Volleyball Coaching Life-Focus

Coaches are big on focus. Parents are REALLY big on focus. In fact:” Focus!” is one of the most often repeated mantras heard in gyms and convention centers across the country where volleyball is played. It is right up there with: “Point!”, “Move your feet!”, “Balls up”, and “Water!”.

The question is: do we really know what we mean by focus? Do the players? What specifically are we asking for from the players and most importantly, can they deliver on the promise of focus on demand as if we were asking for a movie on Netflix?

Finally, is focus what we really want from the players? Or are we confusing focus with what we really want from the players?

Jean Fournier and Damian Farrow talk about focus in Chapter 3 Focus: What Are You Thinking about? of their very interesting book titled:   7 Things We Don’t Know, _[1]

First, they define focus as an “engagement in perception, thoughts, or movements”. In more simple terms, “the focus of attention represents what we are thinking about.”

Next, they separate the concept of focus by looking at it in two ways: inward attention (internal focus) and external attention (external focus). Internal focus means that the athlete is keying on their own inner process, on how they perform through their physical action and the performance of technical skills, i.e. on what they needed to do with their own bodies. The external focus in the opposite, where the players are keying on the external results, on what their intent or purpose is with respect to the game itself, on the result, whether it is passing the ball to target or attacking the ball.

According to Fournier and Farrow, the external focus is more beneficial for performance than internal focus, in fact internal focus tends to distract the player from performing the tasks necessary to play the game because they are paying more attention to HOW they are playing rather than playing. This is in seeming contradiction to what we are being taught, that we need to teach our players to focus on the process, be internally focused and be thoughtful about the process. There is a caveat here, and it has to do with the intent of the activity, whether we wish to learn HOW to play the game or to COMPETE in the game. The internal focus is best for the skill acquisition stage of learning and the external focus is best for the competition stage.

Looking in hindsight at my coaching experience, I can see glimmers of Fournier and Farrow’s contentions in how my players have responded to the exhortations to focus. Could my emphasis on focus on skills early on in my coaching been a hinderance to their progress as competitors? Could my emphasis on result oriented situational practices have been a positive boost to how they respond to real game situations? I can’t say for sure because I have not specifically measured the effects, but this idea will now affect how I conduct practices and how I communicate with my players. Fournier and Farrow’s chapter also gives great advice on how to train players to focus their attention and how sports psychologists go about thinking about which data to take when talking about focus.

But, going back to the initial conjecture: is focus what we really mean when we exhort our players? Or are we collectively confusing focus with what we really want from the players?

I believe it is the latter. Being focused does not necessarily automatically infer that the player is performing effectively and flawlessly, being focused is a pre-requisite for performance, it is a first step, it is the initiation of our cognition towards a specific goal, a prelude to a much larger and more complex undertaking: playing the game.

What coaches and parents are meaning to say is: be completely engaged, be in the flow in the Csikszentmihalyi sense, be wu-wei. But we always conflate engagement and being in the flow with just focus. Even though focus, especially external focus, is critical to attaining flow, it is not a guarantee that flow happens automatically. In logical terms, if there is flow like engagement, there must be focus, but having focus does not necessarily mean that there is flow like engagement.

Focus is a necessary condition for flow, but we as coaches must not treat it as an end point or as a goal by itself, it is just a beginning of the cognitive process towards being completely and unconsciously engaged in the play. Of course, for those that coach the young one, achieving external focus is a feat worth celebrating.

[1] Jean Fournier and Damian Farrow, 7 Things We Don’t Know! Coaching Challenges in Sports Psychology and Skill Acquisition. (Canada: Mindeval Canada, Inc., 2013). 37-46.