How Performance Training Helps Soldiers Stay Focused
This article draws on insights from Kirill Grinchenko, a Performance Expert with the Army Performance Center at Camp Zama, Japan. He explains how Soldiers can develop performance skills that help them apply their training during stressful situations.
People often think performing well depends on talent, experience or natural ability. But the ability to perform well can also be learned. Like any other skill, Soldiers build it through practice. That’s where performance training comes in.
Performance training doesn’t replace the skills, standard operating procedures and strategies Soldiers already use. Instead, it helps Soldiers apply these capabilities during execution.
Performance training also helps Soldiers stay focused, manage distractions and put what they know into practice.
This article explains:
- Why performance skills support execution.
- How Soldiers can train attention and manage energy.
- What techniques Soldiers can use to stay focused under stress.
Understanding performance training
Soldiers spend countless hours preparing for missions. Performance training helps them apply what they’ve practiced.
In a military context, Grinchenko describes strong performance as staying ready, remaining resilient when facing obstacles and executing with lethality.
Strong performance can be tested under pressure. During something like the Army Fitness Test, frustration tolerance—which is the ability to push through discomfort, fear and negative thoughts—can become harder to maintain.
As frustration tolerance decreases, attention can shift away from a task, and a drop in confidence follows. It’s a chain reaction. When one factor starts to weaken, it drags the others down with it. Performance training helps Soldiers recognize that pattern early and use strategies to stay focused.
Training your attention
Soldiers can practice ways to respond to distractions. Grinchenko teaches a three-step strategy called the AIR technique to help Soldiers manage their thoughts.
- Aware: Notice when a distraction or counterproductive thought pulls your attention away from the task.
- Interrupt: Use a cue, such as a deep breath, to break it.
- Replace: Shift your attention to a thought that keeps you concentrated on your task.
The goal isn’t to ignore distractions. It’s to stay focused on execution despite them.
Grinchenko also teaches mindfulness techniques that build awareness of the present moment—to strengthen attention control.
Mindfulness is about noticing distractions, minimizing their power and returning your attention to what you’re doing. Like any skill, it improves through regular practice.
One mindfulness technique is called grounding, which is using your senses to bring your attention back to what’s happening right now.
Try it:
- Name five things you can see.
- Name four things you can touch.
- Name three things you can hear.
- Name two things you can smell.
- Name one thing you can taste.
Afterward, ask yourself what you thought about as you concentrated on each sense.
For many people, the answer is simple: nothing else.
Managing your energy
Soldiers need the right amount of energy to perform at their best. Too little energy, and Soldiers disengage. Too much, and their heart rate spikes, their thoughts race and their muscles tense up.
Breathing techniques can help regulate that energy during stressful situations. There are several techniques you can try. The goal is to practice different approaches before you need them and find what works for you.
One technique Grinchenko uses combines slow breathing from the belly with a positive memory.
- Think about a specific positive experience or something you’re grateful for.
- Take slow, deliberate breaths from your diaphragm.
- Continue breathing while holding on to that positive feeling.
This technique can help steady your breathing, relax your body and refocus your attention.
Preparing for execution
- Practice performance skills during training. Attention control, breathing techniques and mindfulness can become go-to strategies when they’re repeated. Practice them before stress increases so they’re familiar when you need them.
- Use quick-reset techniques. AIR, grounding, STOP (Stop, Take a few breaths, Observe, Proceed) and deliberate breathing can help you regain concentration when outside influences, mental chatter or stress begin affecting your performance.
- Learn from each performance. After a difficult performance, identify what happened, adjust your approach and continue practicing. The goal is to improve your next performance, not dwell on the last one.
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