Why "Execution Mode" is the Skill You Didn't Know You Needed

Source: Alyson McPhee / Unsplash

If you have no interest in sports or fitness, please bear with me for a minute, while I explain why a sports psychology drill is relevant to self-regulation in any domain of life.

First, let me set the scene with a couple of examples of why athletes value being able to switch into doing (execution) mode, and out of thinking mode, in their training and races.

Imagine this scenario: Rob is a sports scientist and recreational runner. His day job is conducting studies related to exercise. He could write a training plan for himself, but he hires a coach to do it for him. Why?

Part of why athletes employ coaches is because they want to just execute their workouts. The doing itself is effortful enough. They don't want to be the ones deciding what to do and not do. This includes athletes who are also coaches, but who often still don't want to write their own training plans.

Here's another quick scenario: Sophie is preparing for a marathon. She works with a sports psychologist to learn how to run the marathon with the least mental effort possible. During the race, she wants all her energy to go toward propulsion, to moving her body forward. Energy is scarce in a marathon. Our brains are energy-hungry, and she wants to expend as little energy as possible on thinking during the race, putting it all into her legs.

How Mastering "Execution Mode" Can Improve Your Focus and Follow-Through

In both scenarios I've described, the athletes are intending to be in "execution mode" for their races and hard workouts, not in planning or thinking mode.

Success at our goals involves a lot of simple execution of our plans, sometimes boring, sometimes taxing. If we add second guessing or mental chatter, execution becomes more effortful than it needs to be. This can reduce our focus, follow-through, and grit.

In everyday life, when we want to focus and follow-through better, we benefit from learning to shift more completely and fluidly into execution mode.

A 3-Minute Sports Psychology Drill to Learn to Shift Into Execution Mode

This exercise involves running, but I'll give you non-exercise variations shortly.

Try this drill:

Run your 10K pace, which refers to whatever pace you could run for 10 kilometers, for the next 3 minutes, but do so expending the absolute least amount of mental energy you can.

Note that you shouldn't run faster than 10K pace. Running for 3 minutes at that pace shouldn't be hard, since it's a pace you could hold for 10K, not just 3 minutes.

Variations

Here are non-exercise variations you can try.

• Cut up some vegetables or fruit, or make a coffee, with the absolute least amount of mental effort.
• Write something you need to write, whether it's an email or a presentation or paper, for 10 minutes, with the least amount of mental effort.
• Pick up anything from the floor of the room you're in, that shouldn't be on the floor, and put it where it should be, with the least amount of mental effort. If needed, set a timer for either 5 or 10 minutes and stop when it goes off.

The Goal

These drills help you learn to notice when you're slipped out of execution mode and into second-guessing mode (or other thinking modes like: planning, deliberating etc.)

The drill isn't meant to be used for all your tasks. It's intended as a way to sharpen your ability to notice when you're layering more thinking into an action than is necessary. It also helps you learn to switch more fluidly and completely between thinking mode and execution mode.

Try the drill with a few different activities that only require execution, not thinking, to learn what execution-only feels like. Then, consider using the drill once a week with one activity, to hone your ability to notice when you only need to be executing your plan, not thinking about it.

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Learning to switch into "execution mode" can help anyone follow through on their plans more consistently. When we add mental chatter to our actions, we reduce the cognitive energy we have available for executing our plans. Ultimately, this can lead to poor follow-through and abandoning plans and goals, because the actions we need to take become too effortful.

Overthinkers in particular can benefit from training themselves to be purely in execution mode, when a routine only requires that. For another discussion of how sports psychology can be relevant to general self-improvement, read this article next.