Mental Performance Mastery Pillar #3: Focus & Awareness

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Learn how to regain control of your time, eliminate distractions, and create the vision of your future.

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Key Questions

• What is the problem?

• What is focus & awareness?

• What is traction and distraction?

• How can we evaluate focus and awareness?

• What are some strategies to improve focus and awareness?

The Problem

Life is full of distractions. Just in our phones alone, we have messages, notifications, social media, and even games. And that’s only one device. Distraction can even come from the people around us or the environment that we're in. The amount of things battling for our precious time and attention is at it's highest and there's only going to be more. If we don’t learn how to train our focus and awareness now, then we will not achieve our goals and become the best version of ourselves.

Focus & Awareness

What is focus? Focus is your ability to keep your mind on a task. It's where you invest your time and attention every second. Our minds can only focus on one task at a time. When we introduce more than one task, we prioritize our focus by switching from one task to another. This is called task switching. When we use task switching, the quality of our focus on each task diminishes.

What is awareness? Awareness is your ability to know what's happening around you, to you and inside you so that you can judge if you are on or off course towards your goals so that you can adjust accordingly. Awareness is like your internal & personal GPS. It helps show you where you're at and if you're on or off course to your desired destination (your goals). Awareness can also be like the voice in your head saying, "What are you doing?", when you lost  focus.

Focus is doing and awareness is knowing what you're doing. The more focused you are the better your training. The better your training the better your results. The better your results, the more you like it. The more you like it, the more you want to train.

Traction & Distraction

What is traction? Traction is the actions that move us toward what we really want. The tasks that we must do to help us progress and create the results we desire. When you choose to focus, take action, and complete the tasks required, you take one step UP the staircase to your goals.

What is distraction? Distraction is the actions that move us away from what we really want. The unneeded tasks that don’t help us progress and create the results we desire. When you choose to focus on distractions, don’t take the required actions, and don't complete the tasks required, you take one step BACK down the staircase to your goals.

We don't know what a distraction is unless we know what it's distracting you from. Awareness is used to filter out the distractions in your life, so that you have clear focus on what you want to accomplish and what you must do now to accomplish it.

Evaluation

There are 3 primary ways that we evaluate focus & awareness with our Warriors and that’s by assessing body language, focus, and self talk. Body language is the process of communicating nonverbally through conscious or unconscious gestures and movements. What we're thinking and how we're feeling is directly connected to what we're doing with our body language. Changing your body language also has a direct effect on how we think and how we feel. Evaluating body language during events will develop a deeper understanding of why performance either excels or does not.

Focus as mentioned earlier, drives the direction of action. Evaluating focus by determining where focus is going and why during events can build better control of the skill.

Self talk is the positive or negative voice inside your mind that encourages you or discourages you. Evaluating whether or not we're listening to the negative self talk or focusing on the positive during events can better influence future decisions.

Bridging the gap between what we're doing with our bodies and what we're doing with our minds is the best way to evaluate and choose the best strategy to improve focus & awareness.

Strategies

Concentration Grid (Focus)

• Get a piece of paper with numbers scattered randomly on a grid

• Cross off as many numbers during recovery

• Active mental recovery, no dead time

• Sports - Practice thinking about the next play

Breathing (Focus)

• 6-2-8 Method

• Breathe in for 6 seconds, hold for 2 seconds, breathe out for 8 seconds

• 5 Rounds to get centered, focused, and present.

• The focus is on the 6-2-8

• Awareness, is where does my mind go when focused.

Signal Lights (Awareness)

• Green - Fully in control

• Yellow - Spiraling out of control and losing control

• Red - Lost control of yourself

• What do you do when you see a green light? GO?

• What do you do when you see a yellow light? Slow Down or Speed Up?

• What do you do when you see a red light? Stop or crash and burn?

• What's your body language, focus, and self talk when you're in green (at your best) and in yellow/red (when you start to struggle)

Start, Stop, Continue List (Awareness)

• What do you need to Start doing?

• What do you need to Stop doing?

• What do you need to Continue doing?

Performance Journal (Awareness)

• What am I grateful for in my life right now?

• What worked well for me today?

• What needs improvement?

• How was my focus towards my goals today?

• What distracted me today?

• What can I do next time to not get distracted?

Eliminate Distractions (Focus)

• Schedule time throughout the day for the task that matter most

• Eliminate the tasks that aren't creating traction towards your goals.

• Access at the end of each day whether or not you fulfilled your tasks or optimize accordingly.

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