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How do you improve concentration for your players in training.
How do I make my players pay more attention during training?
Decades of research about creativity and problem-solving have shown that when we pay attention and focus, we can stretch ourselves and operate beyond our comfort zone.
This kind of sustained attention has been called “flow,” and it is the ultimate prize in learning, as creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi reminds us:
“[The] quality of concentrated attention is what creative individuals mention most often as having set them apart… from their peers. Without this quality, they could not have sustained the hard work.”
Concentration is the attention to a task.
We are concentrating all the time. We never lose concentration; we turn it into another focus.
Which camera are you focused on here?
Also, what do you have open on your desktop or around this presentation that might distract you?
So, a clear starting point for improving concentration is to know what we are concentrating on.
Our challenge is that our players may arrive at training with many different targets, and many of them might not be aligned with what we want them to focus on.
To learn, they must be attending to the focus. As the extract at the start says, the research is clear. The most creative people have sustained attention, which we call flow, and concentrated attention allows them to sustain hard work.
To gain and keep attention, there are three factors that all need to be working together.
Let’s unpack each one to see how we use them practically.
How tuned in we are in terms of our energy.
What are we looking at?
You are probably thinking, what’s with the spider? That’s where your attention has gone. If a spider runs across the gym hall, the players would be distracted.
Seasoned coaches amongst us will know to keep the sun in our faces and try to have the players facing away from other teams running around.
It’s human nature. Sit in a pub with a TV on in the background, and you will constantly look up.
In an exercise or activity, think about what might distract them from the task and remove it!
If you asked someone at the end of a session, what was the aim, and they couldn’t remember or talked about something else completely different then their attention isn’t focused on the right task.
Clear aims, which are agreed upon within the group, make concentration easier. As soon as someone is unsure, they are likely to be distracted.
Perhaps put out the aims before the session or write them on a whiteboard for everyone to see.
Have clear language and, ideally, have the players repeat the aims before the session starts.
If the session’s aim was to improve passing, and you asked your players what they got from the session, and they said ice cream, you know they weren’t concentrating.
Use these techniques during a session to keep players thinking hard about your focus.
Wait time: Don’t pick the first hand that goes up. Give everyone a chance to answer.
I use these ALL the time, and the first three are well-known to be effective in the teaching community.
Game games are games within the sport. So, the goal is to win and win by using the same sorts of methods you would, like scoring tries in rugby. The focus is clear, and there are few distractions from the task.
However, establishing concentration and how to concentrate takes a longer time. Here are three areas you can work on over a season.
Routines redeploy attention.
Players spend less thinking about the process of learning and more time thinking about the content.
When we start, there is clarity about what each part of the session looks like. Everyone expects what is going to happen and is, therefore, focused on that.
It helps that the players know when the breaks will happen so they don’t interrupt.
Model water-breaks, model coach-talk. "This is what happens when I talk; let’s experiment".
This leads to what good behaviour looks like. Good behaviour allows players to be less distracted.
Key players help concentration.
They can model good concentration, remind players of the key focus, and keep the session on track.
What are the players here for? What values do they hold dear to them?
Align everyone’s values as much as possible
Then let’s concentrate on that. Keep referring back to the values.
Make it a focus. It helps the executive attention.
Don’t whisper them – make them roar
Ratio means keeping more players thinking hard for longer.
When you design your sessions, when you want the players to concentrate, are you giving them lots of opportunities to do so?
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