Increased focus can help OR hurt you

A paper written for the 2012 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference looked at the impact of pressure on NBA players. The authors studied 1.3 million in-game possessions. (For the non-basketball fan, a “possession” just means your team is on offense, i.e. has the ball in their possession. So these authors essentially wanted to see how pressure affected a player when his team was trying to score.)

The paper looked at two specific player actions while they were on offense: offensive rebounding (when your teammate misses a shot but you grab the ball, giving your team another chance to score), and free throw shooting (the penalty shot in basketball — and yes, it pains me as an ex-sports journalist to explain this in such detail, but mostly it pains me that there is no basketball on. #MoreLastDancePlease).

The first action, an offensive rebound, relies on pure effort. The player merely reacts to try and snag the ball. On the other hand, shooting free throws requires a lot more conscious focus on the part of the player, since he’s standing there, alone, at the free throw line, with everyone in the whole arena staring at him.

Predictably, the paper found that offensive rebounding was far less affected during pressure-filled moments in the game than free throw shooting. (A “pressure-filled moment” might be the last few minutes or seconds, with the score close or tied.)

That conclusion is rather predictable. What was surprising about the study, however, was when they examined the different types of free throws a player might shoot — namely, comparing games at their home arena and games on the road.

The study found that players shooting free throws at home performed worse than they did on the road.

What’s to blame?

Something called detrimental self-focus.

In the opposing team’s arena, a player on the free throw line gets screamed at by thousands of people who want to ruin the player’s focus during. Speaking from experience as a former high school player (not to brag but… I won zero awards), opposing fans screaming at you only provides you with a nice bit of white noise. It’s easy for the din to calm your nerves, rather than heighten them, so the self-talk in your mind gets drowned out, you relax, and you just rely on muscle memory to shoot your free throws.

Money.

But at home, surrounded by friends and family and fans of your team who desperately want to see you succeed, things change in the worst way. As the study showed, the increased pressure a player feels in front of their own fans causes them to miss more free throws during pressure-filled, clutch situations.

(I always believed fans should try to get deadly silent during the other team’s free throws, instead of scream at them. THAT would truly mess them up, not all the hand-waving and shouting and cursing. If anything, fans tend to get quieter when their own team is shooting, and in doing so, they hurt their cause.)

When the screws tighten, a player subconsciously reacts in a logical way: He focuses more. But this elevated level of focus proves costly, as the over-thinking and over-analyzing messes with his shooting form. The nerves affect the fluidity of his motions and the confidence in his shot more and more until … clang.

That is an instance of “detrimental self-focus.”

I think it’s very easy for us to suffer from detrimental self-focus right now.

It turns out heroic levels of focus and that extra oomph of really trying and pressing and pushing — all too common during tough times in our work — ends up backfiring. That increased focus as a response to arduous tasks or difficult moments, according to the paper’s authors, “disrupts the automatic ability to perform.”

And look, you’re probably not a professional athlete, nor does your work likely require tons of physical activity. I get that. But creativity is very much like a muscle. It’s learned, trained, practiced, honed, and refined through repetition and stretching in different ways.

In times of stress, when we feel added pressure to deliver, it can be easy to focus a touch too much, such that it transforms into detrimental self-focus. Fortunately, you’ve been putting in the reps each day, building a body of work for years. Just like an athlete, you can rely on a certain automatic ability to perform … if only you’d allow your muscle memory to kick in.

Here’s how to do that in our line of work, since we don’t shoot free throws for a living: Muscle memory kicks in when we rely on our strengths and let those guide us forward.

Don’t overthink things. Don’t over-focus. Don’t go panic-searching for an expert to declare what “one should do” in your shoes. You’re not “one.” You’re YOU. Don’t seek the advice externally, finding some general sense of “what works.”

Turn inward instead. Identify what your strengths are, where your unfair advantages lie, and where you feel most energized in your work. What’s gotten you this far? What are you best at doing?

Have you figured it out? Good.

Now take a deep breath.

And let it fly.

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