20.1: Focus

It is common to hear coaches before a big moment exclaim, “Focus!” However, coaches rarely provide guidance about how to focus, or what to focus on. One of the key factors in peak performance in sport is the ability to focus and refocus during a game (Krane & Williams, 2015). This section of the chapter will briefly cover the applied sport psychology literature that has examined the ability to focus and concentrate.

20.1.1. What is the Ability to Focus?

Effective concentration involves two main components; the ability to attend to the correct things at the correct moment and the ability to attend to the information in the correct way (e.g., are you focused on the right thing at the right time). At face value this might seem quite simple, but it can actually be a challenge. For example, JR, an American football quarterback, is trying to hear the play call from his coach so that he can relay the play to his teammates. The home crowd is loud, making it difficult to know if he is relaying the correct information to his teammates. He tells his teammates the play, and then heads to the line of scrimmage. The coach gave him the option to audible (i.e., change the play if he deems it appropriate) if the safety (i.e., one of the defensive players) is close to the line of scrimmage. His focus jumps to the movement of the safety, but of course, the safety is moving all over the field before the play begins. He is having difficulty reading what the safety will do, but he must make a decision. He decides to keep the original play call, which is a four-man passing play (he must look at four different routes to know where to throw the ball). He calls for the ball to be snapped. Immediately one of his offensive linemen misses a block and he has to scramble to avoid being tackled. He avoids the first defender but knows more are coming. While avoiding rushing defenders, he must scan the field for who is open and what coverage the defense is playing. He notices that they are playing zone and notices that there is a hole in the coverage. He steps up and throws to what he thinks is an open receiver. However, there was a safety just out of his line of sight. His receiver makes a great catch over the safety’s outstretched arms. He throws a touchdown!

Before we move on, consider all of the things that JRhad to concentrate on in the example provided above. You will see for a play that might have lasted six seconds, there were many different components to focus on for the play to be successful. The ability to focus on the correct information, at the correct time is vital for sporting success. It is also necessary that athletes are able to shift their focus throughout the game (Williams et al., 2015). In the example above, we excluded any information about past or future events. Both past and future events can be a distractor to athletes during play. Scholars believe the best form of concentration is the ability to stay in the here and now (Hermansson & Hodge, 2012), meaning an athlete maximizes their concentration whenever they have complete focus on the task at hand. In the next section, we will lay the groundwork that focuses on conceptualizing the different types of attention that athletes have during sports participation.

20.1.2. Conceptualizing Attention Control

In the 1970s, Robert Nideffer proposed a model of attention control training that suggests that people have four unique dimensions of attention in a 2x2 model. The first component is the direction of the athlete’s attention, which is conceptualized as either being internal (within oneself) or external (outside of oneself). When attention is internal, an athlete could be focused on feeling their muscular tension or rehearsing strategy within their own thoughts. When attention is external, an athlete could focus on the movement of the other players on the field or finding the open teammate to pass to: that is, focusing on anything outside of one’s body.

The other key component from Nideffer’s model is width of attention focus. Width of attentional focus is thought of as being either broad or narrow. Broad attentional focus is being able to attend to a lot of different pieces of information at the same time. For example, a basketball player surveying the court to see where her teammates and opponents are in order to decide to pass (and who to pass to) or shoot. The basketball athlete needs to see as many of her teammates and opponents as possible to make the decision. Otherwise, she might pass to a teammate who is being covered by someone who she did not see and lose possession of the ball. However, if her attention is too broad, she might become indecisive, leading to her turn the ball over. An example of a narrow attentional focus would be a golfer right before trying to make a short putt (we will assume the golfer has already picked the line of the putt using broad information). The golfer knows that they have to make clean contact with the ball with their putter. In this situation, you will likely see the golfer with their head down, staring at the ball. This is very narrow because the golfer is no longer looking at their surroundings, they have already chosen the shot and now they have to execute it.

Taken together, Nideffer’s model proposes that at any time an athlete will be focused at some width and in some direction. This creates four unique dimensions that include broad-external, broad-internal, narrow-external, and narrow-internal (See Figure 20.1). The importance of an athletes’ ability to shift their attention to where they need it in critical moments of a game is well documented but like most psychological skills, there is a high amount of individual variance in an athlete’s ability to shift focus (Ziegler, 1994). Also, athletes seem to have a high amount of variability in their ability to attend to many or a few cues at a time (Williams et al., 2015). Some athletes can inherently attend to more cues in the environment than others. That is not to say that focus (or shifting focus) cannot be trained, but there seems to be some level of focus that is innate for each athlete.

Figure 20.1. The Dimensions of Attention as Proposed by Nideffer (1976) with Examples

Stevinson and Biddle (1998) proposed a slightly different model of attentional focus. Within the Stevinson and Biddle model there are still two focal dimensions, but they are divided by task-relevance and direction. For task relevance, the researchers hypothesized there are two dimensions of either task association or task dissociation. Similar to Nideffer’s (1976) model, it also incorporates the direction component.

There have also been other classifications of focus in sport that are newer and have less empirical support to date. Brick and colleagues (2014) created two categories that focus solely on internal association named internal sensory monitoring and active self-regulation. Some hypothesize that this model works well when focused on endurance sports due to the high internal focus that often happens during events that last for many hours (Neuman, 2019). There is also recent theorizing that proposes that an external focus is optimal for skill learning and development of most motor skills (Wulf & Lewthwaite, 2016).

Each of these alternative views of focus in skill learning and performance is worth considering because the demands of focus are incredibly varied across the sport domain. What information a gymnast needs to focus on is likely quite different from what a soccer player must focus on for optimal sport performance. Although the Nideffer model has been most cited, these other models are well conceptualized and have empirical support (Williams et al., 2015, Wulf & Lewthwaite, 2016). Therefore, when considering a model that might be most useful for your specific sport needs, examine each of the proposed models in detail to see if they fit the sport-specific needs of the domain.

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20.1.3. Application

Like all mental skills, in order to be able to optimally focused, athletes must train to focus on the correct cues at the correct times (Ziegler, 1994). Interestingly though, athletes rarely get explicit training on what to focus on during a sporting event. Athletes that have sport demands that are somewhat static (i.e., sports where the object is stationary before the play begins, like archery) probably have thought more about their ability to focus compared to athletes who play invasive sports (like basketball or soccer). However, for all sports, there are ways to train focus that should be considered when working with athletes.

Athletes often struggle with shifting their focus from one object to another (Ziegler, 1994). Shifting focus can be trained during normal practice situations. It would be useful for a coach to explicitly tell and athlete what they should focus on in a situation and when their focus should shift (Williams et al., 2015). After a simple explanation, the coach could repeatedly run an athlete through a situation where they have to shift their focus from one cue to another. The coach could give the athlete the space to fail and let them work through the process in a way that allows them to self-correct and self-regulate their behavior. If the athlete continues to struggle, the coach could work to simplify the decision, and then add complexity later on in the practice session. When an athlete successfully completes the task and clearly shifts focus, the coach could verbally encourage that behavior and the shifting of focus. After the athlete has developed the skill set to focus on the task in a practice scenario, the coach could make the scenario more difficult by making the situation more complex in a simulated competition.

Another important, but often overlooked detail, is talking with an athlete about what they are seeing or focusing on after a play. What a coach or mental performance consultant thinks an athlete is seeing compared to what they are actually seeing might be quite different (Williams et al., 2015). Talking with an athlete might help them filter the cues they are seeing. The athlete might be having too broad of a focus during a time when they need to be much narrower in their focus. These conversations should be commonplace for athletes who are struggling with focus during games. Knowing what someone is focusing on is the first step in either enhancing that focus, or altering that focus. Consultants or coaches could also focus on incorporating a pre-performance routine with their athletes. This routine should be developed with focus in mind. At the end of the routine, a coach would want the athlete to be completely focused on the task at hand.

Moving back to the motor learning literature, there has been some interesting theoretical work by Wulf and Lewthwaite (2016) who created the OPTIMAL model of motor learning. Part of their model focuses on the type of focus that most athletes or skill learners should have to optimize for skill learning and development. In basic motor learning tasks, they find that an external focus of attention is far superior to an internal focus of attention (Wulf & Lewthwaite, 2016). They posit that an external focus of attention likely decreases self-focus which allows for increased focus on the task goal. This increase focus on the task goal will lead to increases in motor performance and motor learning. The increase in external focus has beneficial effects on efficiency and accuracy in lab and field-based tests (Lewthwaite & Wulf, 2017).

Being able to focus on the right object at the right time is crucial for most sport performances. Understanding the key components of focus are crucial for understanding how and why performers make mistakes on well-learned tasks. The ability to train focus is increasing with different biofeedback and neurofeedback tools that are available on the market today. Moving forward, sport psychology researchers should continue to develop strong theoretical arguments about how focus is structured in specific sport settings and how it can be best measured.