#96: How To Concentrate Like A Pro
Matthew Emmons was a sharpshooter - one of the best in the world. In 2004, at the Olympics held in Athens, he won the gold medal in shooting the rifle in 50 meters prone position.
Emmons was well on his way to win another gold in the three-position rifle event, where the athletes shoot the rifle while kneeling, standing, and from the prone position. He was ahead by 3 points. But in his hurried anxiety, Emmons choked in the worst way possible. He lost his focus and fired on his competitor’s target in the lane next to his! Instead of winning the gold, Emmons came in eighth.
Imagine losing your focus for just one second in your life and missing the gold. Imagine shooting the wrong target during the Olympics.
How to make sure that you don’t lose focus and concentrate at crucial moments?
When Serena Williams beat her sister Venus Williams in the Wimbledon final in 2002, she was asked a question: what was she reading when she sat down between games?
Serena answered that she had written down a few instructional cues like “stay low” and “hit in front” that kept her focused.
Constant cues can help you concentrate. You can extend your focus by constantly and mindfully reminding yourself what to focus on.
That's what the US Army Special forces are taught. During their gruelling 16-hour training sessions, the candidates are told to forget about the whole long day ahead and instead just think about focusing on the next 5 minutes.
Just do the best you can for the next 5 minutes.
But constant mindful reminders are not enough.
If they were, Shaquille O’Neal would not miss over 5000 free throws.
Shaquille was a dominant basketball player and became one of the highest scorers of the game and yet he missed half of the time.
In fact, he was so bad with free throws that opposing teams made it a strategy to foul him during the ending minutes of the game. Let Shaq take free throws because he is bound to miss them.
No amount of mindfulness or cues helped him. The heat of the moment would make him lose his rhythm.
In 2008 during the Olympics in Beijing, Matthew Emmons was all ready to win the gold medal he missed in Athens. He was doing better than he had ever done before. He earned a bullseye 10.0 in 7 out of his last 9 attempts. Emmons was leading by 3.3 points and just needed a 6.7 in his final shot to win the gold.
But instead of winning it with ease, Emmons choked again. He lost his rhythm and shot his rifle a split second early. The bullet just about hit the board! One second error again led to Emmons missing the gold. Again.
Concentration is not about focus. It's about rhythm.
As Shaq found out. The more he tried to focus, the less he could concentrate. The players who have always done well with free throws are the ones who have built a natural rhythm and shoot without overthinking!
So how do you build your rhythm?
1. Relax
Aaron Fechter was instrumental in creating the whac-a-mole arcade game. Where moles pop up from under the holes and you have to use a mallet to whack them and earn points.
Since observing hundreds of players play the game for over thirty years, Fechter can pretty much say if a person will do well-playing whac-a-mole or not - by just looking at their stance. “If a person looks alert and there’s a lot of head and body movement, I know they’re doomed. When they’re loose and relaxed they usually get a high score.”
As counterintuitive as it seems, you have to let yourself lose to find your rhythm and become better at concentration.
Focus outwards on external action, and not inwards on doubts. This will help you reduce anxiety and become nimble. And as a result, your concentration will improve.
2. Listen to Mozart.
In experiments conducted by Francis Rauscher in 1993, people who heard 10 minutes of Mozart’s sonata did much better in concentrating on tasks like paper cutting and folding and solving maze puzzles. (But this better concentration lasted just a short while after listening to Mozart.)
Music aids with finding your rhythm. But how?
Brain scans show that the prefrontal and temporal parts of the brain that process music are the same area that also light up during spatial reasoning tasks. Listening to soothing music primes the activation of these parts of the brain, which makes it easier to concentrate!
3. Maintain calm during adversity.
In the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the year when Matthew Emmons lost his second gold, Michael Phelps won the gold during the 200m butterfly stroke swimming event. The wondrous part was that Phelps won even though his swimming goggles broke in the middle of the race!
Breaking goggles would have broken the concentration of the best swimmers out there! But it didn’t even faze Phelps a little. Didn’t slow him down even for a second.
Do you know why? Because his coach Bob Bowman had deliberately broken Phelps’s goggles plenty of times during practice.
4. Inducing high stress during training.
Raoul Oudejans and his colleagues from the Vrije University in Amsterdam conducted an experiment. They gathered 24 participants and divided them into two groups. The participants were asked to throw darts. But their training sessions were very different.
The first group were made to hang very low on an indoor climbing wall before they threw their darts. They had to settle their two legs on two footholds, and with one hand they could hang on to a handhold. And with their free hand, they had to shoot darts. They were also told that they were being videoed to show their performance to others. And that they were paired up with a partner and if both their performance was good, they would each win 10 euros. These things were told so that the participant would become a little bit more anxious.
The second group was the control group - the low anxiety group that just threw the darts without added pressure.
Everyone's heart rate was constantly monitored to see how anxious they were feeling.
Then after a few days, the participants were called back to throw more darts. But this time, all the participants had to throw their darts in a highly stressful way. All of them were made to climb very high on the indoor climbing wall before they threw their darts!
The first group did well. But the second group choked and crumbled in the high-stress session. Their performance deteriorated a lot!
While both the groups had to go through the same hard dart-throwing session, the group that had a little bit more training in a high-stress environment managed their emotions and heart rate a little bit better. And that made the difference.
Rhythm comes from managing emotions well.
You’ve got to train yourself in the harshest of conditions so that you don’t choke in the heat of the moment! Not because training in harsh conditions will improve your skills, but because it’ll improve how you manage your emotions.
I am on vacation from 23 May to 6 July. So if I miss an issue of this newsletter or don’t respond to your comments on time, that is why.
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That’s all from me this week.
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