Ask most athletes what they do to get ready before a big game, and you'll hear some version of "I try to focus." It's true, and it's also not very useful advice, because it doesn't say focus on what. In the hour before competition, your attention is going to land somewhere — the only question is whether you're the one choosing where.
When I was pitching in the Colorado Rockies organization, my worst outings almost always had the same fingerprint beforehand: I'd spent warmups thinking about things I had no say over. The lineup I was facing. Whether the ump was squeezing the zone. What a bad first inning would mean for my next outing. None of that was ever in my hands, and every minute I spent on it was a minute I wasn't spending on what actually was.
Why "just focus" isn't a plan
Telling an athlete to focus without telling them what to focus on is like handing someone a steering wheel with no windshield. Pressure fills that vacuum on its own, and it almost always fills it with the wrong things: outcomes, opponents, expectations, other people's opinions. All real, none of it movable in the moment you're standing in.
The athletes who compete the most freely aren't the ones who've eliminated nerves. They're the ones who've gotten specific about where their attention goes when the nerves show up, so pressure has somewhere useful to land instead of somewhere corrosive.
Sorting what's actually yours
Before any competition, everything running through your head falls into one of two piles: things you can influence, and things you can't. The skill isn't pretending the second pile doesn't exist — it's building the habit of routing your attention to the first one anyway. A few examples of what's usually actually yours:
- Your prep. Whether you did the work leading up to today is already decided, but how you use the final minutes — your warmup, your routine, your self-talk — is still live.
- Your breath and your body. How fast you're breathing and how tense your shoulders are is something you can adjust in real time, and it's one of the fastest levers you have on your mental state.
- Your effort. Not the result of the effort — the effort itself. Whether you compete at full intensity on the next play is entirely up to you regardless of the score.
- Your response to the last play. You don't control the bad call, the bad bounce, or the mistake. You do control what you do in the ten seconds after it.
Building your own control checklist
- Write your circle down, literally. Before your next competition, list three to five things that are genuinely yours to influence today. Keep it specific to you and your sport, not generic.
- Notice when you've drifted outside it. You'll catch yourself thinking about the scoreboard, the opponent, or what people will think. That's normal — the goal isn't to never drift, it's to notice faster each time.
- Have one phrase that brings you back. Something short you say to yourself the moment you notice the drift — "next rep," "what's mine," anything that's quick enough to use mid-competition without breaking your rhythm.
- Review afterward, not during. Save the analysis of what you couldn't control for after the buzzer, the whistle, or the final out. In the moment, its only job is to be named and set aside.
This gets easier with reps
The first few times you try this, it'll feel like you're fighting your own attention constantly. That's expected — most athletes have spent years practicing the opposite habit without realizing it. Like anything else you train, it gets faster and more automatic the more you rehearse it, including in practice, not just on game day.
If you're consistently walking into competition already spent from worrying about things you can't touch, that's not a mindset you're stuck with. It's a skill, and it's exactly the kind of work I build with athletes one-on-one.