Playing Soccer, with applications to Being Yourself

Some days ago, Hannah commented on the uselessness of the suggestion, "Just be yourself," since it's not like you were considering an alternative.

I figured that, a lot of time, "Just be yourself" falls into the same category as "I'm sure everything will turn out fine" and associated conversation-ending platitudes that secretly mean, "I support you, but I don't really feel like listening to you talk about your problems right now." Naturally, it would feel frustrating to hear that, particularly since there's a bit of hypocrisy in talking like you support someone without actually doing anything to support them. However, I also feel that, on occasion, "Just be yourself" can be meaningful advice.

In a cool paper, folks were asked to do a soccer drill either while paying attention to what they were doing, or while being asked to simultaneously do a distracting task. As one might expect, the novices did best when they focused on the soccer drill. However, surprisingly, the experienced players did better when they had to do a second task at the same time, but only when using their dominant foot.

The mechanism suggested in the paper is that, as people practice a skill, it becomes an unconscious "automated" process. For experts, focused attention on the task interferes with this unconscious process, hurting performance.

Extrapolating wildly from this study, I'd argue that we are experts at tasks like talking or behaving appropriately in social situations (despite plenty of entertaining evidence to the contrary), and so focused attention can likewise be counterproductive.

For example, focusing on impressing someone could lead to bragging, and thereby have the opposite effect. On the other hand, attention is useful when trying to behave in a new manner: For example, a novice at giving lectures might benefit from paying attention to their talking speed. The phrase "Just be yourself" could then be a way of saying, "You're more like an expert than a novice at this particular task, so paying attention to your behavior is more likely to hurt you than to help."