At his third international competition, in Germany, one of us (Juan Carlos) was shooting the best archery of his life. The technique was there and the practice rounds had been excellent. Then, walking back from the target with his arrows, he glanced at the scoreboard and saw his name in second place. Something tightened in his chest, and he remembered thinking, “I’m actually there.” It was not excitement.
He couldn’t execute his shot sequence in the next round. His attention kept returning to the board, to his name, to what it meant, and he began shooting to protect his position instead of shooting to hit the center. His arrows scattered and he slid down the rankings. On the second day he recovered, climbed back into the top 10, saw his name on the board and collapsed again.
His conclusion afterward was the obvious one, and it was wrong: The problem was the scoreboard, so the solution was to stop looking at it. At international events the board sits beside the path between the shooting line and the targets, because spectators and archers need to see it, so this turned into a discipline of not-looking that he had to keep up all day. It failed, because he would catch a glimpse, see his name and the paralysis would start.
What his sports psychologist eventually established was that the scoreboard had never been the problem. Juan Carlos’ perception and emotional reaction were. He didn’t believe he belonged at that level. He had set a ceiling on himself without knowing it, and every time he exceeded it he felt something like vertigo, a fear of being at the top. Most people are afraid to fail, and he discovered he was afraid to succeed.
We think this is why so much of the advice you have read about focus produces so little change.
The dimension nobody works on
Almost everything written about focus addresses one problem: external distraction. Notifications, open-plan noise, meeting density, the pull of the phone. The remedies follow from that diagnosis and they are sensible as far as they go: turn things off, block time, batch your communications.
At the same time, sustained attention amid distraction is only one of three capabilities, and it is the one you are already trying hardest to fix.
The second is resistance to attention hijacking, and it works differently. A distraction competes for your attention, while a hijack takes it before you have any say in the matter. Someone questions your judgment in a meeting, a number comes in worse than expected, a colleague uses a tone you didn’t anticipate, and your mind locks onto that stimulus and won’t release it. You’re still in the room, but you’re no longer available to it, and nothing in your calendar hygiene touches this because the trigger was never on your calendar.
The third capability, being fully present, is mostly what happens when the first two are working, and it is the one other people can detect. You know what it is like to talk to someone physically present and mentally composing their reply, and you know what it tells you about your standing.
These interact. External distraction invites internal capture, internal capture prevents presence, and the absence of presence makes you more vulnerable to both. Your phone buzzes, you glance and you lose the thread.
Why the hijack is the hard one
Here is what makes internal capture resistant to the usual remedies. The thing that hijacks you is frequently something you have an interest in not examining.
Juan Carlos spent months treating a belief about his own worth as a problem of visual discipline. That is not unusual, because the substitution is comfortable. It’s much easier to decide the scoreboard is the problem than to decide you don’t think you belong.
You will recognize the leadership versions once you look for them. Your attention snags every time one particular person speaks. The discussion turns to a decision you have been deferring, and you lose the room. In meetings with your own boss, you are markedly less effective, and you put it down to the boss’ style. In each case an external explanation is available, and taking it costs nothing now while preventing any progress later.
A structural reason makes this harder for leaders than for archers. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s conditions for flow, set out in “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” are a matched challenge, clear goals and immediate feedback. An archer has all three by default. Leadership work routinely supplies none of them: the challenge level swings between tedious and overwhelming, goals are vague or in conflict, and feedback arrives weeks late if at all. You have to build those conditions yourself, because your environment won’t supply them.
What actually worked
Juan Carlos didn’t solve this by concentrating harder. He solved it by making the trigger boring, and the method has three parts.
Find the pattern, not the incident. One derailed meeting tells you nothing, so look across the last few months for situations in which your effectiveness dropped without an obvious cause, and ask what they have in common. Look for the trigger, which is usually a person or a sign that things are going well or badly. You can probably identify yours once you start looking. If you can’t, ask someone who sits in the room with you.
Then ask what the trigger means to you. People skip this step, and that’s why the rest doesn’t work. Juan Carlos’ answer was that his name near the top of a scoreboard meant he was somewhere he had no business being. Yours might be that a certain kind of challenge means you are about to be exposed, or that a particular person’s presence means the decision is no longer yours. The answer doesn’t have to be profound, but it has to be specific, and it has to be true.
Desensitize deliberately, in low-stakes settings. He spent several months in daily practice visualizing his name at the top of the rankings, in a controlled environment, paying attention to what his body did. His diaphragm rose and his neck tensed. As soon as he noticed those sensations, he practiced relaxing. He repeated this many more times than felt necessary. The point was to make the reaction something that arrived and passed without deciding anything.
The test came in competition, and he ran it deliberately: Shooting well, he looked straight at the scoreboard, saw his name near the top and felt nothing much. Just information. He went back to the line and shot the next arrow the way he had practiced.
The leadership equivalent is unglamorous but available. Rehearse the exchange you dread with a colleague, or sit with the piece of data that spikes your pulse, notice where the tension gathers, and release it. Do it in circumstances with stakes low enough that failure costs nothing, and do it more often than seems warranted, because a response you have not overwritten enough times won’t hold when the real version arrives.
One thing won’t change. Juan Carlos still notices everything, which was his temperament before Germany and was still his temperament when he won an Olympic gold medal. What reaches him now holds him for less time, and he comes back faster.
The goal is not a mind that nothing enters, but a mind that comes back.
“The Archer’s Edge: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Practice for Business Leaders” by Michael Watkins and Juan Carlos Holgado was released Oct. 1.