WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT???

After a successful 4-year stint in one of the strong NCAA Division 1 Basketball programs, Simon entered the next chapter of his career as a professional in a EuroLeague level team in Europe.  Simon recently contacted me after having an up-and-down start to his season. When he was playing well he of course felt comfortable. But when he missed a couple of shots he started to become quite self-critical and found himself overthinking everything out on the court. As a result his game suffered.

One of the things I stressed in my conversations with Simon to remind him that even the best athletes make mistakes or miss shots - and therefore the problem isn't whether or not you make mistakes as much as what happens when you make those mistakes ... how you feel about the mistake ... how well you get back in the game afterwards ... and how quickly.

At the heart of the matter is how you perceive the mistake - in other words how you look at what happened.

About 80 years ago a group of psychologists in Germany started what an approach to psychology they called "Gestalt," drawing on the German word for form or shape. One of the principles of their approach was that situations were best viewed in their entirety and not as a collection of their individual parts, but that each of us have a tendency to only see a "part of the whole" based on our personal needs and agenda.

A famous example of this theory was the drawing seen here.

When individuals were asked what they saw, some reported seeing an old lady while others saw an attractive young woman.

In their discussion of how it was that people looking at the same object or situation perceive different things, they explained that in any whole - some part of it will appear to us as the FOREGROUND and the rest will be the BACKGROUND.  Some part of that whole will stand out as the primary object and the rest will serve as the setting.

In the present example, some saw the features of the young lady as the foreground and the rest as the background, and for others it was the features of the old woman as the foreground. Similarly, when different people go to a game where their sons or friends are playing on the same team, each will have their own particular loved one in the foreground and the rest of the team as the background.

For Simon, his mistakes of the moment became the foreground and everything else in the game (and for that matter in his basketball career) became background. Because his mistakes or missed shots took center stage in his mind, it made it hard for him to mentally let them go and move on.

In such cases, when a person can learn to alter the way he perceives this event, it will results in a different (and more effective) way of responding.

All it took for Simon was to find some other part of the whole to direct his focus to. One such part that did the trick for Simon was the thought that he was out there competing as part of a team who had each other's back. When he shifted his attention to this he found that his mistakes were no longer front and center in his thoughts, and it allowed him to stay confident and competitive after missed shots, lost rebounds or turnovers.

Whatever part of the whole we are looking at will determine our reponse, so it's always helpful to figure out what we are looking at and precisely what it is that we are paying attention to.  As YODA reminds us: