Change the yardstick

"It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves"
Edmund Hillary

"Confidence is preparation. Everything else is beyond your control"
Richard Kline

Even successful people will wrestle with the problem of lost confidence at some point in time: "How to maintain my confidence when things are not going well"

Let us start with what is confidence and what it is not:

It is:

• assurance: freedom from doubt; belief in ourself and our abilities
• a feeling of trust in others or in ourself
• firm trust, a feeling of certainty, sense of self-reliance
• state of being certain either that a hypothesis or prediction is correct or that a chosen course of action is the best or most effective
• Natural confidence is a quiet state and feeling

What it cannot be:

• belief that you are better than others
• belief that the results will always follow
• presume success
• belief that you will never make a mistake
• Confidence doesn't come from trying to impress others. It comes from doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons
• Loud, extrovert people are not necessarily displaying confidence

Someone confident focuses on the process. He can practice each step, each movement and his mastery of each step, so he can do it again. He focuses on the process and not on the results. Because we cannot control the results. There are too many factors that can change an outcome.

Someone who has sustained success will become familiar with it, so that it will become second nature. And the danger is that because you have familiar with it, you assume it. That would be a mistake. That is no longer confidence. For without the greatest respect for the opponents, one may soon find reality knocking at the door. For they to will have practiced.

So how to maintain confidence in ourself when the results are far from what we had hoped they would be. The answer is easy. Well easy to state, but it may take some practice to do it:

"You have to change the yardstick"

How you perform is the only thing over which you have control. If you change the yardstick from the results to how well you gave your best effort, and if you do this repeatedly, you can prove to yourself that you can be trusted to perform well when called upon.

You can still be disappointed about some of the outcomes you achieve because results are outside of your direct control. But this confidence will then allow you to approach the challenges you face with greater calm and with a more directed focus on the process of that performance, rather than on its outcome.

Easy game

CO Square

FOcuss COncentration and COnfidence

As you have guessed, the third element closely linked to Focus and Concentration is Confidence.

..

Clearly, confidence is an essential part of high performance, so it should be worthwhile to look at the relationship between focus concentration and confidence.

Now, unlike focus styles and concentration, confidence is not something that you prepare training exercises for. It can - and needs to - be developed however and I will dwell on this in a subsequent post.

The following 2 diagrams illustrate the interconnection between focus and confidence:

{Diagrams with small modifications come from a presentation by Dr Nideffer}

High confidence Level

With a high level of confidence, the performer is aware early in the recovery process. He can let go of internal thoughts and concerns to remain focused on relevant external cues. Look at the Tiger woods example in the previous post. (Here is he story)

Low Confidence level

...

Due to the lack of confidence, the recovery process slows downs and results in a vicious circle. The longer it takes to recover, the more the internal tension remains or increases, the more the mind is occupied with internal emotions and and less with relevant cues. As a result the performer fails to anticipate. The problem increases and so does the anxiety.

The CO of FOCOCO

Concentration as "Fascination of the mind for the object upon which we focus"

Attention is the process by which we uses our senses to perceive the world. Focusing our attention means that we become aware of one thing or one set of things at the exclusion of others. As discussed before this Focus can be internal or external

Concentration is something else. It is when we sustain our attention on selected stimuli for a long period of time. That is the attention span.

You cannot concentrate by telling yourself: Now, I will concentrate! (And concentration does not mean staring at something). There is also a clear link between concentration and switching focus styles. If we use of lot of mental energy to select the right focus style and to switch between one style and the other, our concentration will fade.

Top performers sustain a degree of concentrated focus. Their mental game allows them to retain balance and the belief that “it ain’t not over til it’s over” . They trust the process.
Someone said of Tiger Woods: Apart obviously his immense talent, what he has is a total commitment to his mental game. Not just once in a while or only when things are going good but on every shot his attention is focused

Here is a story:
One time, Woods missed a short birdie putt on a par 5 hole. In disgust, he whiffed his putter thorough mid air. He tapped the next one in, but he was now four shots behind the leader with four holes to play. A tough task to make up.
On that next hole, Tiger went to the tee and went through his pre-shot routine. (All good golfers have a pre-shot routine of lining up the shot, envisioning what they want to do and the flight of the ball.) Then they step up and address the ball. Tiger did this. As he started his back swing, a car full of hecklers drove by screaming and honking the horn. Tiger froze, right in the middle of his back swing, stepped back from the ball, smirked a smile, regained his composure, and went through his pre-shot routine all over again. He then stepped back up to the ball, took his swing and knocked it right in the hole for a hole-in-one.

Think about it

A simple analogy for the "Zone" and a starting point for high performance

Think of your brain as a camera that can take 40 pictures a second.
Say under normal conditions, your camera brain takes an equal number of pictures in each of the concentration areas.
Now, think of a shot on goal in soccer that takes one second to travel from the foot of the kicker to the goal. The goalie’s perception of how quickly the ball gets to him, will depend
upon the number of pictures the brain takes of the ball.

• If, under normal conditions the camera is focused internally on the goalies thoughts and feelings for half of the time, then 20 pictures will be taken of the ball.
• If the athlete stops all internal processing the camera brain takes 40 pictures of the ball. With twice as many pictures to look at, the ball seems to come to the athlete much more slowly.

The thing to remember from this is that:
The perception of the passage of time is dependent upon the direction of your focus of concentration. The more internal the focus, the faster time seems to pass. The more external the focus, the slower it passes and the more time you feel you have to react.

Once you are capable of performing and of making adjustments without having to consciously think about it, you are ready to begin work on learning to control distractions or those thoughts and feelings that interfere with performance in the actual competition

For us bridge players, imagine how many external cues our internal camera is missing when we focus on our bad play, our bridge partner defensive mistake or any other random topics unrelated to the present game.

Handball and Bridge ... continued

Focus styles used in a bridge game

And now looking at the focus styles used during a game of bridge. It is definitely getting tougher

Switching focus styles requires a great deal of mental energy.
Errors are more likely to occur then we have to change the width and the direction of our attention. We may change to slowly or too rapidly and miss relevant cues as a result.

If declarer plays a card quickly at trick one, we need to change focus from broad external to broad internal for analysis. If we react too too quickly, we may miss the step or make it too late, after our card has been played or after tha game has been played !
Or declarer plays an unexpected card. This may call for a shift to broad internal focus as we consider declarer strategy. If this thinking was not done before, we will switch to broad internal focus too slowly and our tempo will give a cue to the opponent

In addition to the cues relevant to the hand being played, there are a lot of sources of distractions that can call upon our focus if we are not careful. Some external, such as:

• the attitude of partner,


• the attitude of the opponents –say they begin an argument at the table,


• the heat and the noise in the room,
  

Some internal such as:

• a bad result – or even a very good one - on the previous hand,


• the bad feeling we have made a bad play or that partner has taken an unexpected action,


• worrying that our teammates had a tough time on previous round


• or plain simple that we just had lunch and feel sleepy, wishing we did not.
  

Adding to this, the skills used during a game of bridge are mental, not physical like in a soccer game.

• In a ball game, the physical skills are practiced over and over again. When you are playing, your focus is practically always external except for those rare moments when you shoot a goal and even then, it is pretty much only at the moment you actually throw the ball.


• In bridge, it is your mental processes that are at play. You need internal focus to solve problems. And you need to tune in to external cues. Alas, internal focus is also the stuff of emotions, so it is a pretty tall order to stay tuned.
  

For those players whose technical knowledge is still lacking - (say what is the percentage play with ATxxx opposite 9xx for 3 tricks) - , additional internal focus is required to solve the problem at the table, taking your focus away from the game to a potential internal worry (Do I really know what I am doing?)

It should be no surprise that adding this to the need to constantly shift of attention, our mental energy is severly taxed and bridge players all over make mistakes that they should not make. It can then be pretty tough to keep our concentration levels they where they should be. (more on this later - Concentration )

Witness the final of Italy versus USA during the bridge championship in Monte Carlo. If dummy had not been a source of distraction by leaving the table (causing declarer to momentrarily switch to internal focus), would the result have been the same?http://www.worldbridge.org/tourn/MonteCarlo.03/Monaco.htm

Handball and bridge

Focus at work

Time to look at the focus styles used during a game of bridge.

Bridge is a team game - even though some of us may have a tendency to play solo - so I will first illustrate the concept of shifting focuses with a ball game before applying it to bridge. I have always been a keen sportswomen and tried many sports, but my first choice was - and still is - European Handball which I played competitively when I lived in France. So this is what I know and will use it here

(For those not in the know, team handball is a cross between soccer and basketball. If you want to be in the know, look at http://www.handballaustralia.org.au/handball_rules.html )

Brief summary of the game

• A cross between basketball and soccer. Same size court has basketball, 6 players (plus goalie for handball), a goal net for each side, like in soccer, but use of hands instead of feet. A line 7 meters away from the goal is the last defense line. This line cannot be crossed.
• Each team: 3 back positions: left back, right back and center back. 3 front positions: left wing, right wing and pivot and the goalie
• The aim or course is to score more goals that the opponents
  

Focus Styles used during a game of Handball

..

Focus Pocus - the Theory

First the Theory

Along the theory of Attentional and Interpersonal Style by Dr Nideffer
Attention comes in 2 dimensions:

• Breadth: At any given moment, our attention will be Broad (focus on multiple cues at the same time) or Narrow (focus on one thing)
• Direction: Similarly, our focus will either be External (focus on information outside of yourself) or Internal (focus in your own head). Internal focus is also the stuff of emotions

The appropriate style are used for different situations:

We must use broad external focus when we drive if we want to avoid the many obstacles that can get in the way of our car. If we are in narrow focus style, we are at great risk of missing one of the many external cues relevant to driving and crash into an incoming car for example.




A sports coach will use a broad internal focus to analyse and plan a strategy for the next game.



A goalie uses narrow external focus as he prepares for the soccer play to take a shot. If his mind is on the defender who arrived too late, he will miss the shifting of the shooter at the last minute



The bridge player uses internal focus as he reviews possible card combinations and the inferences he can make from the lead before he decides on the best line of play. Right at that moment, it is no use thinking about the state of the match at the other table the system agreements that we have with partner(The pic is a bunch of bridge players in the north pole, check it out: http://www.woodboro.co.uk/NorthPole.htm

Now, people are a bit like a televisions (well, the black box of the olden days anyway) . We can switch to all channels, but you cannot have a picture within a picture. We can all use all focus styles but we can do only one at a time.

But unlike televisions, we all have a preferred style of focus. This dominant style is relevant because it is what we tend to fall back on when the stress level is high.

In the next post ..... handball and bridge

A game of focuses

Mistakes and focuses

While there is a degree of complexity in the game of bridge, there are many who would say other games, such as Chess for example, are infinitely more complex than my favourite card game. And I dare say there are plenty of mistakes made throughout a game of chess.

Here what Kasparov had to say about mistakes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2KKfOGaR_w

But I suspect that there are not many other competitive endeavour where a team of the highest standard can lose a match (even if by 1 Imp) against a team of a much technical skills, be it in mind games or sports. Or we see examples of “stunning” errors in bridge world championships. The people who participates in these events are presumably among the best. They may not be perfect but they really know their stuff. You don’t expect obvious errors from them.

. . Aside . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The reason for me delving in this is personal of course. I found that the few times where I have played in tough events, there was always a match where I ”lost” it. And I made “stunning” errors.
After the fact, I could always ponder on the whys, analyse, increase my self-awareness and resolve to “try harder” next time. But trying harder at the bridge table does not really work. When you try hard, your focus is internal, where it must not be.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Looking for answers, I came across a lot of material in the field of sports psychology and research on excellence in performance. Of course, there will be many aspect to this and it would take much more than one blog to try to digest it all. But I found one thing that made me tick and seemed so particularly relevant to the game of bridge.

Some very useful and interesting research by a sports psychologist by the name of Nideffer (and many others like him) in the area of attention and concentration. My next post will try to regurgitate the theory, try applying it to the world of bridge and examine the postulate:

Bridge is a game of errors because it is a game of focuses

Dealing with arousal

The inverted-U relationship: Arousal - Performance

Before dealing with my main topic of interest, I must put to bed the issue of arousal (in a very superficial manner).

The Yerkes-Dodson law defines a relationship between arousal and performance was originally developed by psychologists R M Yerkes and J D Dodson around 1900. The law dictates that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point. When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases.

• When the arousal is too low, our focus becomes broad. At the table, we will attend not only to the game being played, but also to irrelevant cues, such as the other other players in the room, our partner, the state of the match, our own feelings, and a number of other cues unrelated to the game.


• Inversely, when the arousal is too high, our focus narrows until we can start losing track of relevant cues. Our focus changes from external to internal in a bid to manage the excitement.

The level of optimum arousal is not fixed. It varies based on the sport or activity that we engage in. Typically, complex tasks require a lower level of arousal.

As far as individuals, everyone operates best at their own level. The people who enjoy a quite evening to relax will tend to perform better at a low to medium level of arousal, while others who prefer a loud concert to end a hard week may require a higher level of arousal for peak performance.

It seems to me that the game of bridge must qualify as one of these complex activities that require arousal on the low side. And those people who need to be psyched-up for best performance must find ways to reconcile the two.

Slowing down time

Our Perception of Time Depends Upon our Focus of Concentration

Perception of the passage of time is affected by the amount of time concentration is directed to things going on in the world around us, as opposed to being focused internally, on our own thoughts and feelings. When we are able to quiet, conscious, internal though processes, and keep concentration focused almost exclusively on the game, time is slowed down and we enter the zone.

Time perception can be speeded up as well. When we go to sleep at night, our focus of concentration becomes almost exclusively internal. When we wake up,we have the feeling that time passed very quickly. People under extreme pressure in competitive situations often have associated changes in physiology which causes concentration to become more internally focused. Breathing rate, heart rate, and muscle tension levels all increase. Those internal changes act as distracters causing us to spend more time in our head than usual. When this happens, time seems to speed up and we feel rushed.

There will be methods and training to help us enter the "zone". They would teach us techniques to help us to reduce attention to internal thoughts and feelings, and stay focused on only performance relevant external cues. This must be harder than it sounds as most teaching must require us to start thinking more, not less, thereby temporarily increasing our internal focus. !! I imagine it takes time and patience to reap the reward of such training.

The "Zone"

What is the Zone?

The zone is an altered state of consciousness. When we are in the zone, our normal way of experiencing things is dramatically altered. By examining the descriptions provided by elite level athletes, it's possible to identify some of the common alterations of perception that occur when an athlete has a "peak experience", or enters the "zone" or "flow" state

• There is a feeling of complete control, total confidence.
• We know with certainty what is going to happen before it actually occurs.
• Time is slowed down.
• Objects seem larger and/or more vivid than usual.
• The performance is effortless, occurring automatically without any conscious direction.
• There is a feeling of exhilaration even joy.
• The level of performance exceeds our own expectations, making us aware of a higher level of potential than we would have hoped for.

Calming the mind

Calming The Mind So The Mind Can Perform

There's two seconds left in the championship game, your team is behind by one point and you are at the free throw line shooting two shots. You're very aware of the situation and you, like everyone else, know how important these two shots are. You can feel your heart pounding and your legs are a little weak as you bounce the ball and prepare for your first shot. You take a last deep breath and push the ball towards the basket. You watch with considerable anxiety as the ball hits the front of the rim and bounces straight up. It comes back down and starts rolling around the rim, finally dropping through.

As the ball drops through the hoop, you feel a tremendous sense of relief. It's as if all the weight of the world has been lifted from your shoulders. The ball is passed to you by the referee for your second shot and you step up to the line and dribble the ball. This time, there is no thought of failure, there is no doubt in your mind. You know that you're going to make the shot. You take the last bounce, look to the basket, inhale, feel your knees bend slightly and begin pushing the ball towards the basket. It's effortless and you're in total control, you know before the ball leaves your hand that it's going through without even touching the rim. You feel the excitement as watch the ball spin through the air in slow motion towards it target. The moment almost seems frozen in time for you.

That is the Zone

To reach that golden state we have to quiet our thought processes, shut out distractions, to trust our self and simply let ourselves perform

A game of mistakes

A game of mistake

Everywhere, we will see players, from the highest standards to the average player, make mistakes that they should have known not to make – if only they had thought it through.. More than one bridge star has reflected on this and commented: ”I make mistakes, luckily my opponents make more. This is why I win more often that most”.

I was reading an article recently about the story of a team of international experts who went on to lose a match by 1 imp to a team of inexperienced players who had much less technical knowledge !

In all endeavours where one needs to achieve peak performance, one of the key ingredient of success is the ability of to maintain focus.Without this, there is no winner. All the skills that we bring to the table will not be sufficient if a lack of focus prevents us from using these skills effectively.