Is is the music blasting in your ears to help power you through the grind?
Is it the voice of podcasters helping to distract you from the physical effort?
Maybe it’s a screen that’s showing a movie or show you can get lost in to forget your current struggle?
There are times when you need something other than the thing you are doing to help pull you through, especially when it comes to a hard workout.
But let me turn you into a believer that these distractions, while helping you get to the end of each workout, are blocking you out from the true gains you could be getting from your exercise.
Yesterday in the weekly group coaching call I host for my fitness community, The Temple, we ended up having a great conversation on how focus in our sport and training helps us focus onto our higher priorities and values in our lives outside of the physical arena.
I’ll share a little bit of what we dug into and the teaching lesson that emerged from everyone sharing what’s going on in their current training.
These weekly calls in and of themselves help provide the frame. Each week we have our training roundtable where each member gets the space to talk about not just the physical parts of their training but the mindset and spiritual elements of their training. How the training is helping them live as their best selves, towards their highest potential, all while improving in skill, technique, and enjoying the process.
So each week, we are turning our focus directly onto the meaning of our training. The importance of the group format is the sharing element, having other dudes who ‘get you’ listen to what’s important about your training and offer their support and advice.
That focus in turn helps us become more dialed into our training. We use the training to interrogate ourselves, to view ourselves, to challenge ourselves, and also to express ourselves.
Yesterday that meant connecting the deep focus we enter when we are fully present in our training to helping us better identify and execute with greater intention and affect focus in our lives.
One guy talked about the deep focus he needs when stepping into the batter’s box for the softball team he manages, especially those late inning high leverage at bats where the nerves are high and the pressure is on. He then described how being in a ‘one pitch at a time’ mentality and keying in on all his physical cues when at bat are helping him find greater focus in eliminating 5-10 minute drains on his productivity during the day.
Another talked about the increased awareness of using trekking poles during his endurance walks. He’s building to take down 24 marathon hikes in the cold Canadian December to raise money for local homelessness. As someone who’s struggled with balance and gait issues in walking, really narrowing his focus in walking to proper technique and trail conditions is making a big difference in his ability to keep building volume week after week. But the bigger focus is his ability to run his business, keep training steady, and manage the family while his wife is out of town all week. That’s what increased focus can do.
One more story then we’ll get to how you can use this superpower in focus.
This guy has just started biking as a way to keep base fitness while he rehabs a foot injury from running. He doesn’t have a history biking, but is now finding comfort after a few weeks of consistency. He talked about his increased focus on angling turns and finding the confidence to go faster and faster. That focus on his speed and the awareness of his interaction with pedestrians, cars, and other bikers is helping him find more patience and focus on being present in the moment with his family.
It was a powerful call and I ended it off by synthesizing all of our shares and sending us off into the weekend with a few prompts on how to use this heightened idea of focus to infuse our training with meaning and to spot ways to bring more focus into the areas of our life we need it.
Talk about winning together!
Now, here’s how this all can begin to work for you.
It’s based on deep theories of learning, play, attention, and action. I’ll get into these in future lectures and presentations. But for today, here’s what you need to know to keep going.
The ability to ‘get inside’ of an activity helps you activate the deepest value of that activity.
If we want that activity to reveal to us elements of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and how to live towards the good, that is a moral lesson, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle informs us that we must blend ourself with the nature of the activity and bring our internal motivation as our intention.
In order to ‘get inside’ of the activity, contemporary psychologist John Vervaeke gives us the idea of ‘soft-vigilance of attention’ where we fix our minds to the present action and intensify our concentration on the fine elements to go deeper inside of it.
If I’m riding a bike, for example, and I notice my mind starting to wander to ideas of quitting the workout early, I can use my actions to get out of the mind and into the activity by focusing on the way my left ankle flexes as it pushes and pulls on the pedals. That then might make me focus on my posture, how I’m sitting on the bike, which in turn can alert me to my shoulder positions, and then towards my breathing. Now all of a sudden, I’m ‘in tune’ with the bike and my place biking on it.
So it’s the twinning of these two ideas that highlight how we in the Temple Group actualize the focus in our sports into greater focus in our lives.
If you want to learn more, become a paid subscriber to access the lessons or send me a message about joining the Temple Group where we work through this in real time together, me guiding the way.
Just these two ideas alone are enough to get you out of distracted exercising towards intentional focus on concentration. But I also know you’re not satisfied just with the surface so let’s dive a bit deeper together.
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