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.

Volleyball Coaching Life-Comfortable

I had asked a question of the denizens of the Volleyball Coaches and Trainers Facebook page and the answers kind of surprised me.

The question was:

When did you feel that you were comfortable being a coach and not just treading water?

Most of the coaches who responded said that they are still not comfortable no matter how experienced they are, and I find that hard to believe.

Either they are being overly modest, disingenuous, or they are putting themselves through misery when they coach.

Discomfort is a natural response to doing something new, it is the mind’s response to new challenges and stimulus, but as the mind becomes better at doing the coaching tasks, the discomfort should transform into a sure handed confidence as we perform this task, we get better at what we do and as we progress towards competence, we should feel more at ease with performing the task, until we eventually become sure handed and we get into a flow or a zone when it comes to coaching. It becomes the dynamic, effortless, and unselfconscious state of mind of a person who is optimally active and effective.

We most often will coach with certain amount of trepidation and discomfort because that discomfort drives us to progress in our coaching acumen, we also must reach a certain level of equanimity with certain coaching tasks, because if we didn’t, we would not be able to coach to our best abilities, we would be forever in a cycle of fear.  If we are continuously stressing over the same mundane tasks: whether it is two hits or three hits, whether the kid with the different colored jersey can hit front row, we will never get anywhere. It is this sense of equanimity that I refer to as being comfortable.

We humans have just a limited amount of bandwidth with our cognition abilities, and as we are feeling uncomfortable with how we do what we do, our cognition gives all our bandwidth to performing those uncomfortable things. If we are never able to become comfortable with the basic rudimentary tasks of coaching, we would never be able to advance our coaching capabilities because we would not be able to free up that bandwidth to learn and adapt new skill, information, and be able to deal with uncertainty.

I have been coaching for over twenty years, and I truly felt comfortable only after I overcame my impostor syndrome and started to think about the game beyond the in-the-moment mindset, beyond treading water, beyond hoping that you are never caught being an impostor. In order to get there I had to go through and be comfortable with many things. The x’s and o’s of coaching volleyball: knowing the rules of the game, finding myriad ways to communicate that knowledge, knowing how to put together a lineup, knowing how to teach to different ages, speaking in public, overcoming my natural aversion to large crowds, knowing how to read and teach the fundamental physiological demands and techniques that make up the volleyball skills well enough to diagnose and identify problems.

Once I was comfortable with the rudimentary tasks, I was able to progress in my coaching abilities. It wasn’t until I realized that I had a lot to share with my players and that I am not an impostor that I became truly comfortable. This doesn’t mean that I am complacent or that I have stopped learning, it just means that I am learning more and different things, I am exploring the more complex issues in my volleyball and athletic knowledge skillsets. You can not progress through the knowledge of the game without being comfortable with the foundations of coaching.

I had always marveled at some of my coaching mentors, how they can anticipate and see things happening on the court as well as the behavior of players. When I started to anticipate the action on the court because I knew the game and the human tendencies well enough, my level of discomfort de-escalated.  My epiphany with comfort came when I know what I needed to do to help them as they are dealing with the chaos and challenges on the court without losing my mind or the confidence of my players. I felt calm and equanimous in most coaching environments, I didn’t fear the coming practices or matches. I still must deal with situations that comes up, I still get frustrated and I still get jolted when the unknown rears its ugly head. It is still a struggle to handle all that happens and the pit in the stomach never goes away, but I realize that I can handle it and that I am capable of making reasonable and quick decisions, fully knowing that the decision may or may not work out; knowing that it might not work but still having the courage to make the decision is also a sign that you are growing comfortable with your role as coach.

Being comfortable is also about living with your decisions, however it will result and being able to analyze and dissect your reasoning process with clarity and without biases after it resuts, this comes with experience and the recognition and acknowledgement of our fears, weaknesses, and errors in our judgement and being able and courageous enough to overcome them a little bit at a time. None of the doubts go away, you are just better able to handle and deal with it and be able to achieve equanimity.

Concomitant with this sense of comfort is a sense of curiosity and adventurousness, you begin to ask questions that carries more gravitas, that are more global in scope, and with more granularity and depth that you were able to muster as a frazzled and uncomfortable beginning coach. You can ask the better, deeper, and broader questions, more importantly, you are able to understand the explanations and potential answers. All that comes with comfort.

I hope I was better able to explain the intent of my question and explain why a cursory: I never get comfortable, is not a good answer.

I want to emphasize that being comfortable in your coaching role is not a sign that you given up on learning, questioning, or have come to a complacent rut in your coaching, far from it, being comfortable enables me to explore more of our sport and be able to understand the Why’s, What-if’s and how’s.

To answer the question for myself, I stopped feeling like an impostor when I started a club with some great friends and they, through their own actions and examples, showed me that I was not a complete idiot. It was about six or seven years into my coaching life.