There’s a finding in motor learning that external focus — directing your attention toward an intended effect in the world — outperforms internal focus, where you think about your own body mechanics. Instructions for motor learning: differential effects of internal versus external focus of attention makes this case pretty clearly. William James actually captured it before the research did: keep your eye on the place aimed at, and your hand will follow. Think about your hand, and you’ll likely miss. I have mixed feelings about this personally, but in practice I do use the lazy eye technique specifically to generate that kind of external anchor.
When I was young I was always thinking about how to pitch properly — where my arm was, how my grip felt, the mechanics of the release. Couldn’t do it. That’s internal focus doing its damage in real time. The research in External Cues vs Internal Cues gets at exactly this: the more you attend to your own body, the more you interrupt the very system that’s trying to coordinate the movement. External Versus Internal Focus of Attention in Procedural Skills reinforces the same pattern across different skill domains.
The question I think people immediately hit when they first hear this is: okay, so what am I supposed to focus on then? That confusion is fair. But I think there’s a both-and-ness here that’s easy to miss. You can’t obsess over outcomes — Performance Attachment is Actually Antithetical to Learning — but you do need some external goal to orient toward. It’s not that outcomes don’t matter; it’s that gripping them too tightly collapses your attention inward. The Inner Game of Tennis lives in this same tension.
The real trick, I think, is finding the right cue for the right person. Comparison of Internal vs. External and Holistic Attentional Focus starts to gesture at this — it’s not one-size-fits-all. Which connects to Using the best focus for the right time: the cue that works is the one that pulls your attention outward in a way that actually makes sense given what you’re trying to do. Next time I’m picking up something new, that’s where I’d start — not with the body, but with finding the right external thing to aim at.