Sports Psychologist Visit 2/4

Monday Night was my second visit, I certainly got something from the first session. I was looking forward to my second visit, for the first few minutes we discussed what I had done since my previous visit and how I had managed to use the relaxation techniques. Mark Carrington had noticed how steady and 'Up for it' I was in my last match of doubles.

We discussed a very strange subject to great lengths. Energy Vampires.
For those of you who don't know these are people who sap your energy. So for example if someone perhaps a team mate comes up to you in your match and says something like 'oh your were really unlucky with that shot you just played why didn't your play this shot instead' They are feeding off you putting doubts in your mind were you really unlucky, will you have more bad luck. ?

There are 5 main type of Vampires and I could identify most of these from within the groups of players I play with. I wont explain all these groups as you really need to go through this process yourself. But they are out there.

The next part was some practice shots in relation to the Jack Karnham video, some really amazing examples from the video and from the Psychologist.

We then moved on to how to defend yourself from various forms of Vampires. How to put your self in a protective bubble which they cannot interrupt. This was very interesting and quite simple to achieve. I really liked this approach I can see it being a very effective a form of one upmanship perhaps or even bordering of cheating without actually doing anything wrong.

We had a cup of tea and slice of cake and moveed on to another subject 'Fear of Failure'. This was also quite interesting, we introduce stress and tension into our game because we do not wish to let the team down or indeed ourselves. Perhaps we don't want to be to the only loser if the team is doing well, so the fear of failure puts added pressure onto our mind which in turn passes onto the body. Again identifying these pressures and using the protection and relaxation methods to counteract this is very important. I had not really thought of this as Billiards is mainly an individual sport.

We also spent some time discussing how we should never try to be perfect in our game. I found this to be the hardest part to understand, but it links in with the above. If we always aim to be 100% perfect then we are bound to fail some of the time, perhaps a poor shot or bad position or bad luck even. This can play on your mind and introduce doubts, however if we decide to be 95% perfect then we know we can have a few bad shots which were expected and therefore we should not worry about them. Again it's about reducing the fear of failure.

The 3 hours flew and before I knew it I was on my way home again, still lots of snow on the hills. A remarkable session very impressive, really gave me a lot to think about.