Look around the room you are in now for anything that is bright red. I guarantee you will be able to pick out even the tiniest speck now you are looking for it, even if there is hardly any red at all.
Maybe you have bought a brand new car sometime in your life. How many of those cars do you suddenly see on the road once you start driving around?
That’s the power of focus.
This is how your brain works in cricket too. In short: You can’t see how to play better cricket until you see yourself playing better cricket.
Most people wait for someone to show them, or for it to happen by happy accident. But that’s the wrong way around in terms of how or brains are wired.
You need to use focus to your advantage.
The techniques to improving your focus have been proven over 40 years of research into the way our brains work. It’s called outcome visioning:
- Think forward in time to the end of something: a season or a game for example.
- Imagine what it would feel like to be successful.
- Write down the features, aspects and details of this success.
What does this look like in practice?
You can write something very simple like “take 30 wickets in the season” or really go to town writing a whole report of games or your season as player of the year for the club.
It doesn’t really matter how much or how little it is, or how wild the success is either. It all works in the way we want. Keep it somewhere and review it as often as you need to remember it.
The idea isn’t to wish the world to come to us; it’s to use the natural power our brains have of focus to get more from ourselves. Think back to the colour red.
Interestingly, Gbell has already emailed me with his ambitions for the season. “To be The Golden Fielder, to be the leading run scorer, to help Rosaneri win as many games as possible, and to be The Wisden International Cricketer of The Year”.
Ok, maybe he has set himself some unrealistic targets, but the good thing is that he is focused on achieving success for the coming summer.