“Leadership is a matter of having people look at you and gain confidence…If you’re in control, they’re in control.”-Tom Landry,

As a football player, you should not undermine the power of focus.

The football mind is delicate and just a single second of lost focus can cost you and the team by extension.

It is, however, not uncommon to find athletes losing focus on the game and focusing on trivial things such as the outcome of the game instead of the moment. The good news, however, is that the art of focus is one which can be learned and the benefits are many including the improvement of football confidence among players.

Read on to understand fully how focus affects performance and how you can maximize focus even when under pressure.

How Does Focus Affect Performance?

As players, it is easy to focus on outcomes rather than the game itself.

While this is focus in itself, the athlete finds him/herself in the seemingly endless race to deliver a win. According to experts of psychology for football, players who feel the pressure to produce sterling performance are most likely to lose focus.

When the game is not going according to plan, they start to feel stressed, and they get tense. They begin to play tentatively, avoiding mistakes at all costs which makes them more mechanical. This kind of focus is less effective and eventually leads to losses.

Another potential derailment for footballers comes in the form of self-doubt.

Self-doubt can turn even the best of players into average players and can maim their performance if they do not re-evaluate themselves and find out what is wrong and what needs to be done.

Football psychology instructs that to improve your focus; you must learn to concentrate on the moment.

How to Maximize Focus Under Pressure

To maximize focus, players need to work on their football mental game. What does this really mean?

Psychology in football suggests that focus should be on the process, rather than the outcome.

Players, as such, should focus on delivering for the tasks at hand rather than the potential of winning or losing. Any thought that does not contribute to the moment has the potential to wreak disaster and should be eliminated before it materializes and kills your focus.

Players should realize that any thought that does not directly lead to the completion of the process is harmful to their football mental toughness.

Being Present In The Moment

Football psychologists explain being in the moment as eliminating any thought that does not directly contribute to the completion of a task.

They, therefore, suggest that to succeed at planting focus into your system, you must improve your football mental game by practicing how to make a list of the relevant and not-so-relevant outputs mentally. Anything that does not directly contribute to being in the moment should be eliminated and the player re-strategize.

Since psychology in football has been proven as effective and true over time, this way of thinking is guaranteed to work.

Surprisingly, when players focus on a moment, everything else, including the result usually takes care of itself.

As a player, therefore, you should learn the art of focus to help rid yourself of unnecessary stress and improve focus.

Download the free mental game assessment and get started on Improving Your Mental Game in Football.