Focus, Attention and Sports Psychology for Canoeing and Kayaking
My canoe and kayak coaching brings me into contact with many paddlers aiming to improve their sporting performance. One key area that separates high performing athletes from others is their ability to focus and pay attention to the right things at the right times.
Fortunately, this is a skill which you can easily learn. Many of us are familiar with the model that we can only consciously process 7 plus or minus 2 pieces of information at a time. This might mean that at any moment on an average day we can hold about 7 ‘thoughts’ or chunks of information, perhaps 9 on a good day and perhaps 5 on a bad day. It’s estimated that on average our senses are bombarded with about 2 billion pieces of information at any one time. So how useful would it be for you to make sure you were paying attention to the most important pieces to get the best from your sporting performance right now?
I’m sure you can think of a time in your life that illustrates this principle. How many times have you been looking for something and just can’t find it? Although you know where you put it, it’s just not there. You search everywhere else, and as a final check you look again at where you first left it and there it is – but you’d already looked there and couldn’t see it!
How many times have you been talking to someone and found your attention drifting off? Something suddenly brings you back to the conversation – perhaps the other person is looking at you and waiting for an answer but you haven’t a clue what’s just been said.
These are examples of deletions. These things are there but you unconsciously filtered them out. You haven’t been paying attention and the information went un-noticed.
Some of the information you do sense is distorted. An example of this is time. We can all think of a time when the hours flew by – usually because we were having a really good time.
Because we distort and delete so much information, we often fill in the gaps by generalising. This means we make assumptions without checking. For example, 2+2=4. We know this to be true in all situations without having to check.
This natural process of deleting, distorting and generalising can lead to problems. I was out canoeing recently, on a fairly straightforward river. We were watching another group descend the rapid and someone in their group was so intent on avoiding an overhanging tree branch they didn’t see a rock and they capsized. In this case the rock was deleted from their attention.
They swam down the relatively minor rapid and got out at the bottom. I asked if they were ok. “Yes, but I didn’t enjoy that swim, the waves were enormous – and that rock was as big as a house!”. Actually, the waves were pretty small and the rock was about the size of a shoe box, and clearly the person was distorting the facts.
Several months later I met this person again. They told me the incident had had quite a bad affect on them. They had now stopped paddling similar rapids and became scared even thinking about them. Clearly they were generalising what they had experienced and assuming unconsciously that the same thing would happen on every other similar rapid. I offered to help and we worked together to sort out this simple problem. Before long they were paddling again and progressing to bigger and more exciting rapids.
The process of deleting, distorting and generalising does have it’s benefits. Distortion allows us to be creative and think of new possibilities. Generalising allows us to learn, and deletion keeps us sane by allowing us to leave out the majority of detail when we communicate and yet still be understood (eg, Most people will understand you if you say “I’m going to the shops in the car”, but this statement deletes when you are going, are you the driver or the passenger, which shops are you going to, which car, and are there really shops in the car?).
So do you want to learn to delete, distort and generalise in a way that allows you to maintain your focus and attention when it really counts? Contact me to develop your skills in this area.
