Focus is a verb that needs to be treated with care and utilized properly. 

Yes, it can be verbal dynamite when it’s applied in the right manner. But you want it to blow up the plans of the opposition, not your own players. 

I’ll give you an example of how focus of a negative nature affected me and my team during my career as a professional soccer player. 

My team, Norwich City, had won promotion to the Premier League in 2004. It meant that, for nine months or so, we’d be playing at some of the most famous soccer stadia in the world sharing the same pitch as some of the games most high-profile players. 

Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney at Old Trafford, home of Manchester United. Thierry Henry and Patrick Viera at Highbury, Arsenal’s then ground. Steven Gerrard at Liverpool, who played in front of the world-renowned Kop at Anfield, and Didier Drogba at Chelsea, one of the games great strikers who played for the most fashionable and glamorous club in London.

It won’t surprise you to learn that, as a small club, Norwich City were expected to struggle playing at such a high level. But we acquitted ourselves very well, beating Manchester United 2-0 in one game and only dropping out of the Premier League and back into the Championship on the very last day of the season. 

With our manager Nigel Worthington able to keep the core of our squad together that summer, everyone in the game expected us to get promoted again at the end of the following season. We had a group of players who had done well at the highest level of the game in England and who were, as a result, desperate to get back to the Premier League and go one better by staying there. 

But that never even remotely looked like happening so, not long after an opening run of games that saw us win just four of our first sixteen league matches, the football club decided to involve a sports psychologist in order to see if he could, after working with the core group of players, myself included, hypothesize on why we were performing so badly and completely against the high standards that had been expected from day one. 

For the first few days of his time at the club, Gavin Drake did nothing more than stand and watch us in training.  

Simple enough. Yet through merely observing all of our day-to-day actions, he came to a very swift conclusion. 

Which was, albeit unintentionally, the players were being set up to anticipate and even expect poor personal performances. 

If, for example, we were involved in a group keep ball exercise, the instructions from the coaching staff, called out at regular intervals, would be phrases like “…don’t lose the ball”, “…don’t mis-time the pass” and “…don’t give the ball away”. 

Similarly, in shooting practice, the message would be “…don’t miss the target”, “…don’t mess it up this time” and “…make sure you make the keeper work harder”. 

That was the focus that they were passing onto us. With, of course, nothing but good intentions. But the meaning of the message was still a negative one. 

How, do you think, the mind of a professional athlete might assimilate such instructions? 

If you’re told “…don’t lose the ball” then your mind is going to start thinking “I’d better not lose the ball” or, worse than that, “I’m going to lose the ball”. 

Similarly, …don’t mistime the pass” means a player starts to mistime his passes whilst if he or she is told “…don’t miss the target”, then they’re probably going to do just that. 

When we are focusing upon a task, that focus should be channelling our energy into what we want to happen with an expectation of achieving that exact aim. That’s because our brains work teleologically (ie) the brain will lock onto and help you achieve whatever it is you are focusing on. 

Thus a teleological brain will hear the instructions and then utilise its blind spot when it comes to the negatives in any instructions. In short, it doesn’t hear the word ‘don’t’. 

So “…don’t lose the ball” becomes “…lose the ball” and “…don’t miss the target” becomes “…miss the target”. 

It’s important, therefore, when you are taking coaching sessions for you to be aware of this and to adopt the instructions you give your players accordingly. 

Focus upon becoming aware when your drills and instructions might be negative and unhelpful and replace them with more powerful and purposeful habits that you can pass onto your players. 

“You’re always going to make the right pass”. 

“You’ll always score when you’re one on one with the goalkeeper” 

“When you’re going for a 50:50 ball, you’re always going to win the tackle and make a pass to a teammate”. 

It’s a subtle change of emphasis but the difference it can make to the confidence of any group you are working with can be enormously positive. 

Their focus will change from “don’t” to “do” and their overall play and confidence will improve as will that of the team as a whole. 

Simply because you’re no longer telling your players what you don’t want them to do but encouraging them into doing what you (and they) do want to do. 

These are the habits that the elite performers in soccer adopt, habits that focus on success by doing the right things all the time rather than worrying about doing the wrong ones. The likes of Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Zlatan Ibrahimovic never went out to play a game worrying about the possibility of losing a match. They know, beforehand, that they are going to win and that is why they were, and remain, in that elite group of the very best soccer players to have ever taken up the game. 

Because they focused on what they wanted to achieve. It’s little wonder, therefore, that they became the best of the best. 

You may never have a Messi or a Ronaldo in your group. But there’s nothing to stop you encouraging your players to share the same mindset as those great players. 

Something which might take both you and them a very long way in the game. 

@Home Skills