The Role of Focus and Confidence in High-level Athletic Performances

Abstract

Despite the ability for past studies to link various psychological factors to optimal athletic performances, the roles of specific factors have yet to be fully discerned. Using a phenomenological-constructionist approach, the present study aims to gather a sharpened understanding of the roles that confidence and focus have on elite sport performances. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 Canadian and Norwegian high-level athletes originating from various sporting backgrounds. The athletes were interrogated about their general perspectives towards confidence and focus, inquired about the nature of their focus with regards to different game situations and asked to revisit their best and worst performances with the emphasis put on their confidence level and focus. The analysis of the interviews was inductive and followed Giorgi’s (1985) phenomenological methodology. Results suggested that an optimal focus is very often, if not always, present in best performances and largely absent during worst performances, thus suggesting that focus indeed plays a direct role on sporting exploits. Furthermore, confidence appears to serve as a powerful facilitator for the occurrence of optimal focus, leading to suggest that its relationship with performance might be more indirect. The increased understanding of the roles that both confidence and focus have on athletic performance that is enlightened by this study can serve as basis for practitioners in the development of performance enhancement programs in addition to stimulate future research on the possible relationship between confidence, focus and performance.