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‘Pay attention!’

Growing up, how many times did we hear that from parents, teachers, coaches and others?! The reason why we heard it so often is that it’s great advice! It cuts right to the heart of performance under pressure, because the prime issue is our control of attention.

But as sound as it is, this advice is so familiar that it washes over us. We hear it all the time and so we stop hearing it. How ironic that the single best piece of advice we can receive for performing under pressure – ‘Pay attention!’ – doesn’t get our attention!

All those adults saw what was going wrong inside our head: we had lost our focus. We needed to learn how to deliberately pay attention to what we were doing, to hold it there despite potential diversions, and to shift it to a new focus when needed.

It sounds so straightforward because these are everyday mental processes that we take for granted. Surely something so basic and commonplace cannot be so important for performance?

It’s not only important, it is core to performing under pressure. In most demanding situations this most fundamental mental ability of all – how well we pay attention – has the largest influence on the outcome. If we don’t get that part right we are definitely going to struggle.

The emphasis on attention is important because it is arguably our greatest limitation. Our capacity to pay attention seems very big but it is, in fact, very small.

Remember that under pressure, the rules change, and the capacity of our working memory plummets. When the task in front of us is demanding, we can really only focus on one thing at a time. For conscious, demanding tasks, multitasking is a myth. No problem to talk on our phone while shopping at the supermarket: two easy, almost automatic tasks. But even then, mistakes can occur – we accidentally pick up the wrong item, we miss things that were on our list. Now add some pressure – a screaming child, time pressure to get to an urgent appointment – and the errors flood in. At the brain level, RED has disrupted BLUE and our once-clear mental screen has shrunk down and clouded over.

When we take on a demanding task but our attention is split, we go downhill fast. Doing two tricky things at a time – such as playing the piano while reciting verse – makes our performance deteriorate not just a bit, but dramatically. The fall-off is more a cliff than a gentle slope. I often tell athletes that when their attention is divided, they are half the player.

The magical question to ask ourselves when reviewing our performance under pressure is: ‘What were we paying attention to in that moment?’ Paying attention in performance situations is our most powerful – but vulnerable – mental tool, and so understanding what disrupts it is a revealing starting point. One of the most common attention traps is the negative content loop: a self-defeating, circular pattern of thinking and feeling. Instead of focusing fully on the task in front of us, we find our attention diverted towards potential or past negative outcomes, such as losing, making a mistake, or missing a deadline. We see threat in the situation, our negative perception of the threat sparks an emotional response, and our emotions lead to unhelpful behaviours. Those behaviours reinforce our negative perception, starting the loop off again, causing a self-reinforcing, downward spiral.

Remember Tony? He’s running late for another important meeting; this time he’s due to present an important pitch to senior colleagues. In his mind he can already imagine the looks of judgment as he walks in late. He’s angry with himself for miscalculating how long it would take to get ready, and at the same time he’s worried about the potential fallout for his pitch. He feels anxious and tense, his thoughts are racing and he can’t concentrate. Despite a late night rehearsing, his mind is suddenly foggy about his presentation and he feels himself starting to freeze. That alarming realisation only reinforces his negative self-judgment, and the negative content loop is set up.

Initially Tony had a positive picture in his head about how the situation would ideally work out. But the threat within the situation – his lateness and the negative attitude it will spark – has changed his perception. What he wanted and what he is likely to get are now at odds with each other. His fantasy and the reality clash, creating an internal conflict.

It’s almost as if he has one mind trying to do its best to prepare for his performance, and another mind that’s much more concerned about how he’ll be judged. He’s caught in two minds.

Instead of focusing on his presentation, he finds his attention stuck on exactly the outcomes he didn’t want. Sure, some of his attention still seems to be carrying him along, so that it’s not as if he’s completely stopped functioning. But a good chunk of his attention is now caught up in the negative spiral. He’s drowning in a flood of pessimistic thoughts and uncomfortable feelings, and is fast losing focus and effectiveness.

And it all seems to feed into the loop and strengthen it, so Tony finds it more and more difficult to get back on task. The loop becomes a downward spiral: the deeper he goes, the harder it is to climb out.

The reason why a negative content loop is so damaging for our focus is that it takes us out of the current moment. It diverts our attention from the present into the past (a mistake or missed opportunity) or the future (negative outcomes and the criticism and judgment that will result). Our mental horsepower is cut in half right when we need it most.

This looping into the past or future also gets our mind and body out of sync. Our body can only exist in the here and now, but when we are trapped in a negative content loop our thoughts are fixated on the past or future and drag us there mentally. This mind–body split takes its toll on how we think, feel and act.

One classic negative loop is the ‘poor me’ loop. Something goes wrong in our environment. We start to feel sorry for ourselves, seeing ourselves as the victim of circumstance. Life is unfair; we don’t deserve this. This swirl of feelings and thoughts makes us uptight, frustrated, angry. We get stuck on the injustice, feeling more and more self-righteous. And the situation just keeps compounding itself.

In a nutshell, we’re sulking. This kind of behaviour is meant to be restricted to children, but adults can turn it into an art form. Sulking involves both passive and aggressive elements: we withdraw and go silent, but make sure that everyone knows we are far from happy! We’re moody and resentful, and our sullen, brief replies, when we give them, are intended to annoy others.

Many of us demonstrate this behaviour. A lot.

From the performance point of view, sulking is a very unhelpful mental state to adopt. It leads to a lack of action and movement. Not only that, but the sulker also deliberately affects those around them. Because they feel like they are being punished, they punish others back.

Some people really know how to hold grudges. They are so adept at sulking that they can remain in that state not just for minutes or hours, but days, weeks, months, even years on end.

Next time you’re watching a sporting event, follow the competitors’ eyes. When an unfortunate incident occurs, they often look downwards, which can show they’re stuck in a ‘poor me’ loop, turning their attention inward. Or they may look upwards, questioning whatever higher power they deem responsible for the injustice. The origins of this type of ‘poor me’ behaviour lie in the attachment behaviour we looked at earlier. When the parent is well attuned to their child’s distress, they can provide comfort through non-judgmental facial contact and a soothing voice, but when the relationship is unpredictable or unresponsive, the child will come to associate their discomfort with a lack of eye contact. Later in life, when the same individual faces disappointment and discomfort the same pattern will emerge. The ‘poor me’ loop, and other negative content loops, are a deadly attention trap for performance. This kind of mental state doesn’t matter that much if we’re just going about our everyday tasks. But when we’re in a more demanding situation, it can become our sworn enemy. It sucks away treasured attention that we could be using to extract maximum information from our environment, solve problems or overcome obstacles.

Think about our golfer from earlier, feeling anxious as he takes the final shot in his first big championship. He might be focusing on where he wants the ball to go, but because his RED mind has taken over, part of his attention is also diverted to the water trap and where he doesn’t want the ball to land. He starts to worry about the water trap and a negative content loop is triggered. Out of nowhere, some self-defeating self-talk – ‘I’m going to miss the shot … I’m going to lose the championship!’ – and negative feelings – shame, frustration – seem to burst onto the scene.

His mind now contains images of two ‘targets’: the one he wants to hit and the one he doesn’t. And because he’s trying to perform while he’s split in two by doubt, his shot inevitably falls somewhere in the middle.

Cast your mind back to a recent performance moment when you lost mental focus. What diverted your attention in that moment? Did you get trapped in a negative content loop and partially fixated on what you didn’t want to happen? It was as if part of you was doing everything it could to defeat you in that moment.

You were caught in two minds.