coin and the lollies she could buy – you know, all the things that were of value to a ten-year-old young athlete. What she didn't recognise was her other hand that she had been holding out at forty-five degrees to the left of her started to gravitate towards the other hand as did her body shape as did her physiology. Everything started to gravitate and face the two-dollar coin. So, by the time she had finished describing to me and everybody in the room how important this two dollar coin was she had shifted her body to forty-five degrees round to the right and was completely facing the coin.
What this showed me and showed everybody in that room was you get what you focus on physiologically, emotionally and cognitively. We start to gravitate towards what we give our attention to. So, I then asked the athletes, “If we focus on what we don't want, what are we thinking about?” Clearly what we're thinking about is the negatives. I don't want to fall; I don’t want to forget my routine; I don't want to lose; I don't want this person/that person to beat me; I don't want to not be selected. If we recognise that we gravitate toward what we focus on and our focus is on a negative, what's the likelihood of us are getting what we want, rather than what we don’t want? Of course, what we're going to do is we're going to recognise as we go on, “Oh you know what, I’m failing more frequently” or “I am forgetting my routines” or “I have fallen off” or “I've not been selected” and we’ll try to correct that. And the more we try to correct it the more importance and focus we give those things that we don’t want the more we will gravitate towards them again, so they become stronger and stronger and stronger.
So, I think we need to recognise the importance of focus. Focus is our direction. It’s what we're looking to achieve. It’s our directional gravitational point. If we do shift away from what we don't want to what we do want, you know, “I want to make sure my routine is pristine” “I want to remember every single skill” “I want to make sure that I perform it the way that I know I can perform it, what I visualised” “I want to make sure I get selected” and “What have I got to do to make sure I'm getting selected”. We're focusing on what we DO want and we're more likely to gravitate towards what we do want. Also with the forward thinking as solution-based thinking, “You know, I want to be selected for this team. What have I got to do?” So, we're gaining traction, gaining momentum in a direction we want to go, always with that growth mindset mentality. So, focus is incredibly important.
The language we use indicates where we're going to end up or what direction we're going to gravitate towards. Our language and our use of specificity within our language is critical for us to be gaining traction and momentum in our desired direction. So, when I ask these athletes then to break back into their groups. And then we initiated the rotation around all these different support specialists and each of us with a focus on different aspects. Each of us had different value to add to the training. Some were chiropractors. Some were nutritionists and others.
As a mind coach one of the things that was reported back to me when everybody reconvened was that these athletes were more focused on what they did want and the less fearful of the consequences of what was going to happen if they got what they didn't want. So, when we think about focus it isn't just one of those throwaway lines of, “You know what, you need to be more focused.” Yeah. It is partly we need to be more focused but we need to be more focused on specific things that we want; the direction we want to travel in. We know that mentally, emotionally and physically we're going to gravitate towards what we focus on; the things that we place value on.
I hope this episode has allowed you to have a different perspective on the use of the word focus and what focus means to you.
I look forward to our next episode of Brain in the Game, and until then train smart and enjoy the ride. My name's Dave Diggle and I'm a performance mind coach.
Copyright 2012-2022 Dave Diggle
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