Hello, 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 looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
In this Episode 85, we're going to look at how do I stay focused as an athlete when there are so many distractions? Now, don't get me started about how athletes are so distracted in today's world. I remember taking a photo, I was on tour with a team and there were 40 of these athletes waiting to get on a bus and go to training. And I took the photo because all 40 of them were so immersed in their devices. No one was talking, no one was communicating, no one was interacting at all. And the big trigger for me was none of the athletes were trying to catch a snooze before they were training. So you know it's tough when then they're not trying to grab a sleep at that point. Now, there's no way this is healthy, but it is today's way. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. And I say that with a really heavy heart.
Now, fair enough, a couple of these could be having conversations with their loved ones and their family because we had been on the road for over a month at that time. Maybe some of those were talking to their agents about contracts or commercial agreements, maybe. But the reality is almost all of them, a good 90-95% of them were on social media. Now, I am not the social media police by any stretch of the imagination. Now, you're probably listening to this on one of your social media platforms and probably off of one of mine. So I'm not having a go at social media. It is today's communication model, and most athletes utilise it to stay connected when they're on the road. And I get that, and it is a very valid thing to do. But the vast majority of them do sit there and listen to or read what those couch critics have been saying, those trolls who troll them on their performance from the day before, the week before, the game before. And then you think, Why would you do that? Why would you expose yourself to people who their only qualification is they've spent copious amounts of time sitting in front of a television watching?
They don't understand the athlete, themselves.
They don't understand what's been going on in the team dynamic, probably.
And they certainly don't understand the rules and the regulations and the team dynamics of what's been set for that performance, be it a game or a competition.
So if that's the case, if these athletes are looking through this social media onslaught of information, that is fake information, or at least at best, not relevant information, then we need to do that smarter.
So we're going to look at a couple of different ways that we can keep the focus of the athlete on the things they're going to give them the biggest bang for buck, the biggest returns on investment for them.
And we're going to start by talking about focal currency. Now, anybody who's listened to me or watched me lecture or been on any of my trainings anywhere, they'll know I talk at length about focal currency. I want to first explain what I mean by focal currency. Now, focal currency is our focal currency. It's how we spend, our focus, where we put our focus, what return on investment we're going to get from our focus.
If we think about it like money, if I gave you a couple of hundred dollars or a hundred pound or mark or whatever where you are in the world and said, Right, I want you to do something with that, the likelihood is you probably wouldn't walk out in the street and just throw it away. Well, I hope you wouldn't anyway. You would probably think about, Okay, where can I put this to get a return? Am I going to put it in shares? Am I going to put it in the bank? Am I going to put it into investments? Whatever you think about is going to be a good return on that amount of money, that amount of investment that's been given to you, then you're taking stock of, What am I going to get from this? Where do I put this? Now, if it's a couple of hundred dollars, the likelihood is you're not going to go and buy a property. If it's a couple of hundred thousand dollars, then that might be different. There's obviously different currency amounts that you would do different investments with. Our focus is exactly the same. If we're thinking about, Okay, I'm going to go and do this skill or this routine or this whatever, this set of skills, then that's like getting that couple of hundred dollars.
It's in the moment. It's the short term return on that focal point. But if we were going to get that couple of hundred thousand dollars, then, or pounds, or drachma, or whatever it is, then you're going to look at that very differently and go, Okay, this is a bigger, longer term investment with that money. What am I going to do with that? I might go and buy a property. I might put that in shares. I might put that into long term investment somewhere because it's a larger chunk of money. Our focus needs to be the same categorisations. When I talk about focal currency, where are you spending your focus? Is it on things that are going to give you a return or is it on things that you have no control over? So I'll often say to an athlete, we need to focus on the things that we can control and let go of the things that we can't. What essentially I'm saying is invest your focus in things that are going to give you a return. If you're overthinking and being obsessed around things that you can't control, then that's essentially throwing that investment down the toilet because you can't control it.
All you're looking at is what you haven't got, or didn't do, or can't have anymore. And that realistically isn't going to help your performance, your sustainability, your replicability, the ability for you to control. The analogy I tend to use with athletes is if you go out there and you're preparing for, let's say, a Formula 1 race. We've just had the Australian F1 race here, and there's a whole debacle with that, and we'll go into that maybe in another podcast. But let's say you go out and you prepare for a dry race, then all of a sudden you walk out to get into your F1 car for the race and it is bucketing down with rain. Now you can focus on the fact that it's raining and unless you've got some connection to the weather gods, then there's nothing you can do about that rain. You can't stop the rain, increase the rain, reduce the rain, change the rain. There's nothing you can do about that weather. So overthinking the rain isn't necessarily going to give you any return in your focal currency.
However, if you focus on, Okay, how do I need to change the setup of my vehicle? Do I need to go from slicks to wets? Do I need to change wings? Do I need to change my race line? My start strategy? Then there's things there that you can control. So it's not about avoiding, Okay, well, it's raining. There's nothing I can do. So therefore, Hey, the race is done and dusted. I've got no chance. It's repurposing your focus onto something that you do have control over, so your set up, your strategy, your race line. Everything there is a good investment in your focal currency. So hopefully that gives you a bit of an idea when we talk about what's my focal currency doing, have I got a return on that, that's what we're talking about. Now, athletes who tend to over focus and obsess on things, they normally obsess on things that are highly emotive. And anybody who invests money in the stock market, in shares, in property, they will always tell you, do not make an emotional investment, because the likelihood is you haven't looked at the data, you're not making decisions based on those metrics, you're making decisions based on fear or high emotion. And this is the same too.
So when we're talking about obsessive focus, these are athletes who obsess over something, and that's normally mistakes or consequences. So they may obsess over the last time that they competed. They made a mistake or they fell. Or a classic one is they go to kick a goal, whether it's in football, soccer for those of you who are not English; or in rugby, or shooting for goal in hockey, or any other sport where you've got what we call a closed skill, and you make a mistake, and you don't score the goal, you don't get the outcome, then you start to obsess over that mistake. Now, what we know of people's human behaviour, replicability, consistency, setting blueprints, and patterns for success is: we get what we focus on. We know that. And those of you who have listened to me before know I talk a lot about the fact I ride a motorbike. And one of the things that gets ingrained into you as a rider is if you're going round a corner or you're doing anything at any speed, the reality is wherever you look, you will go. We see this time and time and time again where you might be laying around a corner, you're going quite fast, and all of a sudden you look into the ditch because you think, Oh, I don't want to go there.
And in that split second, you're heading towards that ditch and you have to course correct. And you haven't done anything different in your approach other than change your focus. You're no longer focusing on where you want to go. You're focusing where you don't want to be, and then you're gravitating towards that. In one of my trainings on the deep dive catalog we have on smartmind.com, I talk about an F1 race where Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen were in the midst of their race, and they crashed on turn one. Now, what happened was everybody that was behind them coming into that corner, and back in those days where those two were constantly battling for first place, everybody was behind them. But if you look at the aerial picture, what you'll see is all those racing car drivers, irrespective of the fact that they are professional racing car drivers, have come off their racing line and they're gravitating towards Hamilton and Verstappen's crash. That makes no logical sense. But what you know about human behaviour is every single one of those racing car drivers are looking at the fact that those two have crashed. And because they're looking at them, their vehicles are going in that direction.
So we know that about human behaviour. We know we get what we focus on. And wherever we're looking, or focusing, or looking to correct, we'll gravitate in that direction. It's just a human trait. So if we're obsessively focusing over something that's not working, then we're going to replicate and be ultra focused on that mistake, rather than shifting our focal currency to things that are going to give us a bigger bang for buck, a stronger return on investment, which is how we do the skill properly in the first place.
I talk a lot about following a blueprint. When you're following your blueprint of how, your brain creates neurological points of reference. These are neural pathways of 'how'. Now, it doesn't matter whether you're using that same analogy of kicking a goal in a closed skill, or as a gymnast doing multiple somersaults or a hockey player with going for goal, whatever you're doing, you've got these neural pathways in your brain. And they're essentially like a domino set. When those dominoes get tipped, this is how we do this skill. This is how its skill get executed. However, if we make a mistake and the vast majority of you listening to this are human, you will make mistakes. There's going to be times where you go out there and, irrespective of the best laid plans, things are not going to work. You're going to make a mistake. If you become overly focused and obsessed on that mistake, then you end up rewriting that blueprint. That blueprint no longer follows the optimal blueprint that you created. It's now got a glitch in that process, in that framework of how you operate. So that glitch forms part of your replicability. Now, I was working with a very well known gymnast, many, many years ago. And I got this phone call to ask me to go and work with them because they were about to compete in a very high competition. And what happened was they were working on the pommel horse. They were doing circles on the pommel horse, doing their skills. And at the same point in a routine, this very established athlete would fall off. And so they asked me to go in and help them correct this one skill that was a significantly difficult skill in their routine. And I turned up and I said to them, Okay, show me the routine. And to form, this athlete got up, he did his full routine, got to this incredibly complex set of skills and fell.
And I've gone, Okay, and they've gone, See, this is what's happening. Every single time that he does his routine, he goes to do this very complex skill and he falls. I said, Okay, so show me the skill. So he got up and he did the skill individually and did it beautifully. There was not a flaw with that skill. So we're looking at that and going, Okay, this athlete no longer is it about, Can I do this skill? Because clearly he can do this skill. It's about how does that skill fit into my neural pathway, into that neurological point of reference, those dominoes. And so I said, Okay, so you can do the skill. And he goes, Every single time. I said, So explain to me why you fall at that point in the routine when you're doing all the skills that you can do, and you get to that point and you fall. He goes, I do every single time. And for me, that was all I needed to hear. I thought, Okay he's obsessively focusing over this skill at that point. So I said to him, Okay, we're going to do a routine again.
And he instantly turned around and said, But I'll fall. I said, Okay, that's fine. But I'm going to ask you to do something completely different for me. Are you willing to try something different? He goes, Of course. These people had flown me in from another country to have this conversation. And I said to him, Okay, what I want you to do is instead of starting on that side of the pommel horse, I want you to stand on this side of the pommel horse and do your routine starting from here. He goes, I don't do that. I said, I understand that. I understand it. But you said to me that you were going to work with me on this. What I'm asking you to do is I'm asking you to do your normal routine, what you would normally do. But instead of starting on that side of the pommel horse, I want you to start on this side of the pommel horse. He's gone, Okay. He walked around the pommel horse, he started his routine, and when everything looked awesome all the way through to the end. And he did his full routine.
He got off, he did a complete routine, and it was the best routine he'd done in donkeys. He turned to me and goes to me, Oh, my God. What happened? I said, The blueprint that you had created had this glitch put in the process. If it was a computer program, you had a virus in your computer program. And every single time that you got to that point in the program, the glitch would pull you off the pommel horse. And he goes, But all I did was walk around the other side of the pommel horse. I said, Exactly. So what we did then is we wiped the old program and we reinitiated again from here. It's no different to turning a computer off and turning it back on again. Sometimes it just resets the program. By getting him to stand on the other side of the pommel horse, he took it from his subconscious and back into his prefrontal cortex, a boss in the office. And what they did then is he goes, Right, I've got to follow the process. I've got to follow the blueprint. But he wasn't focused on the mistake.
He was focused on the fact that I've got to reinitiate this blueprint from the other side. Now, I've done this with athletes. I work in rugby, for argument's sake, and I've done this with kickers who have gone through a slump in the fact that they just don't kick under pressure. And I've gone to them, Okay, what I want you to do is I want you to start changing where you kick from, I want you to start changing some part of the process. And what it does, it takes it out of the subconscious. So if you remember what the subconscious does do, it doesn't think, it just follows the process. And if we've over-focused, over-obsessed on a mistake, and we've then integrated that mistake into our blueprint, then our subconscious doesn't know. It just follows that, gets that, and makes that mistake time and time again, embedding that mistake into our process.
I know we've probably gone down a rabbit hole here with obsessive focus, but that often dictates what we choose to focus on. And if we're looking at becoming way more efficient in our focus process, then it's about focusing on what's going to give us the biggest bang for buck, rather than on things that haven't worked in the past. We want to make sure that the things that we're doing are going to give us that return.
Now, I want to go down another little rabbit hole here, which is about instant versus delayed gratification. Bear with me, this is a really significant today issue. When I explain to you why it's a today issue, you're going to understand why sometimes we again become overly obsessed on things that aren't giving us a return on investment. So instant versus delayed gratification, this is part of our innate human behaviour. If we go back to the caveman and woman days, our whole ethos was instant gratification. Now, if we were hungry, we would leave the cave, we'd go hunting, we'd find something to eat, we'd bring it home and we would eat it. Sometimes we'd even eat it when we was out there and we'd hunted it and we'd killed it in the moment, and we would, depending on how hungry we were, we would eat it right there. So humans were created to have instant gratification. If we wanted to sleep, we slept. We didn't go, Oh, look, I've got five hours left at work, so I'm going to keep working through that before I can go home and have dinner and go to bed. The cave man and woman days where you were tired, you would lay down, you'd go to sleep. So instant gratification because there was no consequences to anything else was the thing of the day.
Then through the Industrial Revolution, I know I'm going down a history route here, but we've changed what humans would innately do because of our evolution in process. During the Industrial Revolution, we had light bulbs, people went to work, and so if they were hungry, they had to wait until the end of work. No longer could they have that instant gratification, stop the mill, stop the machinery, I'm hungry, I'm going outside to eat. It would be, Well, I've still got five hours left at work, so I've got to go through that process before I can go home and eat. As time went on through the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, and we started getting the annual leave that would come up at the end of our work period every year, we'd say, Right, I've got to keep working all year, and then I'm going to get my holidays at the end of the year. We started to teach people about delayed gratification.
We couldn't eat when we wanted, we couldn't holiday when we wanted, we couldn't sleep when we wanted. We had to complete things before we could get what we wanted. So that's that delayed gratification. And there's a whole vast different world between that instant gratification and that delayed gratification. Because as humans, we have to understand we've got to follow something, do something, and get an outcome before I can have what I want.
Fast forward to today, and you may be listening to this on one of your devices. That could be a cell phone, mobile phone, tablet, computer, a whole variety of different things, your television. Wherever you're listening to this is a technological marvel. It's completely revolutionised the way that we do everything in our world. It's also taken us back to that instant gratification mindset. Because if you look at what athletes and humans in general are doing is, I'll go on my social media and I'll get a 'like'. If I get a like straight away for a photo I've just posted, then that's that instant gratification. We started to retrain our brain again to want instant gratification. We want that instant acknowledgement, whether that be friend like, whether that be someone who makes a comment on your post, whether that be you making a comment on somebody else's post and then them liking it.
Because when you make that comment or you like something, guarantee you sit there thinking, Have they seen it? God, it's been 30 seconds, why haven't they responded? And we become obsessively focused on waiting for that instant recognition. If we go back to talking about sport here, then that instant focus on fixing that one thing, rather than thinking, How do I fix that? How do I go back and think about, What was I doing when this was working? We become way more obsessed in, If I just focus on it, if I do everything I possibly can right now to fix this, then I'll move past it. What we end up doing is growing that glitch, because we've retrained our brain again to be instant gratification dominant. As an athlete, I try to encourage our clients, and as I say they're all different walks of life and sports and different stages in their careers. Some of them are grassroots, some of them are Olympic champions. Trying to get them to go back to process orientation allows them to have that delayed gratification. Let's build the process, let's build the process. If we keep doing what we're doing right now, the outcome will come.
I often frustrate coaches and I frustrate coaches because I refuse to talk about winning. And it's not that I don't want to win because I am so competitive. I would gnaw your leg off to beat you. There's actually a story where I was training for a running race, and I would do sandhill running every day. I remember I was doing this sandhill running one morning and at that stage, I think I was in my mid-40s. I'd been running for a while and I was running up this sandhill and this young female athlete came running past me and she goes, Morning. She ran up this hill straight past me and left me for dust. Now there's probably a whole variety of things going on in that, from the fact that she was probably about half my age and a hell of a lot fitter than I was. She may have only just started her run. I was multiple kilometres into my run... And I'm just making excuses here. For whatever reason that was, she shot past me. Now, I ran that route every single morning for a week until she came again and I thought, No, I'm not going to let you beat me up that hill.
So I'm highly competitive. So it's not about me not being competitive. And I did beat her, by the way. But what I'm trying to highlight is focusing on the outcome makes us instant gratification focused. I've got to get that outcome. I've got to get that outcome. And we forget to focus on our how, the process. So therefore, focusing on the outcome, got to get the outcome, got to get the outcome, we become highly erratic in how we do what we do. What we're trying to build is replicability and consistency, so every time we go out and we perform, what we want to be able to do is perform under pressure consistently. That's focusing on the how, not the what. We want to focus on that how. We want to get to that point of, I know if I follow this process, I'm going to get the outcome. So if something doesn't work and we need to revert back to process, we've already invested our focal currency is on that process. So that's a little rabbit hole of instant versus delayed gratification. As an athlete, particularly as a high performing athlete, we need to revert our thought back to delayed gratification. Follow the process and I will get the outcome. Be highly invested focal currency being spent on that process, then I know that's a strong investment in consistent performance. Does that make sense?
So if it's everything to do with using our focal currency for good, not evil, we want to use it in a way that's going to promote consistency and replicability. That's part of the big picture puzzle. Now, remember, what we're talking about here is how do I focus and stay focused as an athlete when things are distracting us? We've talked about the emotional distractions. We've talked about the obsessive focus on things because they haven't worked, and we've talked about that requiring that instant gratification rather than that delayed gratification. I've just got to force the outcome. So what we want to do is focus on the Goldilocks moment, which is just right. It's got to be urgent enough, it's got to be a good enough investment for us. But we've also got to recognise there's a process to get what we want if we want to get consistency and replicability. I talk about eating an elephant. Everyone's probably heard, How do you eat an elephant?
A chunk at a time. Because if you eat that whole elephant, you choke. So we want to eat that elephant a chunk at a time. Okay, how do I do this? What that leads into is setting objectives and valuing those objectives. So the difference between an objective and a goal is an objective is an outcome. So that's being able to do this skill, doing this routine, kicking that goal, whatever that is, that's your objective. And it's an objective because it's emotive, and it's emotive because it's something that you want. A goal is the actions that you need to do to get that. And the reason we use goals for the individual steps is because if you score a goal, you celebrate. And that allows us to recognise and reward. So we increase dopamine, serotonin, we reduce the cortisol, the fear and fight and flight in the brain. And what we start to do is to recalibrate our brain to go, Right, if I keep hitting all these goals, I'm going to get my outcome, which is my big objective. That way, it allows us to stay on track. So these are 'in the moment' strategies to allow you as an athlete, to stay on track.
That's being very, very clear. Where am I spending my focal currency? It's making sure that you're focused on process rather than outcome. It's making sure that you've got that Goldilocks moment. Yes. Eating elephants, a chunk at a time. If I eat all of these chunks in order, I'm going to get my objective. When I've got my objective, that's really important to me, so I can recognise that and I can reward that. All of these things stop the external fears, anxieties, emotions, consequences impacting how you do what you do. And it will stop the external distractions, because the internal processes take priority, because they've got a bigger bang for buck, a higher return on investment for you. So let's look at some bigger structural processes that you can go through. And one of the things I teach is the funnelling process. So that's called the 7 to 2 and game day. The 7 to 2 is a funnel shape that we look at and go, it's in a funnel for a particular reason. And the start of the week is the wider part of the funnel. So we front load the week and we talk about what are my non-negotiables, the things that we need to do every single day to make sure that I'm physically and mentally right.
So that's things like, our non-negotiables are our hydration, our nutrition, our sleep, our recovery process. So all of those are looking after the physicality of you as an athlete. Then we look at the psychology and we've got what's called Job V, which is:
J for Journal, making sure you're collecting data, you end of every session, you're collecting that information.
We've got the O for Objectives. We've already talked about that, making sure we've got week and session objectives, so we've got a purpose and a focus.
We've got B, which is Bounce. This is our neurological stimulation and pattern recognition process I teach.
And we've got V, which is visualisation, which is embedding those blueprints that we're talking about, those optimal performance strategies into our brain.
So there are our non-negotiables. They should be happening every single day, looking after you physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Then you look at your individual needs as an athlete. What is it I need to do to be ready for competition at the end of the week? What are my wants? What do I want to feel? So I might want to feel confident, in control, comfortable, relaxed. And then you look at that and go, What do I need to do to feel those?
Then you got your nice to have. These are more reward based things. You know what, it'd be nice to have a massage or to have a morning lay in. All of those things are part of the recognition and reward process. This whole system then gets built so that your focus is directed towards things that are going to give you an outcome. Rather than emotively, what tends to happen, that funnels up the other way, and we start doing more and more and more and more as we get closer and closer to competition, because we're emotionally being driven rather than process driven. That funnel system allows you to stay on track. Now, I'm of a vintage, of an age where I remember on the television and at the circus, you'd have an act where they'd be spinning plates. They'd be on long sticks and a plate, and they'll spin a plate and they'll get that plate to be spinning around on top of that stick like a basketballer spins a basketball on their finger. Then they would get another stick and spin another plate. Now they've got two plates that are spinning, and then another stick and another plate, and they've got three, and so on, so on until they've got this, like, 10, sometimes more plates, all of them spinning. And for dramatic effect, they'll see one, it'll start to wobble. Then everyone will go, 'Oh!' And they'll run in, they're able to spin it again and get it back up to speed. We do the same thing as athletes all the time. We're not spinning plates per se, but we're spinning plates of things that we need to focus on, whether that be physical preparation, competition preparation, skill acquisition, retention, optimisation, looking after our body, making sure we're recovering properly, making sure the team dynamic is right, making sure all of these things are part of our process. They're all individual plates that we need to spin. The only way we can efficiently and effectively spin those plates and making sure that none of them are wobbly, none of them have way too much obsessed focus, is have a process of how we spin those plates. And if we spin those plates in a consistent formation and pattern, then we're always paying attention to each one of those individually for the right amount of time at the right time. So what I teach my athletes is a time management process.
Now, you'll be able to download this template after you've listened to this and go through this process. Now, it comes in two different stages. Stage 1 is called Columns. Stage 2 is called Day and time. Stage 1 column, if you can just picture this, or if you've downloaded it already and you've got it in front of you, there's seven columns and there's seven different colours, and each column needs to be associated to a part of your process. Now, it could be your preparation process. It could be your recovery, it could be your mental preparation. It could be skill acquisition. It could be part of your school or your uni. It could be part of your relaxation process. It could be family time. So each one of these columns needs to be individual, and you'd put at the top of those a title for each one of those, whatever they are. And then in that list, let's say you're doing recovery, under that recovery tab, you would list everything that you need to do to recover. Now, you might have a list of three things. You might have a list of 15 things, from Normatec compression through to stretching, through to yoga, through to whatever that is that you need to do, massage, physio, whatever that is to recover.
And you do the same with every single column, skill acquisition, competition preparation, visualisation and mental preparation. What all of those things would have a shopping list under each one of those categories. Then you'd look at the next one, which is day time splits. So you'll see Monday, and it's got a time. And then what you would do is make sure on a Monday, you've got at least one thing from every single column. Think of those columns like individual plates, so that you might turn around and go, First thing Monday morning is recovery, and then I'm going to go into my mental preparation. I'm going to go into my game review, then I'm going to go into skill preparation, and whatever it is. The whole idea of this is you've got balance. When you've got balance throughout each individual day, what you end up doing is you're spinning every single plate and your focus is on things that are going to give you a return. And it's not an obsessed focus. You don't turn around and go, Mondays is all about new skills because I've got to upskill my routines. Then you've got no balance. You're obsessed on one aspect of your preparation.
That is not going to give you the return that you want because you're going to be highly emotive. So this time management process allows you to make sure that everything is being spun, every plate has the right amount of attention, focus, and directed focus to get the process to work.
So we started this podcast talking about, how do I stay focused as an athlete when there are so many distractions. What I hope you get from this podcast is:
- the vast majority of distractions are emotive.
- the vast majority of distractions are counter intuitive.
- we might be focusing on things that we can't control, so therefore, we're highly emotive, we're trying to force an outcome with something and we're doomed from the start.
- following a process that allows us to have the correct focal currency on the item that we're looking to optimise as much as possible.
- we're reducing our obsessive focus. We're not focusing obsessively over things that haven't worked.
- we've got a delayed gratification process trying to be reestablished again. So we're looking at that, let me invest in the process. I know when I follow my process, I'm going to get the outcome that I want.
- that Goldilocks effect, eating elephants.
- then we set objectives and we value those. We know that when I hit this, it's going to give me X. It's going to be the springboard into the next thing.
- and we can then recognise and reward, shifting the neurological chemistry to be way more motivational than fear driven.
- we looked at the funnelling process, which is a very structured way of getting to the day before a competition, going, I might feel nervous, but I know I'm ready. My focal currency has been spent on the things that I need to do, not the emotions that are fear driven.
- and lastly, we talked about spinning plates. So we looked at that time management process, having these individual columns that allow you to pick and mix each day, giving every single day an opportunity to have balance.
If you're an athlete, what I want you to do before you change anything is to look and make an assessment. Have I been spending my focal currency in a place that's going to actually be a good investment? Or have I emotionally been throwing my focus and my currency at things that I'm trying to control that I have no control over?
If the latter is you, then I urge you to really consider, what is it I need to do to redirect and reinvest my focal currency? Am I investing in me or am I investing in my failure? Now, it sounds dramatic, but it's so true. I see it so often.
Hope you got a lot from this conversation around getting the most, staying on track, not allowing those external distractions to take you away from your focal outcomes. Until the next episode of Brain in the Game, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name's Dave Diggle. See you on the next podcast.
