The 10 Essentials: Essential #10
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 brain is just like any other muscle in your body. Focusing requires effort and the brain will get fatigued if required to hold that effort for extended periods. So you have 2 options:
Option 1 – you train your brain to handle longer and longer periods of focus before it fatigues.
Option 2 – you allow your brain to take breaks when it works for your sport and train a refocus strategy so that you effectively bring your brain back to focus when you need it
Or maybe there’s a third option…where you do both! This allows you to develop both aspects, which ultimately gives you more control and more consistency with your focus.
To train both aspects at once, I highly recommend meditation. It requires you to focus intensely on one aspect (typically your breath) while recognizing when your mind has wandered and immediately bringing it back. You can start small with just a minute or two. Over time, you build up so that you are doing 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or more! You have to build your brain’s endurance just like you do for all of your other physical aspects.
To better refocus, create anchor phrases. These are short phrases (1-3 words) that shine a laser pointer on what you believe is the most important thing for you to focus on in that moment. The anchor can be anything that connects you to that concept. Here’s some examples of anchors that my athletes have used include:
Drive
Trust my training
Kobe
Hands down
Hit the mitt
Lock in
Anchor phrases can focus on something physical, technical, or mental. You might even have different anchor phrases for different situations in your sport. Start by thinking through the times your mind is most often distracted and write down a few anchor phrases for that particular situation. Test them out in training before using them in competition.
Remember: you focus only one time during training or competition. The rest of the times you are refocusing to the task at hand. This will happen again and again throughout your competition. It is not a one-time skill. Just like you won’t do one squat and believe you are done building strength in your legs, you will use your anchors to refocus over and over.