THE GROWTH MINDSET

A Newsletter for Coaches

Date: Feb 25th, 2022 Vol.1 Issue# 5

The reasons that athletes miss the Gorilla

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According to Dr. Amishi Jha, one of the world’s foremost experts on focus and attention, we are all missing 50% of the things that happen in our lives.

That seems frighteningly high. What am I missing out on in my life? I sure hope it’s staff meetings and time spent marking assignments. What 50% are your athletes missing during your games and practices? Are they focused on the things that they need to focus on to play their best?

With all the distractions present in their lives I am sure that sometimes they are missing out on information and signs that they need to recognize and process when competing.

Dr. Jha outlines three different types of attention that she has labeled the flashlight, the floodlight, and the juggler.

Flashlight: A flashlight illuminates anything directly within it’s beam of light. Everything outside the beam of light is very hard to focus on. Our players’ focus will be like this in competition too. Perhaps they are focusing on the task at hand or perhaps the flashlight is focused inward on the fight they had with their boyfriend or girlfriend. Or maybe it is focused on the past on what happened the last time they played this opponent. The challenge is helping them focus on the right things.

Floodlight: A floodlight creates a broad and open view of all of the surroundings. We use this attentional focus when we are concerned about assessing a threat. Our athletes are not going to be able to process all the information if they are using their floodlight to process what is going on in the game.

Juggler: The juggler is our executive function which is used a lot in sports. It helps us execute the plans we have made. Athletes use all three of these types of focus when they are in competition and a big source of poor choices can be the wrong attentional focus activated at the wrong time.

I love to use the video below to help teach my players about focus. It is always interesting to see the reaction when you ask them about the Gorilla.

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My first thought every time I watch this video is the white team needs to improve their spacing.

Coaches gonna coach.

I am always blown away that 95% of the people who see this video fail to see the gorilla. Does this mean that all the people who miss the gorilla aren’t paying attention?

Actually, it is the opposite. When people miss the gorilla they are paying attention but they are focused solely on the white team and don’t see anything else that is happening.

My team this year has a turnover problem. Occasionally, they make passes that leave me wondering if they are able to see period. I showed them the above video and none of them saw the gorilla. I was able to fight off the tidal wave of sarcastic jokes that immediately came to mind as I came to an important realization.

Maybe their flashlights are not pointed at the right things.

Instead of looking to see where our opponents are perhaps they just are seeing the white and orange of our jerseys. Perhaps they aren’t seeing the opponent at all. We have started to use “Seeing the Gorilla” as a term to remind them to do a better job of focusing on where the opponents are on the floor.

We have also started to practice meditation before our games and practices. Usually just a five minute guided meditation to help them get rid of the distractions in their heads and increase focus on the task at hand. We are only a few weeks into the practice so I can’t say conclusively that it is lowering our turnover percentage but it is calming our coaching staff which can’t hurt either.

It is also important to ask players "what did they see?" when trying to understand what is the motivation behind their actions.

A book that made me a better coach

Toughness: True Strength on and off the court.- Jay Bilas

Toughness is discussed in sports all the time but I find it is a bit of an abstract concept.

No one can quite define it but everyone knows it when they see it. That’s a really hard thing to teach our players.

Jay Bilas has done a good job of trying to provide a more tangible of what he believes allows individuals to display toughness. This book started out as a great article on ESPN in 2009 with specific examples of what tough play looks like for college basketball. You can find the article at the link below. The book expands on the article and flushes out what Bilas saw as the ten pillars that make up what he believes creates toughness in individuals.

His definition of toughness is that athletes should be “easy to play with and difficult to play against”.

I love this. It is not talking specifically physical but sums up what makes a player and a team difficult to beat. The main takeaway that I got from the book is that toughness is a skill that can be learned, and improved. It really got me thinking about how all mental skills can be improved. Each of the ten pillars has a few great takeaways and examples They move from Trust to Self-Evaluation.

My favorite was the chapter on the Next Play philosophy that Bilas learned playing for Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski. Coach K defines it as “the absence of fear of failure, you have moved on”. It doesn’t mean forgetting why it went wrong, but instead being accountable and recognizing what went wrong, and moving on to the next play.

I have used this for years and I am not sure if I got it from this book or Coach K’s book Five Point Play but I have found it an effective message to help players work through and accept the errors that come in competition. This is a really solid book that I have read and reread many times.

How to use this book with your Team.

I think it would make a great book to read as a team. I would have them go through the book and have different players present one of the pillars of toughness that they related to. From there I would have them assess what that pillar would look like for the athlete and the team.Jay Bilas 2009 Toughness ArticleHere is the link to the article that led to the book. It is something I have included in our playbooks ever since.www.ncacoach.org​

How are you developing toughness as a skill on your team?

This is a great question for me this week. I was struck by the realization that I need to be doing a better job of developing this skill with my team this year. My team competes really hard but I think toughness is something we are lacking. We don’t always make the tough play or withstand an opponent increasing their intensity. We work hard but we aren’t necessarily hard to play against. We did finally win a game where we came back from 17 down at the start of the fourth quarter. (after we played well but lost to the best team in our Region).

I’m hoping that is a start but I need to focus more on this skill in the last three weeks of our season if we are to maximize our potential.

Three things I will be doing in practice this week to improve toughness.

1. Scenario-based Drills

Creating game end of game scenarios allows my team to figure out how to hold a lead and how to come back. The more experience they have in these situations the harder they become to play against. Doing this at the end of our transition drills is even better as it simulates how their bodies will be at the end of games.

2. Free Throws under Pressure

I stole this from a Bob Hurley Sr. DVD I watched years ago. Have a player validate a win in a drill by hitting a free throw to confirm their victory. No make, no win. It simulates a game as they are tired and there is something on the line.

3. Holding them accountable to Communicate on the court.My current team did not get to play any organized basketball for almost two years and I find that one area they really have struggled with is communicating on the floor. I am not sure if this is a by-product of COVID or just who this group of kids is but we are definitely not tough enough to communicate all the time. We are going to work hard on it in the next few weeks.

Thanks for reading, if you enjoyed this issue please share it.

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