More Vegetables, Please.
Motivation, energy management, stress management, self-confidence and maintaining focus are all important factors for enhanced performance. Sport Psychologists talk about the techniques of imagery, arousal control, goal setting or self-talk as tools to improve those factors. However, despite numerous visits, getting people to fully commit to practicing these techniques isn’t easy.
I was recently working with a high school football team on the development of their team mission statement — a commitment for which they are accountable. I love this exercise because the team comes up with the statement on their own. It’s fun to facilitate the conversations, and they get passionate at times because this is a process of a team taking ownership of itself. Seeing the players engage with each other provides a sense of their team cohesion and respect for each other. This is what they came up with:
While this mission statement is short, it’s very intentional for the team that owns it.
Once this was agreed upon, one of the players asked “How can we maintain our focus if it’s getting away from us?” What a great question. His question was a door for me to embark on some player development. I say this because I could have simply answered, “Think about the goals you started out with and get back to those.” The truth is, asking teenage boys to set goals is often like asking a little kid whose favorite food group is chicken nuggets, to eat all the vegetables on his plate (it’s a painful ask for everyone involved).
In this case, I wasn’t explicitly asking them to set goals, just sharing how they could maintain focus. I explained,
“Maintaining focus is a practiced skill, and it begins with knowing what you want to accomplish first. An example of this would be setting a goal. It’s takes self-reflection and honesty to admit what you can improve on. Do you need to get stronger, faster, employ better techniques? Academically are you doing everything you can? How about with family or your faith [if that is a big part of your life]?”
My goal was to help these guys understand that deep down, they know themselves better than anyone, and after some deep thought they need to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard to capture it. Once you identify what you want to improve on, think about the actions you will take towards making that improvement and write those out. Now you have something to remind you where your focus should be. Different situations require different goals, so make a habit of reflecting and capturing what you want to accomplish and how you’re going to make it happen. Simply put, make a habit of setting goals; when you find yourself losing focus, reflect back on the goal you set for yourself.
Without trying to sell them on the importance of goal setting, I was able to leverage their interest with something they had ownership in, their mission statement. In the end you could say, “They asked to eat their vegetables.”
