Record What You See So You Can See What To Record

The other day I talked with a head coach about his experience with recording his observations of player behavior during a team event. He described a moment where, from afar, he observed two players acting disrespectful towards a presenter. The coach admitted that in the past, he would have stewed and become distracted over this display of inappropriate behavior; however because he was able to capture what he saw in real-time using his phone, he immediately felt a sense of calmness and was able to focus on his primary task.

He told me that writing down what he saw, put it out of his head, put his mind at ease, and he knew that he could address this behavior at a more opportune time.

This peaked my curiosity. For years at Horizon Performance, we have made it easy to record behavioral observations so coaches and instructors can visualize a more holistic view of a person’s behavior over time and in specific contexts. We have found that this greatly improves data-driven selection and development decisions. In fact, making better decisions has been the foundation of our value proposition. But after talking with this head coach, I realized capturing observations in the moment may also provide useful real-time cognitive benefits for the observer.

Many of the environments in which we work for both the special operations community and athletics are inherently stressful. In these situations, the observer’s brain must attend to many environmental and cognitive factors. Many of these fast-paced, action-packed events can cause an increase in the hormone, cortisol, which is known to inhibit memory encoding and retrieval.

This means that, not only is it stressful to try to retain what you witnessed in working memory, but it is also difficult to later accurately retrieve that memory. So the next time you observe a behavior that you’d like to address in the future, consider capturing it in the moment so you can stay engaged in the present.