Attentional Focus

If you have competed in any competitive sport, it is highly likely that you’ve heard your coach tell you time and time again to focus. For so many developing athletes it is difficult to be aware of spacing, understand where the ball is, and know where their opponents are all while running, treading, skating, or swimming. Why is it that a certain performers struggle to focus on one task at a time, while others are able to seemingly focus on ten different things at once? The key to improving attentional focus is to be able to change between areas of focus seamlessly, while keeping attention on the pertinent information at any given moment.

Attentional focus can be defined as the ability to attend to the internal and external stimuli around you with both a broad and narrow lens. As an athlete, the amount of stimuli around you at any given time can quickly become overwhelming without the proper mindset towards attentional focus. External stimuli could be things like actions of the opponent, sounds from the crowd, weather, and voices from your teammates, while internal stimuli come from within us and include thoughts, emotions, and physical reactions. Stimuli that you interpret with a narrow lens are things that you can zoom-in on: the ball, the opponent you are guarding, and your technique. In contrast, stimuli that you interpret with a broad lens are things that you have to zoom-out to identify such as the shot clock, spacing, and defensive formations. As you think about the number of stimuli at any given moment of athletic performance, it becomes clear why athletes need to be able to filter out what stimuli are essential to focus on for performance and what stimuli are prohibitive towards optimal performance.

The first step in improving attentional focus is to recognize and categorize each sport-related stimulus into one of the following areas: Narrow Internal, Narrow External, Broad Internal, or Broad External. Once you have every sport-related stimulus for your particular situation written down, go through and cross off every stimulus that is unimportant or will not help you perform at your peak, such as sights and sounds from the crowd. What you have left are the stimuli that you want to focus on in each of the four quadrants for optimal athletic performance.

As athletes continue to become mindful of the different factors that are essential to focus on for optimal athletic performance, they can specialize their training to help themselves be able to change between the four quadrants of focus without missing any essential stimuli. Being able to quickly and seamlessly change between each of the four quadrants is the key to being able to focus at an optimal level of performance. Although some aspects of technique require less focus as athletes gain experience, being able to quickly change focus from Narrow Internal stimuli, such as how the ball feels leaving your hand, to Broad External stimuli, such as reading the opponent’s defense, is a valuable skill for athletes at all levels. At Think Big Performance we help athletes recognize the essential areas of focus for optimal performance and work through a variety of specialized techniques to help athletes improve their focus.

Dan Matulis, MS, CMPC