Where Does Your
Mind Go?
Dan Gucciardi, one of the best researchers working in performance psychology, defines mental toughness with a deceptive simplicity: it's the ability to pay attention to the right thing, at the right time, regardless of circumstances. That's it. Not toughness in the colloquial sense — grit, intensity, willingness to suffer. Just: can you put your attention where it needs to be, when it needs to be there, even when everything in your environment is working against that?
That definition cuts through a lot of noise. Because what I've seen in fourteen years of playing and another decade working inside professional sports is that performance problems are almost always attention problems. The mechanics are usually fine. The fitness is usually fine. What's not fine is where the mind goes when the pressure comes on.
It goes to the last mistake. It goes to what the coach is thinking. It goes to the scoreboard, to the crowd, to the outcome that isn't here yet. It goes everywhere except where it needs to be. And because attention is the mechanism through which everything else runs — your reads, your timing, your execution — when attention fails, everything else fails with it.
Before we can train it, we have to see it accurately. Not the version you'd describe in a post-game interview. The actual version.
Your Self-Talk
I'm not going to lecture you on positive thinking. This is not that. What I want is an audit — an honest one — of what the voice in your head actually sounds like when the pressure comes on.
Most performers have a very practiced relationship with their inner critic. They know its moves. They just haven't named them explicitly, which means they can't work with them deliberately. The first step is recognition. The key question isn't whether these voices are helpful. It's: are they managing performance, or managing self-image? There's a meaningful difference.
The Defusion Move
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy uses a concept called cognitive defusion — and the name is slightly unfortunate because it sounds clinical. What it actually is: a practice of unhooking from your thoughts. Not fighting them. Not replacing them with better ones. Unhooking.
The metaphor that lands most consistently with athletes: thoughts are weather. If you're standing outside and it starts raining, you don't argue with the rain. You don't tell yourself the rain is wrong. You notice it's raining, you decide whether to keep going or find shelter, and you move. The rain is just the rain.
The voice in your head saying you're going to choke or don't miss this or they're all watching you fail is the same. It's weather. It happens. You don't have to argue with it. You don't have to believe it. You notice it — even name it, which creates just enough distance to act — and you return to what you're doing.
That's the move. Small. Repeatable. Trainable. It doesn't make the voice go away. It changes your relationship to the voice. And that changes everything downstream.
Red Head /
Blue Head
Dr. Ceri Evans — forensic psychiatrist and performance psychologist, perhaps best known for his work with the New Zealand All Blacks — developed the Red Head / Blue Head framework. The model has become one of the most practically useful tools in applied performance psychology, and the reason it works is also the reason it gets misunderstood: Red and Blue are not good and bad. They are directions.
Red is activation. Fire. Edge. Urgency. The sprinter in the blocks needs Red. The defender in a physical battle needs Red. There are moments in competition where moving toward Red is exactly the right call. Blue is precision. Width. Composure. The putter on the 18th hole needs Blue. The quarterback reading a complex defense needs Blue. There are moments where moving toward Blue is the only viable option. Neither is better. The question is always: which direction does this moment require?
The mechanism is simpler than you might expect. You set an intensity anchor — a number from 1 to 10 that represents where you want to operate for your primary performance context. Then, in the moment, you monitor what the environment is doing to that number. Internal environment — your thoughts, sensations, emotions — and external environment — the crowd, the score, the stakes, the opponent. Some environments add intensity; they push you toward Red. Some drain it; they push you toward Blue. Your job is to notice which way you're being pulled, and point yourself in the direction you actually need to go.
A championship final might add three points of intensity. If your anchor is a 5 and the game is pushing you to an 8, you need to point toward Blue to get back. A flat Tuesday practice with nothing on the line might drain three points. If your anchor is a 5 and the environment is pulling you to a 2, you need to point toward Red to find your edge. One breath. Recognize. Point. That's the whole move.
Your Reset
A reset sequence is not a motivational ritual. It's a physiological and attentional interrupt — a short, specific sequence of actions that executes the breathe-recognize-point move you practiced in Section 4. It works because it gives your nervous system something familiar and controllable to do in the gap between what just happened and what you do next.
The best reset sequences have three things in common. They're short — three to five seconds, usable between plays, between pitches, between points, mid-performance without stopping. They're physical — they involve a body action, not just a thought, because the body is where the state change happens. And they're directional — they're built around knowing which way you need to go, not around eliminating a state that's "bad."
You may need two versions: one that points toward Blue when the environment is pushing you Red, and one that points toward Red when the environment is draining you. Design yours below. Three to four steps. Each step should have a clear purpose — grounded in what you know from Section 4 about how your body and attention move in each direction.
Open Monitoring
The first two weeks trained the narrow modes — focused on a single point (breath), then on a single field (body). This week expands. Open Monitoring is the broad external mode: your attentional field opens to the full sensory environment without grabbing onto any single thing.
Sounds, temperature, light, movement at the periphery, the quality of the air. You're not tracking anything specifically. You're holding everything lightly, aware of it all without becoming absorbed in any of it. When something draws your attention, you notice it, let it go, and return to the wide field.
Here's the direct transfer: this is game-state awareness. The ability to hold a wide attentional field — reading the whole situation without tunnel-visioning on one element — is exactly what separates performers who process quickly from those who are always slightly behind the game. You're training the underlying capacity here, in a setting where the cost of failure is zero.
A common experience this week: the mind wants to grab. It finds something interesting in the environment and locks onto it, and suddenly you're in narrow focus again. That's fine. That's the wandering. Notice it, release the grab, return to the wide field. The practice is the releasing, not the holding.
Three weeks in. The container is established. Use the same time, the same place. The consistency is working even when it doesn't feel like it.
How to Practice — Week 3
- Set up. Seated, eyes open or at a soft half-gaze. If open, let your gaze rest unfocused rather than fixing on any object.
- Open the field. Rather than directing attention toward a specific object, let your awareness expand outward — like widening a lens. Include sounds, sensations, light, movement, temperature. Nothing is more important than anything else.
- Hold lightly — don't grab. When something in the environment draws your attention, notice that it has. Don't follow it. Don't suppress it. Just notice the pull, release it, and return to the wide field.
- When the mind wanders to thought — return. Same as always. The difference this week is that the anchor is the wide environmental field, not a single point. You're returning to bigness, not a spot.
- Close with thirty seconds of narrow focus. End by bringing attention to a single point — the breath — before finishing. Feel the contrast. Notice how it feels to narrow after holding wide.
audio/ folder alongside this HTML file,
named mbat-week3-open-monitoring.m4a. MP3 also supported — update the src attribute to match.
After each session, note one specific observation about your attentional field this week. Where did it want to go? What did it feel like to hold wide? Where did the grabbing happen? The patterns here are data about how your attention works — relevant directly to what you're building in your reset.