I have for all of my sports coaching career taught that in the heat of battle there are only two points of purposeful focus…present and future.

The simple rationale behind this approach is that in the majority of cases, the action within competitive sport is moving at a rapid rate and if you are caught up in what happened 30secs ago, chances are you are going to spend a lot of that competitive experience living in the past.

As you are thinking about what happened, others are focused on what will happen. And because of their approach and yours the experience will pass you by, as will probably the result.

One of the great skills for any athlete, but then again, one of the great skills of life is to be able to deal with something going wrong by efficiently and effectively evaluating what happened, what you can take from the situation, what you apply now and in the next few minutes and what you store way to use another day.

It is a skill that comes from understanding, focus and experience, developed and refined through immersion and practise.

It is not necessarily an easy skill to acquire but it is an important one. And once learned it will continue, if you work at it to serve you well.

Now as I said, although I have used it from a sporting context it is a skill that will serve you well in all aspects of life.

Our progress or success is quite often reduced because we cannot let go of what has taken place in the past. We continue to dwell, to take on the victim mentality, to make excuses, attempt too justify thinking, actions or behaviours.

The skill in being able focus on the present and the future will come from the ongoing development of ones ability to efficiently evaluate what has just occurred. The efficiency will be determined by the time you can truly afford as apposed to the time you want to take.

For instance; you miss a basketball shot, you dwell on that for more than 2 secs and the opposition are up the floor playing 5 on 4, taking full advantage of the opportunity you have afforded them. Next thing they score and the situation has gone from one negative (you missing your shot) to a double negative (you missing your shot and them making theirs).

There is reason as to why everything happens, sometimes those reasons are quite noticeable sometimes not so much. Therefore your evaluation skill has to encompass the ability to quickly judge what can you recognise now and what should be done at another time or through another means.

Effective evaluation doesn’t always have to be done then and there. However if you are going to put the evaluation aside for another time or place, once again you will need to develop your ability to be able to effectively do this. There is no sense thinking I will look at that later and then spend the next few minutes going over the situation again and again or worrying about the fact you will not really understand what happened until another time.

Different reason, same result!

Play the game that is infront of you, focus on the now and the future. When things go off script, evaluate understand, change or store and more importantly move on.

Doing this in an appropriate yet effective time frame will go a long way in removing the possibility of the ongoing negative effect of what has taken place. The ability to move on and truly move on, will allow you to learn from the experience and use it to create better opportunities/results in the future.

And in doing so you make sure…

The Journey Continues!