How to Improve Focus in Sports: Drills That Work
You just made a mistake. Maybe you missed an open shot, went out too fast and blew your pacing, or let a routine play slip through your hands. Now you're three plays past it, still replaying it while the game keeps moving without you.
Here are the exact techniques to fix focus in the moment, plus the one step almost every list skips: getting out of the frustration before you try to refocus at all.
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What to do right now to sharpen your focus
1. Start with a cue word
This is a short, specific word or phrase you say to yourself that snaps your attention back to the present task, something like "next" or "here" or "watch the ball."
Something short enough to say fast and specific enough to give your brain something to actually do.
2. Build a pre-performance routine
Novak Djokovic bounces the ball a set number of times before serving, adjusts his strings, and takes a breath before every point, win or lose the last one.
The routine gives your body a fixed sequence to drop into, so your attention has somewhere specific to go instead of drifting back to the last point.
3. Visualize the bad scenario
Michael Phelps and his coach Bob Bowman spent years rehearsing worst-case situations before races.
At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Phelps' goggles filled with water partway through the 200m butterfly final. He couldn't see the wall. Because he'd rehearsed exactly that kind of scenario so many times, he counted his strokes and swam blind, won gold, and set a world record.
That's the difference between positive visualization and negative visualization where you rehearse a likely problem and prepare for it.
The fifteen seconds right after a mistake
If you try to use your cue word or visualize the next point right after a mistake, it wont't work. Your attention is stuck on what just happened, and telling yourself to focus just adds more noise on top of an already loud moment.
Djokovic has a specific move for exactly this:
- Between points
- He exhales hard
- Shakes out his hands
- Adjusts his racket strings before he says anything to himself
The physical release needs to come first.
Only after that does he use his self-talk, reminding himself why he belongs on the court and what he's actually playing for right now.
You can build the same sequence for yourself.
Step one: physically separate from the moment
Turn your body away from the field, track, or court for a second.
Take one full exhale, longer than feels natural, and roll your shoulders once to release tension that built up there.
This physiological signal tells your body the last play is over.
Step two: watch it from outside yourself
Replay the mistake in your mind, but instead of seeing it through your own eyes, picture it like a replay clip playing on a screen a few feet in front of you.
Watch it happen to a player who happens to look like you. That small shift in perspective creates the distance you need to detach from the event.
Step three: turn back in and use your cue word
Once you've physically released and stepped outside the replay, the cue word or routine has something to attach to.
Say it, run your routine, and get back into the play.
Try running just steps one and two on their own at your next practice, even without a mistake to trigger them. Notice how much faster you're back in the game once you've done the physical release first.
Why you can't think your way back to focus
There's a well known idea in psychology called the Yerkes-Dodson law: performance peaks at a moderate level of stress or activation.
Too little and you're flat and disengaged. Too much and your focus, coordination, and decision-making start falling apart, even if you have all the skill in the world.
Right after a mistake, your activation is already too high. Telling yourself to "just focus" or "think about what went wrong" asks your brain to do more mental work at the exact moment it's least able to do it.
It's what happens to a nervous system that's still running hot from the last play.
That's why the physical release and the outside-view replay have to come before any cue word or routine. They bring your activation back down into the range where your brain can actually process information and make a decision.
Once you're back in that range, the tools everyone already recommends, cue words, routines, visualization, start working the way they're supposed to.
Focus is a skill you build. Elite athletes build attention the same way they build any physical skill: through repeated practice.
Try this in your next few practices:
- Pick one cue word and use it every single time you reset, even in low-stakes drills.
- Build a short pre-play routine, three to five seconds, and run it the same way every rep.
- After a bad rep, deliberately run the physical release and outside-view replay before moving on, even if you don't feel like you need it.
- Notice, at the end of practice, how quickly you got back into the play after a mistake compared to the practice before.
That last one matters more than it sounds. Speed of recovery is the actual skill you're training. The mistakes won't stop happening. What changes is how fast you get out of the fifteen seconds after one and back into the next play.
Ben is an ICF-certified coach and NLP master practitioner. He dives into psychology and neuroscience, then turns what he finds into tools athletes and high performers can use under pressure.
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