(Photo by Cristopher Farrugia)
Monthly Archive for March, 2022
Page 3 of 4
Have you ever experienced the frustration of wanting to focus on something and not being able to, because your mind goes all over the place and you can’t bring it back, to the idea, action or feeling you wanted to experience.
I would say, that you should not worry too much when this happens. Getting distracted is in fact a very common experience and common to all people. However, there are times when we pay too high a price for a simple distraction. Let’s think, for example, of Paris Saint Germain goalkeeper Gigi Donnarumma, who against Real Madrid made a pass that crossed the entire length of the goal he was defending and on which an opposing player swooped with ease and put it in the net.
Probably Donnarumma had never made a mistake like that before, but he was distracted and so he did the wrong thing at the wrong time. You will say that one of the best goalkeepers in the world should not make such serious mistakes due to superficiality. Instead, as we have seen it is possible.
So, even in such experienced people distractions are always lurking and the greater the importance of the situation the more serious will be the effect of the error. Donnarumma, obviously, knows well that these mistakes should never happen but awareness is not enough to avoid them. His explanation of the error was aimed at convincing the referee that he had suffered a foul that hindered his referral. In essence, an attempt to shift the focus from the superficiality with which he had dealt with that action. In a match, superficiality is synonymous with a lack of respect for the opponent, which leads to give little attention to what is really happening in those moments.
In those moments, the player is distracted for several reasons including underestimating the threat posed by the opponent and the mistake, in the belief that everything will be fine.
Instead, a goal was scored by Real Madrid and this also led to the simultaneous conviction of the Spaniards to be able to win and to the depressive reaction of PSG, which was unable to regain its lost confidence, due to a distraction of one of its players. As teenagers playing tennis say about an opponent, when because of one lost point they lose many others in a consecutive way, PSG has melted.
The match between Paris Saint Germain and Real Madrid was won by the Spanish team thanks to their determination and competitive quality.
It was the match in which it became evident that the quality of the players, if understood only in technical terms, is not enough to win the important matches, the decisive ones, the ones that are worth a sporting season. In fact, PSG is made up of extraordinary players (Messi, Mbappé, Neymar, De Maria, Donnarumma) that put together do not have the behaviors of the champion team. On the contrary, Real Madrid is a team that wants to win these challenges, knows the mechanisms and plays as a team, united and determined.
When PSG conceded the first goal on a gross and superficial mistake by Donnarumma, said in the words of teenagers, he melted. Its way of playing has practically disappeared and its stars have not made the difference on the pitch, they have become absent.Above all, the team cohesion expresses in combativeness on the field has been missing. Above all, the team cohesion that expresses itself in combativeness on the field has been missing. PSG has behaved as if it were a Flaneur, a French expression for a bourgeois who loiters around town without goals. PSG has become a team of time wasters, they did not know what to do because they did not foresee it and in any case it is not in their mentality to have a plan for difficult moments. Like superficial optimists they only thought of the match as an event that would go the way they wanted.
It was the match between the adult mentality of one team against the adolescent mentality of the other. The adults won.
For an athlete to be focused is one of the most difficult mental activities to develop and manage.
In sports, concentration must be total, and its development never ends, because as the level of difficulty of the performance to be provided increases, so do the obstacles to maintaining the necessary attention.
Errors, moreover, are always lurking and any of them can take away energy and conviction to the ability to respond effectively.
Usually, athletes are not aware of the intensity level of their concentration: am I focused on the right things? Am I moving with an adequate degree of intensity= am I aware of the timing of my action (right, too slow or too fast).
Is it possible to be convinced to be attentive and make concentration errors? Yes!
You know that you make mistakes because: you act before you think, you think too much and you do the right thing at the wrong time.
Attention training consists in giving answers to these questions.
How many leader-managers, coaches, teachers, professionals think this way?
- Be committed to acquiring and expanding new strategies and ways of working.
- Always self-assess and achieve new adaptations.
- Maturing or changing takes time. It is necessary to be patient and honest with yourself.
- Knowing that just because something has worked in the last two years provides no guarantee that it will continue to do so in the near future. It takes knowing how to evaluate and adapt your approach and strategies.
- You need to work hard and you need to know how to embrace it.
- You have to be aware that becoming an expert will take much longer than you had anticipated.
- Staying an expert over the course of a career requires relentless commitment.
A study conducted by Women in Sport, titled “Reframing sport for teenage girls: tackling teenage disengagement” highlighted that more than 1 million girls who considered themselves sporty in elementary school lose interest in physical activity as teenagers.
The dominant reasons are attributed to fear of being judged, lack of confidence, and dislike of others. Just under half (47%) said they were too busy with school work to continue playing sports. Seventy-eight percent of girls who play sports say they refrain from playing when they are menstruating because of pain and perceived fatigue.
The survey also found that the pandemic affected teenage girls’ concerns about their appearance, as well as mental health issues, more than boys. It found that they are less physically active than boys in general and are much less likely to participate in team sports.
The data from this survey shows a pretty bad situation in the UK, as only 37% of girls reported being physically active compared to 54% of boys. Percentages that get much worse among 17-18 year olds where only 3 in 10 girls describe themselves as sporty, compared to 6 in 10 boys.
Self-esteem and body image issues were found to be problems that all girls struggled with, but this was especially true for girls who had stopped taking part in sports and physical activity when they grew up.
The report showed that most girls understood the benefits of being active and wanted to increase their physical activity levels, but only 47% said they found it easy to get motivated.
Stephanie Hilborne, the chief executive of Women in Sport, said, “It is an absolute farce that teenage girls are being pushed out of sport on such a scale.” She added that losing sport at this formative stage of their lives equates to a “lifelong loss of joy and good health”.
“We need to dispel the myth that adolescent girls drop out of sports simply because their priorities change. Our research found that 59% of adolescent girls who were athletic love competitive sports, but were turned down because of early years stereotypes, inadequate opportunities and a complete lack of knowledge about managing female puberty.
“Teenage girls are not voluntarily leaving sports, but are being pushed out as a result of ingrained gender stereotypes. We all need to do more to reverse this trend and not continue to accept this as inevitable.”
The association calls on schools and sports associations to keep girls engaged in sports, especially during the transition from primary to secondary school and during puberty.
Tennis – It’s a sport in which you need to show emotions in order to conduct your game, which requires: technical-tactical skills, explosiveness and intense competitiveness.
Let’s not forget that tennis is a perfect combination of violent gestures placed in a context of total tranquility.
However, this approach must not turn into impulsiveness and anger that have a devastating impact on performance, no one is able to manage them in their favor because they block the mind and any form of reasoning.
In this regard, tennis players make vocal noises or shout in the act of hitting the ball. Why?
- To perceive to hit the ball harder. Through the shouting they give more strength to the shot.
- Discharge the emotional tension of the moment.
- Raise the volume of the voice to prevent the accumulation of stress.
- Assert your dominance over that territory. Remember Tarzan’s cry in the forest?
- Scare the opponent. The object of one’s aggression is the other who must be emotionally dominated.
In this interview, Toni Nadal describes what was the philosophy that guided him in coaching Rafael Nadal.
These are very useful ideas for anyone who wants to direct themselves in guiding a young person.
The principles and values - “In a passage from the essay The Civilization of the Spectacle, Mario Vargas Llosa writes – What does civilization of the spectacle mean? That of a world in which the first place in the current scale of values is entertainment and where having fun, escaping boredom, is the universal passion – in this way, not being bored, avoiding what disturbs, worries and distresses has increasingly become for social sectors from the top to the bottom of the social pyramid, a generational mandate. I would add that this has contrary, if not devastating, consequences for good character formation.”
Value of difficulties - “I don’t like things to be too good. As Quevedo (a Spanish writer and poet) said, “He who expects that everything in his life will be to his liking, will have a lot of problems,” and I think that’s the case. Also, I think people learn much more in the difficulty than in the ease, so that was my idea. Especially that it was understood by Rafael as well.”
Winning and continuing to work hard - “When you get used to winning a lot, sometimes you forget your principles, you forget what made you win. That’s why I think you always have to pay attention to these things. When Rafa gained a lot, I remember always telling him to work harder to prolong the positive moment. Then when things got a little bad, I told him to train harder to get out of this tunnel as soon as possible.”
Always wanting to do well and get better - “All my life I thought that if we didn’t do things right, others would be good enough to overtake us. The historical moment has been very high, at all times we have been very close to victory but also very close to defeat.”
Respecting opponents - “The first thing is that respect is not only with Federer, it’s a respect for everyone. I don’t understand another way of understanding tennis and life if you don’t have respect for others. Then, when the bad times came, we always overcame them in the same way, through reflection and acceptance of adversity.”
Living life outside of tennis with simplicity – “Rafa has experienced that emotional maturity like any other tennis player. When he’s on a tennis court and there are 25,000 people watching, it’s clear that it’s something very special. But when he leaves the court, he’s a totally normal person. I never tried to make Rafael an example, I just tried to never make him a bad example.”
Accepting mistakes and defeats – Understanding and accepting that even if we did all that, things wouldn’t necessarily go well. He grew up listening to and especially absorbing a whole series of phrases I repeated to him tirelessly: if you can’t defeat your rival, at least don’t help him defeat you. Doing everything we touch does not guarantee success; not doing it almost certainly guarantees failure. When we fight in an entirely adverse situation, we will almost always end up losing; but there will be a day when we can turn the tide. And that day will justify all the previous ones. It is very difficult to master the ball if you are not able to master your will.”
If the change orientation of a leader is one basic attitude to take, the other two are the desire to take on new responsibilities and to give them to employees.
- Feeling responsible means being aware that you have acted exactly as you should have with the thoroughness and speed required, considering yourself totally involved in the results achieved. The question to be answered is, “Did I do everything in my power to do?” In this way, the firm is able to ensure that the firm’s work is carried out in the best possible way, using the necessary resources, and that it feels responsible for what it achieves.
- This is a key aspect of assigning responsibility to employees. For example, in situations of prolonged organizational stress, it can happen that a manager is convinced that he wants to give more delegation to his employees because he feels pressured by too many requests, he has difficulty managing them, and this leads to a reduction in the time dedicated to planned activities and a consequent increase in the time dedicated to emergency activities. The daily activity flows so fast for him that little by little the awareness of having to change is replaced by habituation to this condition of not governing the situation.
- On the other hand, even employees, who in turn are extremely accustomed to this way of acting, run to their bosses as soon as they have a problem, expecting solutions. This vicious circle is also often encouraged by a condition of mutual satisfaction between managers and employees. In fact, the former is still gratified by perceiving himself as indispensable and by his ability to lead others by providing technical solutions. The latter are satisfied that they do not have to make decisions that could be wrong, and that they act under guidance that spares them from taking on responsibility.
In short, there is a widespread belief that to be successful, it is not enough to have the know-how or to have the professional skills and experience. The validity of this view has long been amply demonstrated in sports. David Hemery, winner of a gold medal in the 400m hurdles in the distant 1968 Olympics, interviewed 63 elite athletes from 20 different sports and showed that awareness and responsibility were the two most important attitudes that these athletes recognized as being at the base of their success. The Canadian psychologist Terry Orlick (1992), who has had forty years of experience with athletes, managers and astronauts, in his model of human excellence has shown that commitment and confidence were the most important psychological skills shown by top performers, others have added to these two skills the goal setting, which corresponds to the ability to establish clear, specific and challenging goals and to pursue them through planning articulated in weeks and months (Durand-Bush, Salmela, and Green-Hemers, 2001).
From these data, it is clear that if professional skills and experience are not supported by an adequate mental approach, one finds oneself in the condition of someone who, while owning a Ferrari but not knowing how to drive it, runs the risk of being overtaken by a less powerful but better-driven car.
Those who wish to have further information on how to develop these skills can contact me directly through this blog.
