The tenth and final Essential is learning to Focus and Refocus. Focus is having your brain paying full attention to the aspects that are important to your performance in that moment. In some sports, this focus is on one particular component that is mainly internal, such as driving out of the blocks at the start of the race. For other sports, there are a lot of external components that have to be simultaneously analyzed, like when a quarterback is finding an open receiver. What is the same in each situation is the need to focus the brain on what is important and push out the distractions that pull away from those components.

The seventh Essential is learning to Handle Adversity. Adversity is actually one of the things that makes us love sport! It’s always thrilling to watch or be the athlete that overcomes adversity, or makes a comeback. It’s why we always cheer on the Cinderella story in sport. The greatest athletes are not the ones that never fail, they are the ones that recover the fastest.