The Grey Area of Control
Everyone has heard of “control what you can control.”
It’s a popular, and impactful, sport psychology phrase.
The message is to focus on thoughts tied to behaviors that are within your control. Thinking about what you cannot control will exacerbate stress and anxiety without producing any meaningful action.
Ruminating about playing the best team in the league? Not in your control - you don’t make the schedule and you expect to play most teams in your league.
Skate with your head up? Communicate effectively with teammates? These are within your control - no one can take these actions away from you.
Where it gets messy is when something is not entirely one or the other. It’s in the grey area of control.
Scoring a goal? You can certainly will yourself to beat everyone on the opposing team, but more often than not, you need help from teammates and have to go through unpredictable defenders. Scoring isn’t entirely in or out of your control; you are a factor.
Winning the game? Again, you’re a factor, but you don’t have outright control.
What happens when you catch yourself focusing on a thought in this grey area?
You recognize it as something you don’t have outright control over, then shift focus back to something you can control. It’s the same process as when you notice yourself thinking about something uncontrollable, but this time it’s a little different.
This grey area of control is the influenceable area. You don’t have total control over winning the game, but you can absolutely influence the end score.
My favorite example involves a teammate. You cannot force a teammate to change their play. You can, however, influence them by communicating effectively. Sometimes, your influence will be enough to change the outcome - they’ll run that play differently like you told them. Other times, they’ll completely forget what you said or outright resist your feedback.
Regardless of the outcome, the role you play stays the same - focus on executing behaviors within your control that have the best chance of producing your desired outcome.
There’s a tangible difference in every athlete’s mind when they stop thinking about having to produce the outcome they want to influencing the outcome they want.
You let yourself off the hook a little bit. You don’t become complacent - instead, your mind relaxes because you let go of the irrational responsibility to win the game for your team, or to do everything necessary to score a goal. All you can do is influence the outcome. So focus on how you can most effectively influence the outcome.
Step 1 is understanding whether a thought is directly controllable or uncontrollable. If it doesn’t fit neatly into one of these, it’s influenceable. Once you’re here, let go of perfectionism tendencies and understand you play one role of many in reaching an outcome. Other roles include teammates, opponents, coaches, refs, weather, luck, and on!
Step 2 is pivoting your focus back to what’s within your control.
So, you keep thinking about how badly you want to win this game and score a goal for your team…yet this is only influenceable. After understanding that all you can do is play your role as effectively as possible, you have clarity in subsequent thoughts and behaviors that leave you the best chance to win or score.
There are a few things worth pointing out that are always within your control. Athletes have to nail down anchors like the following so they can readily pivot their attention to confidence filling thoughts and behaviors.
When considering what you can control, think APE: Attitude - Preparation - Effort.
There is no grey area with APE. No one can stop you from having a positive, resilient attitude, preparing effectively for your upcoming game or shift, and putting in maximum effort. When you focus on controllables, confidence goes up (because you know you can do them) and anxiety goes down (there is less unknown to be anxious about when you focus on maximum effort as opposed to scoring).
Focusing on controllables is always your best route to the outcome you were already thinking about.
Even though athletes feel the need to focus on scoring and winning, it’s actually hurting their chances in the process.
You improve your chances of these outcomes by thinking about them with a new perspective - one that prioritizes the ingredients that lead to the end-goal, not the goal itself.
