Join me as I’ll discuss examples of how I’ve encountered – personally, clients in my private practice, or athletes in the media – the usage of mental skills and sport psychology
Garrett West goes back to where he went to school in undergrad. UW lacrosse. Go Eagles. Hope you're enjoying your Saturday so far.
LZ Granderson: Today, I want to talk about our attention or our focus. He says our brains cannot multitask. In the city, our miles per gallon are different than on the highway. It's important to be single task focused as much as possible, he says.
Hello, Cadre. Happy Saturday. Another edition of good old sports, like Saturday here with myself, Garrett West. Rolly. Hope you're enjoying your Saturday so far. I have a nice lacrosse hat. I know we have a lot of midwesterners here, so that's where I went to school in undergrad. UW lacrosse. Go Eagles. But I have a cool analogy that I want to share to you all about the topic that we can all relate to, regardless of what we do in life, and that's our attention or our focus. So I've said a few things about this in previous videos, but specifically about, like, being where your feet are.
And that's a really good analogy that I try to live by throughout my daily life, is being where my feet are and going from one thing to one thing and being 100% engrossed in that task. So, one thing that in these live videos on Saturdays, I like to bring up just recent examples of things I've encountered personally, things that I've used, maybe work with clients that I work with in my private practice. Maybe it's the soldiers that I work with in my current job in the military. Maybe it's previous athletes that I worked with, athletes in the media.
And so just trying to pull from different areas of life and show you all that a lot of this stuff applies to all of us. So this one for today, I recently encountered, when doing a training on attention control with soldiers, and specifically, we're working on their marksmanship training, how they can go about having proper and optimal attention. So I'm not going to say anything controversial here in that we, our brains cannot multitask. I think we've all heard that at least once. We know that it's true.
Our brains cannot multitask. If you think you do, I promise you can't. Like, if you did two tasks simultaneously, there's zero likelihood or very little likelihood, unless you're a complete anomaly, that you would do as well at those two tasks simultaneously as you would if you just did one exclusively. And one analogy, which is the main thing I want to get to today, one analogy that think helps is because we're all adults on this platform, and we all maybe drive cars or understand that every vehicle gets different gas mileage, right?
If you have a vehicle, or if you're purchasing a vehicle, you know that the miles per gallon that you get in the city is different than you get on the highway or the interstate. So I know I just got a recent. I got a Mazda CX five recently. A few, like, I guess two months ago when I moved to Arizona, and that car gets 25 miles per gallon in the city and then 31 on the highway, I think. But the numbers don't matter. What's important is that we get more mileage and more efficiency when we're on the highway, right.
And that's because in the city, when you're driving, you're constantly shifting, you're constantly stopping, and you're constantly having to kind of reboot the accelerator, right. You're stopping and going. You're stopping and going, whereas on the highway, you're just going. You're just having that single focus of just going. And I love this analogy that this is how our focus works when we multitask or when we have our brain going on so many different things. It's as if we're driving in the city, our miles per gallon.
In other words, it would be if we were driving on the highway, if we were focused on one single thing. Right. So when you're, say you're on your phone and in a conversation with somebody, you're doing two things and you're getting terrible gas mileage with your focus, right. You're not getting as much as you would out of that conversation or even whatever you're doing on your phone if you were texting somebody. Everybody's busy. I get that. But it's important to if we can try to be single task focused as much as we can so we can get that efficient gas mileage with our focus.
All right, so that's the analogy I want to share with you all today. Maybe you can think about it if you're driving at all this weekend or traveling this weekend or I think also another way to apply this knowledge throughout the rest of this weekend and today and this upcoming week is when just pick up when you are maybe multitasking. Right. Again, we're all, we're all busy. We all try to be efficient with our time, and that's important, but it's going to be more efficient if you focus on one at a time, be where your feet are, and try to maximize that mileage that you're getting out of your focus.
All right, that's all I have for you all today. Hope you enjoy the rest of your Saturday. Appreciate you all being here.
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