Find the 'Rocks' in your mind
Jared Tendler has some advice on how to correct major mental game issues in poker and life using his 'Mental Hand History'.
Many people have an innate flaw in the way they try to solve problems like fear, tilt, low confidence, etc. – they don’t look deep enough. I was driven to learn more about the Mental Game when traditional sports psychology material didn’t help me solve problems handling intense pressure as an aspiring professional golfer. The more I learned, the more I realized that too often people aren’t looking far enough below the surface to identify the real problems.
Let me give you an analogy. If you have pain while you are walking, what’s the problem? Is it the shoe, the material of the road you are walking on, too tight socks?
When you get curious about what’s causing the pain, you have a better chance of correcting it. Let’s say once you look closer, the problem is simple enough – you have a rock in your shoe. So is the problem the pain? No, it’s the damn rock!
Too many people think pain is the problem and don’t take the step back to understand what’s causing the pain. They look at the pain points in their mental game like fear, greed, anger, distraction, and think that’s the problem to solve. So they stop analyzing any further and focus on strategies that are essentially pain management (aka trying to reduce fear, greed, distraction, anger).
This isn’t inherently a bad strategy, especially in the short-term. But this is unreliable because emotions can actually prevent you from controlling your fear, greed or overconfidence. Plus, in the long-term you can become less adaptive, limit your potential upside, your performance will have excessive highs and lows, and you’re likely to burnout more frequently.
Instead, you have to find the rock—you need to figure out what’s causing those emotional pain points.
What is The Rock?
The rock, your rock, is the underlying flaw driving your emotional swings and repetitive errors.
Now, when I recommend digging deeper to get to the underlying issues, people usually assume we are going to begin talking about their personal life and looking for Mommy/Daddy issues. Cue the eye-rolling, big sighs, and impatient frustration with “psychobabble.”
Look, there are many people out there that do actually need to talk to a professional about things from their past that are impacting their daily lives. But that’s not my focus. My niche is in improving performance, and when you are looking at how psychology impacts performance, the work is more practical.
From a practical standpoint, the biggest contributor to your errors and emotional volatility is what lies below the surface, such as flaws like:
- Total amount won
- Expecting to always be your best
- The need to be right
- Believing mistakes are inherently bad
- Believing you are unlucky
- The illusion of emotional control
- Assuming the worst/best will happen (aka being a shitty psychic)
These are examples of some of the rocks that are behind your emotional reactions. The key is for you to find the ones that are affecting you.
The Mental Hand History
The tool that I developed to help dig deeper and find the rocks in your mind is called the Mental Hand History. The name comes from my work with poker players, as I was trying to get them to work on their mental game in the same structured way that they would work on their technical game.
The Mental Hand History helps you analyze information and identify the flaw. There are five steps:
- STEP 1: Describe the problem in detail.
- STEP 2: Explain why it makes sense that you have this problem, or why you think, feel, or react that way.
- STEP 3: Explain why the logic in Step 2 is flawed.
- STEP 4: Come up with a correction to that flawed logic.
- STEP 5: Explain why that correction is correct.
Example
Describe the problem in detail: I hate when weak regs, or a reg that I know is good, plays badly and wins.
Explain why it makes sense that you have this problem, or why you think, feel, or react that way: If they played better, or like they do normally, I would have won the hand. Obviously I should be happy since I’m winning long-term from their mistakes, but they just play so bad sometimes, it’s insane how they can show up with hands like that.
Explain why the logic in Step 2 is flawed: I’m trying to control how they play, which obviously is impossible. And I’m focusing too much on short-term results. The worst part is that I’m losing control of my game trying to control theirs!
Come up with a correction to that flawed logic: Rather than trying to control the decisions other players make, make sure you’re making the decisions you want to make.
Explain why that correction is correct: That’s how you can have the most control in the short-term, and long-term.
Do the Work
Actually completing a Mental Hand History can be challenging. But just like the mapping process, where you see your mental and emotional patterns better the more you focus on them, the more you think about the cause of your problems, like the Mental Hand History trains you to do, the more details you’ll gather that will help you complete it.
How do you fix mental game leaks? Let us know in the comments:
