Focus On Decision Quality, Not Outcome Quality
Putting “the process” into action is something every performer can stand to improve.
We’ve arrived at a time where everyone is familiar with, and possibly rolls their eyes at, the concept of focusing on the process, not the outcome. But, many of these proponents still lack tangible ways of walking the walk, not just talking the talk.
One way to consistently focus on the process is considering the quality of your decisions, not the quality of the outcome.
It needs to be said: the outcome is important. I won’t tell you that you shouldn’t care about the outcome of a game. Of course you do! With that said, it doesn’t mean the outcome is what you should think about despite its importance.
What’s more important are the ingredients that land you there, aka, the process.
One element of the process includes decision making.
When you make the right decision (going to sleep before watching yet another episode of your show or refusing to retaliate against the player that should’ve gotten a penalty), you’re optimizing chances of success. Optimization doesn’t guarantee anything, though. Sport psychology in general doesn’t guarantee success. It optimizes your chances of it, though. By implementing best practices day in day out, you’re giving yourself the best chance of that outcome being what you want.
Decision quality is a common way to check-in with your process. Hopefully you have a good BS detector, where you can be aware of your inner dialogue lying to yourself. These lies often come up in 2 ways:
This is the right decision. But, in reality, you know it’s not the right move, lowering your chances of success in the near or distant future.
This isn’t the right decision, but its negative consequences aren’t significant. This might be true, and it’s important to enjoy life and not optimize every little thing. But, you might minimize the negative consequences and ignore the high stakes it has (sleep is a big one here).
Flexing your awareness muscle every day will help you catch yourself forgoing the right decision for instant gratification, which, for example, could be an unhealthy substance or the lack of putting hard work in.
Two ways you can flex your awareness muscle:
Check in with some decisions throughout your day, and honestly answer the question “how is the decision quality I’m making?” A high quality decision means you’re optimizing chances of success for yourself. A low quality decision means you’re sabotaging your chances of success.
Notice when you’re focused on the quality of the outcome not the quality of your decision.
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Sometimes, your process is great. You did everything you were supposed to, but something unlucky happened. A weird deflection caused the puck to go in, or you got sick despite a healthy lifestyle.
It’s tempting to pay excessive attention to this outcome and its quality. The trap this sets is it pulls you away from quality decision making.
When you make, objectively, great decisions, but the outcome isn’t what you wanted, should you change everything up? Probably not. Maybe a tweak here and there - that’s learning - but to uproot your process because the outcome isn’t what you wanted can be a dangerous practice.
Now, if the outcome quality is consistently below your standards, it might be smart to more intentionally scrutinize those ingredients making up the process.
The added benefit of honing in on your decision quality, not the outcome, is that it will leave you more level-headed going forward.
If a goaltender is beat for the first time in a game after 20 shots, they might be tempted to change something to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But when it comes to optimizing success, we can see how this can set the goalie up for trouble. They’re saving 95% of shots faced…if this performance is maintained, there’s a great chance they come away victorious. But, if that goal against (an outcome) is negatively impactful to their mental game, it could cause them to jeopardize the great game they’re putting together.
Let’s discuss another example in the opposite way.
When you look at the scoresheet, you’re having an awesome game. A couple of goals and an assist - proof to convince your mind that you’re performing well. But what if this proof isn’t as reliable as it feels?
Just as we might put too much weight on negative outcomes, we can do the same with positive ones.
To embody consistency, you should bring the same mindset with you in the prior example as this one - let go of the outcome and hone in on the ingredients that get you there.
2 goals and an assist is great, but we could look at the ingredients building up to these and scrutinize the judgment more effectively.
Maybe you didn’t move your feet to help out on defense, and a teammate made a great play to set you up for a breakaway. Not great ingredients, but a great outcome.
You lost your cool and yelled a teammate on the bench. The next shift resulted in a goal for your line, but does this mean the yelling optimized chances of scoring? Probably not.
During one shift, a shot of yours hit the post. You felt angry and unfocused for the rest of the shift. This is an example of you doing many right things, and making just a minor tweak could result in a goal next time. Instead, you let your frustration destroy your focus, missing out on what perhaps could have lead to a better response in the future.
Controlling the controllables also fits in here nicely. You have more influence on the ingredients and decision quality leading to the outcomes than you do the outcome in and of itself.
So, it makes more sense to anchor your focus on the (controllable) ingredients that lead to outcomes you want, not the outcome itself.
This graphic helps explain this concept.
Mentally trained athletes are more level-headed and care less about outcomes than they do the process.
The mentally trained athlete has a more level-headed approach - they react to mistakes in a similar way despite the outcome. There is of course, some emotion that you cannot remove from the equation. But overall, they care more about the process, not the outcome.
Each reaction should be judged based on the decision quality and your behavior, not what resulted from it. Mentally untrained athletes react to a costly mistake more intensely than other mistakes simply because it shows up on the scoreboard.
This is a recipe for inconsistency and a lacking mental game.
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What might start off as an exhausting exercise to monitor decisions big and large will pay dividends for your mental game down the line as this exercise comes more naturally and feels less taxing.
To sum it up: check-in with the spotlight of your attention more often. When you notice yourself emotionally wrapped up in an outcome, reel yourself in and refocus on the quality of your decisions that led to the outcome. This is the important subject matter to train your mind to focus on.
