I started playing billiards (pool) in summer of 2019 and it was love at first sight (or play :)) Spent hours playing in league and many more hours playing in my head; watched a lot of videos. Most of what I did was learn how to make balls. One thing I noticed was, during practice I used to shoot great, but when it came to competitions I used to struggle; could feel heart rate peaking, hand shaking and missing shots I could make without thinking during practice.
Took a friend pointing it out to me that I need to not just practice on “making balls” but also getting into a “right mindset”.
After a particularly bad form in a higher competition, and feeling low and bad about it, my wife asked me
- Her: Why do you like to play pool?
- Me: I love to make balls; when a shot in my head comes off well on the table – that feeling is so good, do not know how to even describe it
- Her: Why do you care if you win or lose?
- Me: aaaaaaaaaaaa, I do not (Mind = Blown)
This is also around the time when I found “Pleasures of Small Motion” and changed the way I think.
Pleasure of Small Motions by Robert Fancher has helped me compete better and get in good mindset before any type of game friendly (or) competitive.
Notes form the book
- Motivation of why you want to play makes a big difference. Do you play because you want to win? or do you play because you like all the mechanics that go into making the ball
- Psychologists have learned that people need “multiple competencies” to sustain themselves – when something in which we take pride and satisfaction becomes unavailable, we need to be able to turn to something else to motivate and sustain us.
- The best self-talk during 0play is none at all. Good research in several sports has shown repeatedly that when the best competitors play well, the conceptual and verbal centers of their brain show little activity. The sensory center, however, works vigorously.
- To improve your mental game, you must have acute body awareness, and as soon as you shoot, you must pay attention to what you did – and what happened as a result.
- You have to pay deliberate attention to all your bodily sensations, and you have to pay attention to exactly what happened at the table. Then you need to correlate the two. As you do this, you commit images to memory and use it later.
- Careful, deliberate practice lets us build new wiring. This is a well-documented fact; until new wiring develops, though, we must control its actions consciously. We have to pay conscious attention to a shot. Once we have consciously carried out the practice that develops new wiring, we can do those things through unconscious process automatically.
- In pool you make some movements over and over again; you face the same angles repeatedly. Shot making becomes automatic then conscious brain circuits are free to consider more advance and subtle possibilities. You do this with a lot of practiced – deliberately and with appropriate conscious controls.
- Pattens exists not on the table, but in your mind. The pattern you see results from your knowledge of the game. Example: before I knew how to draw a ball, I would have done the first scenario
Concentration is simply centered, well-ordered thinking.
- To concentrate is to establish a center; around which other matters are systematically arranged.
- Well-ordered thinking connects the center to the goal, taking into account everything that will affect whether you attain the goal.
- Motion of the object ball is derived from the cue ball, which gets its energy from the stick motion, which derives from your body. The center of the shot is always your body. That is the only thing you can control. Your dynamic image of a shot centers on the bodily motions necessary to make a shot. Concentration always starts from and centers on your body.
- Feed-forward process consists of
- Mental representation – a dynamic image of what is going to happen
- Attention to what in fact is happening as you undertake the action
- Comparison of action to the image; and
- Correcting the action – where need be – to conform to the image. The image guides the action
- In a nutshell, concentration is constructing a complete image of the shot, centering on your body, then understanding and guiding your bodily motions by reference to this image. By “reference to this image” means you pay attention to what you actually do, compare it to the image, and make corrections as needed.
Emotions is simply the motivation to act in a specific way, under specific circumstances, to pursue something we care about.
- You should not put negative thoughts out of your mind; instead, when negative thought occurs to you, you need to deal with it. Ignoring it won’t make the concern that prompted it go away
- Suppose you are down 6-to-2 in a race to 11. You think “am in deep trouble. He only has to win 5 before I win 9”. The correct response to such thoughts will be something like “that is true; no doubt about it. Still, he won six of the eight; I could win six of the next eight. I need to settle down and select each shoot wisely, then stay carefully centered on my body. I can’t go getting panicky”
- Most pool players, when they are having an off night, do exactly the wrong thing: they focus on conscious controls. They become too concerned with the success of their shots, forgetting the feel of good play.
- As per science, increased emotional arousal induces better concentration and more precise motor control, and therefore improves performance – up to a point. Past this point, increased emotional arousal causes excessive narrowing of focus and disruption of automatic motor control processes. The key with emotions is to have enough, but not too much.
- Emotions help us focus better and “right amount” of emotions is important in everything we do
- Too little and we do not care enough to completely focus
- Too much and our focus is narrow, and we lose attention to bigger picture
- Everyone has different threshold for handling emotions before it either becomes optional or problematic
- Modulation of emotions involves at least three processes:
- Attention to the goals
- Appraising the significance of specific circumstances for these goals
- Assessing the probability that something good or bad will result from the specific situation
- Our preconscious perceptions begin a process of appraisal that sets emotions in motion before our conscious mind is aware of what’s going on. Thus we become aware of emotions after they have already started
Keeping the pleasures of small motions central to your interests at the table will aid your emotional climate, for a simple reason: no matter what the circumstances, there is always some action available to you that can fulfill this interest
- The fundamental motivation for playing is pleasure, and the underlying pleasure that makes us enjoying pool is delight in precise control of small motions – satisfaction we take in experiencing our fine motor control causing predictive, intricate, elegant shots. Often, we lose sight of basic reason for doing something, letting subsidiary concerns take center stage. We often forget why the game captivated them in the first place.
- If we think in all-or-none terms (that one shot and I would have the rack), we are likely to get overly excited or lackadaisical- one way or other we fail to appreciate the correct significance of the shot. This is one reason why players fall apart after missing one shot: they have overestimated its significance, and they get more emotional than they can handle when they miss. It is also a reason why we make a brilliant shot, then miss the easy one that follows: We have overestimated the first shot, and having made it, we basically decide the game is over, the next shot is in the bag, and we think the next shot is insignificant. Since we have no significance to it, we feel nothing about it, and our concentration and motor control go off duty.
- 2 elements that help us modulate emotions
- Body awareness
- Rational internal conversation
- To explain the above better – you must use rational internal dialogue to determine what, realistically, you need to do (just make a few balls and see how it goes); and you must then use your awareness of the necessary bodily sensations to interrogate and change your current bodily state (are you walking too fast, not stoking enough, hand is straight, …)
- Dumbest thing you can do is ignore feelings that have been generated. This is because these feelings are shaping the state of your motor control and mental attentiveness. Ignoring them, and your conscious and unconscious efforts are simply at cross-purpose
- Confidence always derives from a prediction you make about the probability of success. Predictions based upon sound knowledge of what a situation requires, and what tools you have at your disposal to meet the challenge, generate rational confidence.
- Achieving stable confidence depends on 2 things
- Accurate self-knowledge
- Reasonable expectations
- Easiest way to lose confidence is to expect of yourself something that is highly unlikely, then make some excuse why it did not work.
- Suppose you come to the table with 5 balls left out in open. If you generally run out from five (without any clusters) 20 percent of the time, you should realize that you have about 20% chance of running out. If you make 4 balls and miss the 9-ball; you have in fact performed quite well relative to your abilities. You should be pleased with yourself – you are on your game.
- Competitive skills differ from shooting skills, and if you want to compete well, you need to know just how and why so you can develop competitive skills to match your stroke.
- Competition is a social process and involves you being judged by everyone watching.
- The effect of competition on our play, then, is always relative – relative to the standards by which we expect to be judged, and to our estimation of our likelihood of measuring up.
- Mental baseline to start a competition match with – I want to see if if I can play better than before, with no preconceived notion of the outcome, but have a serious desire to win.
- Pay attention to your opponent; their strengths and weakness and make your game plan accordingly.
- In similar manner; pay attention to your game on that day and select your shots accordingly.
- When you compete, your overriding goal is to win. Key term here is overriding. In competition, winning should not become your only goal, even though it becomes the main one. Sustain your interest in many other goals, but in service to winning.’
- With competition in pool, your subsidiary goals – pleasure in the strokes themselves, organizing your thinking and working to a good rhythm, meeting a challenge, maybe even trying out new skills if the occasion arises and so forth – don’t vanish. Rather, they take specific shape because winning ids your overriding goal.