A sport psychologist's approach on how to focus

FoundRead summarizes an article on how to focus. Though sport psychologist H.A. Dorfman's advice was for pitchers, you can easily apply it to just about anything.

According to Dorfman, "you can’t just urge someone to be disciplined; you have to build a structure of behavior and attitude. Behavior shapes thought. If a player disciplines his behavior, then he will also discipline his mind...it’s easiest to change the mind by changing behavior, and that’s probably as true in the office as on the pitching mound."

Repetition isn’t enough. Sometimes you gotta pretend. Just as a bike is better balanced when it is going forward, a pitcher’s mind is better balanced when it is unceasingly aggressive. If a pitcher doesn’t actually feel this way when he enters a game, Dorfman asks him to pretend. If your body impersonates an attitude long enough, then the mind begins to adopt it.

Re-examine the geography of your workplace. There are two locales in a pitcher’s universe--on the mound and off the mound. Off the mound is for thinking about the past and future, on the mound is for thinking about the present. When a pitcher is on the pitching rubber, Dorfman writes, he should only think about three things: pitch selection, pitch location and the catcher’s glove, his target. If he finds himself thinking about something else, he should step off the rubber.

Focus more on your task-effort (which you control), less on responses to it (which you don’t). A pitcher shouldn’t judge himself by how the batters hit his pitches, but instead by whether he threw the pitch he wanted to throw.

Focusing on the (comparatively) small task at hand will arrest diverted thinking about the (comparatively large) ego involved. A baseball game is a spectacle, with a thousand points of interest. But Dorfman reduces it all to a series of simple tasks. The pitcher’s personality isn’t at the center. His talent isn’t at the center. The task is at the center.