Mindful awareness helps us understand and accept when we’re distracted, but it also helps us identify the precise nature and type of our distractions, allowing us to process and move past them more quickly, and minimizing their impact on our performances.
Some distractions are one-offs. They pop up unexpectedly and are generally unrelated to what you’re currently doing. The sudden remembering of something you forgot to do earlier in the day is a common culprit. Other distractions can be recurring, and directly related to our performances. Remembering previous performance blocks during a present competition is an example we see only too frequently.
In either case, we want to be prepared. Great players get distracted. It’s human nature. What separates the great players from the good ones is the ability to reliably concentrate on the most important aspects of their performance with and in spite of these distractions. Mindfulness reminds us to observe that our mind is wandering, accept that this is likely to happen from time to time, especially in pressure situations, and refocus our attention on the task at hand. The STOP sequence and the AAA model (which we’ll be revisiting later in this module) are excellent reminders of this process, but before we get to them, let’s work through the basics of mindfulness practice.
