Thinking right in sport and life: How to refocus using the 4 F’s
Growing up, you probably heard your parents, teacher, or coach tell you that in order to perform optimally, you needed to ‘focus.’ While this was good advice in theory, rarely did these words come with any sort of tangible explanation on how to properly focus, or if things were going wrong, how to properly refocus. That’s what I am here for. As both a Mental Skills Coach and Professor of Sport & Performance Psychology, it is my job to teach individuals how to use mental skills to perform at the highest level. Today, I am going to teach you how to refocus.
Before we get into specifics, we need to start with a few universal truths:
*Proper thinking helps performance. Incorrect thinking hurts performance.
*Thinking is simply a skill. Skills can be learned.
*The thoughts we have are a choice. This means our thoughts are controllable.
*Focus is simply a thought. That means that focusing is controllable, but more importantly, a skill that can be taught.
So, what are the 4 F’s, and how do we use them?
Fuck
Imagine for a moment, you are hanging a picture in your home. While hammering the nail into the wall, you hit your thumb with the hammer. When this happens, you are likely going to say one thing: Fuck!
For some within the field of Performance Psychology, allowing oneself to get angry or frustrated after a mistake is unacceptable. There is the belief that to perform optimally, you need to stay even-keeled, never getting too high, never getting too low. From my perspective however, the anger and frustration one feels after a mistake is normal. See, when a human make a mistake, there needs to be some type of feedback provided (e.g., finger pain) to let you know that you made a mistake. The problem is, that many people simply focus on their anger about the mistake, and struggle to refocus on the task at hand. This is where the other 3 F’s become so important.
Fix
As I explained earlier, the pain experienced by hitting your finger with a hammer is simply feedback alerting you to the fact that you did something incorrectly. In order to be able to effectively move forward, you need to be able to first understand what the mistake was, then go about fixing the mistake. Perhaps you were trying to swing the hammer too hard. In that case, you can either physically rehearse the proper behavior (e.g., slowly swing hammer) or mentally rehearse the proper behavior (e.g., visualize swinging hammer striking nail properly). Once you’ve made the correction, you should be able to move forward. Much like the first F however, people can get stuck here, unable to let things go. This is where the third F comes in.
Forget
At some point in time, you simply need to move on. You cannot change the past. Too often, people ‘fix’ their mistake, but continue to ruminate on the mistake they made. We are human. We make mistakes. You need to let it go. A really good way of visualizing this is by imagining a toilet. Once you’ve fixed your mistake, imagine throwing any thoughts (both good and bad) in the toilet and flushing them down the drain. Once gone, you are now free to be able to refocus on the task at hand.
Focus
Again, focus is nothing more than a thought. You can control your thoughts. Once you’ve gotten rid of your previous experiences, you are now free to focus on the new task at hand.
Final thoughts:
So here is a quick and handy way to refocus after making a mistake. The best part: you should be able to run through each step in less than a minute total. No more excuses for not being able to refocus after a mistake.
