Mental Skills Monday: Focus

What's up, Cadre family? My name is Garrett Westerwell. Here. Happy Monday. For those of you that haven't been tuning in, or maybe you have just a reminder. I use my background in sport and performance psychology to help people realize that everybody's a performer. And in performance, we can train our minds to work for us rather than against us. So today's topic is going to be a lovely one. That is focus and or attention. We kind of use those terms interchangeably. And to open that discussion up, I want to start with a quote, because I think it's super powerful and helpful.

And the quote is that attention is the currency of performance. So again, attention is the currency of performance. And as you're digesting that, let's break it down for a little bit. All that means is that without attention, there's nothing we can really do to offset not having attention in our performance. It is single handedly one of the most important things we have in our toolkit whenever we go about a task or a performance of some kind. So, in its simplest form, the secret to high performance and high success is being able to place your focus on something when you want it to be and sustain it for as long as you need to.

And the cool part about focus is that it's a trainable skill. You can literally train your brain to place your focus where you want it for as long as you want it and do that consistently. Like all mental skills, similar to physical skills, it's cool because you can train it, and there's a lot of great ways to do that, which we'll talk about later on. So, like I said, attention being the currency. A performance currency usually means money or numbers. So let's talk about numbers. Let's crunch them up a little bit.

A good analogy that I like to use to talk about and frame focus relates to numbers. I like to think about focus as our. We have about 100 total focus points at any given moment on our task or our performance. So let's say that zero on that scale means that we're either asleep or we're completely absent minded. Whereas 100 means we're completely locked in, maybe even in sort of that flow state, if you ever heard of that. And in the middle, there is usually where most of us fall. Because we're humans, we get distracted, but we also want to maximize the number of points that we have for our focus abilities.

So, like I said, I work a lot with sports psychology and with athletes and athletes, because they're people just like you and I are. They get distracted, just how our brains work sometimes, right? And athletes often get distracted by a lot of things. For example, a tennis player gets distracted by a lot of things. It can be the weather, maybe the, you know, it's cloudy. Maybe they don't like to play when it's cloudy. That takes away five points. Maybe their coach is just making some questionable game plan decisions.

That takes away five points. Maybe they're a college athlete and they didn't do well on a test earlier that day and that's just lingering in their mind. That takes away 20 points. All right? And then maybe the opponent is, you know, maybe they have a personal history with that opponent and they're focused on that. That takes away an additional ten points. So to do some quick math, that would be at 5520 and ten. So that's 40 points taken away. And if we're just looking at that, that's. They're left with 60 points of focus in their system.

They could be the best tennis player in the dang world if you're only performing at 60% of your focus. Going back to that quote, they're not going to perform very well because attention is the currency of their performance. And just like that tennis player in that example, you also deal with distractions every day. You deal with times when your attention is on something that isn't relevant to your performance or the task at hand. So really, the goal of that framing around point system is how can you maximize the number of points that you're allocating towards your performance or your task at hand.

Right. And to do that, there's really three basic rules and stuff that I've touched on before and stuff that I'm going to touch on more, in more detail later on. But number one, focus on what you can control, what's in your control. Number two, focus on what's the most important in that task or performance. And then number three, be aware of what takes away that focus. What takes you away from that 100 points on your focus scale. What brings you from that 100 down to a 90? And like I said, that accumulates and keeps building up.

What takes you down from a 90 to a 70? Maybe you're working with a 30 or something like that. Be aware of what draws away your focus. Focus on what's most important, which I have a fun acronym that I'm going to dive into in a later video and focus on what's controllable, which I've kind of talked about a little bit in a prior video. So you can look back at that one if you want to learn more about controlling the controllables. That's a great phrase that I often like to use. So all that says go out there, try to maximize the points that you have in your focus ability, because, again, it's the currency of our performance, and it's just a really important skill no matter what you do.

So try to apply that today. Have a great rock and rest of your Monday, and go get some. Stay focused out there, people. Thank you.