November 29, 2012

On focus and self-confidence

I've examined a lot of different types of people: athletes, successful business people, you name it. They tend to share one thing in common and that is self-confidence that borders on belief.

The following is not going to be an academic paper. I've read my fair share of mental toughness books and have had a large amount of exposure to what needs to mentally done in order to perform well in a given activity. What I'm more interested in is providing a slightly opinionated summary of some of those things based on that research data and some empirical observations.

People who lack confidence tend to lack focus. It's probably because they lack confidence. I'm sure everyone has felt some type of confidence in their life before where you were doing something exceptionally well and knew that you would continue that over the course of the activity. Do you sometimes wish that you could re-capture that focus and apply it all the time? Well, I do too. The fact of the matter is that being self-confident is extremely important but you're never going to feel that way 100% of the time. Everyone is going to have those moments of weakness. Your job in staying self-confident in general is to attempt to time those moments so that they occur at non-critical times.

You shouldn't be thinking about some important thing in your life in the middle of a test or a sporting event; you should be focused on the task at hand and nothing else. So much of what we do is based in the mind. That's one of the reasons why people tend not to excel in activities if they have something big going on in their lives that they might be worried about. You've got to deal with that stuff first before you can expect to perform.

I always found that a nice technique was to imagine how bad failure in a given area would affect you on a scale of 1 to 10 and then compare yourself to starving children in the world or something like that and ask yourself if you've really got it so bad. Chances are, you don't. If you do, you've got my sympathies, believe me. But it's just a nice way of putting things into perspective and lessening that innate ego that we all have. Nope, unfortunately we're not the center of the universe but maybe we can be a little happier in it if we can apply ourselves the way we would like to.

People have a lot going on in their lives and sometimes you've got to make difficult choices as to what you would like to focus on for the short-term. I have some personal experience with this and it sucks. It requires some type of active sacrifice. I firmly believe that if you're focusing on more than a few things at a given time you'll start to perform poorly in all of them. I should know because I've done exactly that and have noted the resources.

It's hard to live in the moment and let that take over your mind. When you're writing a test, nothing else matters. When you're about to take a shot in that basketball game, nothing else matters.

We're scatterbrained by default. It's hard to fight that nature but it does tend to interfere with performance.

People (like me) will tell you to do certain things in certain ways and they might even be right. But, I'd like to point out that some days it rains and there's just nothing you can do about. The key is not to focus on things that are not in your control sphere. But there's an important disclaimer to that: not to blame things outside of your control when it's really your fault. That usually happens when ego comes in and that's one fine line to walk because loads of self-confidence is basically like inviting ego to the party. I believe that if you're aware of ego, you should be able to keep it at bay though you will slip up there from time to time as well.

In the end it's everything in moderation and that does apply to focus as well.

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