The ultimate moment

Jack has trained for years for this ultimate moment. He's a talented athlete who pays attention to the effort required to succeed.

Like any athlete, he has encountered setbacks, but each time, he has picked himself up and moved forward.
Today, he has mastered his discipline to perfection.

His entire athletic career has been geared towards this crucial moment. This competition will make him the grand champion. It is time for him to enter the scene.

But he realizes that the stakes are high. The stress wins him over, the pressures of time assail his mind, and the fear of failing invades him.

He tries to keep the negative thoughts out of his mind and ignore the troubling emotions they generate. Unfortunately, he invested so much effort in this task that he lost his concentration completely.

His mind has just been diverted from the motor tasks he has to perform. The one he usually masters so perfectly.
The starting signal is given. Jack doubts, questions his abilities, and wonders if he is doing the right thing if his movements are as good as usual.

It is too late. 

Jack's concentration is gone before he even starts.

All those years of training have been for nothing. In all that time, he'd been taught to train physically, but no one had shown Jack how to train his concentration.

In our respective fields, just like Jack, we train to acquire skills. We automate motor patterns or sequences of tasks quickly and unconsciously in familiar and manageable situations.

Time pressure and stress

However, when time pressures arise, stress increases, and the potential consequences of failure haunt our minds, we start to doubt. We question ourselves, consider the worst, and try to take conscious control of motor patterns or task sequences we've relegated to our subconscious world. At that point, we lost power, and everything went haywire.

Concentration has nothing to do with mental effort. First and foremost, it's a state where we give no importance to our negative thoughts and let all those motor patterns we've stored in our subconscious emerge.

As the tornado rages around us, we stay calm and know we'll do the right thing at the right time because it's all organized in our subconscious.

In the world of sports, this is called "Flow." It's that incredible moment when your body acts perfectly without you having to worry about anything.

Since our thoughts greatly influence our reactions, it's pretentious to believe in success if we only train the body.