Focus on What You Can Control

July 5, 2011

There was a bit of flack in the Round of 16 match up between Juan Martin del Potro and Rafael Nadal last week at Wimbledon.  The center of the controversy was the amount of time that Nadal was taking between points and the injury time out that he took just before the first set tiebreaker.  Del Potro had a running dialogue with the chair umpire on both of these topics and while he may have been correct from a rules standpoint, he was distracting himself from his own performance.

When getting ready for a big event, many top athletes will go through a distraction control planning exercise.  It’s a way of figuring out all of the possible distractions that could happen during the event and then determining a programmed response or strategy to deal with each one.  If Juan Martin del Potro had done any distraction control planning, he wouldn’t have been bothered so much by Nadal’s behavior.  Rafa is infamous for taking a lot of time between points, and for occasionally taking an injury time out at an opportune moment.  Del Potro had to know this coming into the match so why get so fixated on it?  This was normal Nadal behavior so just treat it as normal and move on.  Focus on the job at hand which is playing your best – not complaining to the chair umpire.

Later in the day, Del Potro tweeted that it was a moral issue rather than a rules issue.  That may be so, but the question remains – why focus so much on something you can’t control?  Our ability to focus is finite so it’s important that we have a solid grasp of what is in our control and what is not.  Focus on what you can control and you’ll perform much better.