Move The Needle on Performance One Attribute At A time

By: Kyle Spears

“Sporting Performance depends heavily on psychological factors such as; motivation (to achieve certain goals), aggression, concentration, focus or attention, the ability to tolerate pain or to sustain effort, the perception of sensations and events in training and competition, the placebo effect, communicative skills, the ability to cope with anxiety or stress, attitudes towards events and participants in sport, attitudes towards winning and losing, learning ability, attitude, mood state, personality, alertness and vigilance, the ability to manage distractions, and the ability to relax effectively. “

-Supertraining By Yui Verkhoshansky and Mel Siff

This is a lot. If we try to focus on all of these attributes at once, we would quickly become overwhelmed by the sheer number of things we either aren’t good at or need to work on.

The nice thing about being human is that most of us are already hardwired with several of these attributes ingrained in our personality. Often, there are just a handful that athletes need to develop for their sport—and that’s usually the job of a coach or guide.

One danger is that an athlete might look at this list, spot an attribute they’re lacking, and overly fixate on improving that single thing. In doing so, they may fail to maintain the skills they already have or neglect other important areas that also need attention.

In a recent episode of the podcast On Coaching by Steve Magnus and John Marcus, they discuss the myth of optimization. Their main point revolves around the idea of “good enough.” What they mean is that we will never fully optimize everything. There will always be one more detail to tweak, one macro we might have forgotten, or one extra minute of sleep we could have gotten for better recovery. Instead of chasing perfect optimization, we should focus on steady improvement—moving the needle in all areas of performance, training, recovery, and mindset.

As you look at this list, you’ll probably notice a couple of performance characteristics you’re lacking and need to develop. Our goal when we identify these areas is to improve them slowly and steadily. Too often, if we weren’t aggressive enough, didn’t push hard enough in a workout, or had a bad attitude, we fall into an “all-or-nothing” mindset that actually stalls our progress. We convince ourselves we’ll never improve our mental game or develop certain attributes.

But here’s the truth: even if you fumbled the ball in a given instance, simply recognizing it is already “good enough.” The first step in creating change and developing new habits or mindsets is acknowledging that change is needed. Once we recognize this, we can begin to habit-stack and gradually shift the behavior we want to change. This process usually involves multiple instances of awareness and occasionally slipping back into old tendencies. It may even require coming up with a new strategy for how you’ll adjust your mindset or behavior moving forward.

Everything is a learning experience in the pursuit of excellence.

So, while this list may feel daunting, our goal is to pull out just three things we need to work on and figure out how to move the needle on those. Improvement—steady, consistent progress—is ultimately good enough. Recognizing a behavior is the first step toward changing it. And that, in itself, is good enough.