Your brain is constantly challenged to make decisions, even just the simply choice to read on…. and to carry on reading on.
Children learn from a stimulus, making a response and gaining feedback. Even from their earliest moments babies are giving themselves feedback on what makes them happy. Then as parents we introduce rewards which reinforce what we hope is good behaviour. When we plan our sessions as football coaches we are looking at how we can help this long term learning. Putting on sessions, asking the players questions, and giving them feedback on their answers.
How The Brain Works?
I believe that learning how we think can help you think better. The brains primary function is to survive. Around this survival the brain is making many decisions which forms the human beings we are.
Above is an image of how the brain processes the information to make a pass. This is adapted from the image created here. The whole process is taking the brain 0.439 seconds – which seems fast but actually we make a lot of decisions in life a lot faster.
The brain will make decisions based on emotional and rational responses. The prefrontal cortex stores the information or facts that we know. Often when we take a breath, before making a decision, we are trying to access all the facts we know. Our training is aimed at keeping our emotional decision making calm-fear and anxiety are not helpful and so training helps to calm us and make better decisions.
Too many options can frazzle the decision making process, stress stops you thinking clearly, and striving for perfectionism ultimately prevents action. Pure rational answers are not really what we are looking for in football, training will streamline your options, to pass, dribble or shoot. In the search for perfectionism often 80% of the picture is good enough to make a decision. Our brain reconciles emotional decisions quicker, the are often unconscious decisions and so training helps us make faster, better decisions.
Make quick decision a habit, start to notice what decisions you are making, so that the brain can reconcile them and so you can access them from your memory.
To help the brain process this information better we want to be as relaxed and happy as possible and be well feed and watered. This also will help the learning process. It will enable you to think clearly.
How to Improve Decision Making
Hopefully I have given you some insight into how the brain works with decision making. Knowing how you think will literally help you think better.
The simple answer to improving decision making is training. Practice.
In every day life decisions are made, some at the split of the second, the subconscious makes those decisions based on your previous experiences and your gut (emotional thinking), whether it be landing a plane on a river or taking a penalty in the World Cup final, the best chance you have of getting it right is to have seen it all before.
Analyse, watch as much football as possible, watch the decisions that are being made and decide was it right or wrong, what else could have been done. Also analyse your own performances-what else could you have done? Look for the decisions you have made, notice them, and this will help you access them in the future.
Train-you learn outside your comfort zone, get your brain used to making decisions. Think long term and don’t agonise over mistakes. Understand why you made that decision and try to recreate the same situation to get it right next time. I think it’s key to train your decisions, get your brain used to making quick decisions, and also to train scanning and taking pictures. The more you practice the more memory you will feed your brain to work from.
You will learn most from the mistakes you make, to enable your gut, to make the right decisions in those big moments.
The more you train, the more you are enabling your subconscious to make quick decisions.
Good luck!
