Self-improvement
Chapter Eight: Self-assessment and self-management
At this time of year, most tournament fishermen are taking a midwinter break from competition. The holiday season is upon us, when our thoughts turn to gatherings and celebrations with family and friends.
As we have discussed in previous articles, this can also be a good time to review and reflect. Conscientious tournament anglers find time between seasons to sift through tournament records and evaluate performance dimensions in light of their 2005 goals. Most of us do an end-of-season tackle and equipment inventory as well.
You, the tournament angler, however, are the most important piece of equipment you have. Yet how often do you set aside time at season’s end to reassess yourself?
Self-assessment
Psychological research clearly indicates that accurate self-awareness is a prerequisite for making adaptive changes. Look through your Performance Psychology and Tournament Fishing notebook and find your best 2005 tournament finishes. If your notes to yourself are complete and accurate, you will be able to quickly identify the lakes, techniques and patterns where you were most successful this year. Spend some quality time with yourself, as it were, revisiting these scenes and circumstances. Doing so will help you store your successful experiences in the “black box” on your shoulders that holds your hat.
As importantly, you should look closely at those tournaments where you performed poorly. When they don’t do well, average athletes are inclined to take a superficial approach, and come up with a vague, imprecise explanation for what went wrong. Such individuals often quickly dismiss bad tournament finishes and go on to the next event. They actively try to forget about poor performances rather than learn from them.
Top athletes, however, pay as much attention to their mistakes and failures as they do to their successes. By spending time seeking to understand the root causes of poor performance, serious competitors give themselves the opportunity to identify and ultimately strengthen domains where they are not strong. You should do the same.
Put another way, elite athletes take full personal responsibility for each and every performance, regardless of the outcome. Also-rans tend to overplay their personal talents when they are successful. They also tend to externalize blame or responsibility when things go awry.
We’ve all stood there and listened to tournament winners carry on at great length about the importance of a minor difference in color of an obscure bait. And, if the lure happens to be out of production, well, you can expect an extra 20-minute explanation about how much better the old version performs than the new model!
Try not to get caught up in the natural human tendency to overestimate your skills when you do well and blame someone or something else when you screw up. Make a conscious effort to be objective, and think about your poor performances in the same way you would evaluate a piece of equipment.
Try this as your model for evaluating your 2005 tournament results: If it worked, then keep using it. If it didn’t work, fix it, or get rid of it. You can refer to past articles in this series on learning new techniques and making needed improvements for specific suggestions about what to do. However, the most important thing is to correct the mistakes you made last year, rather than to keep doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.
Baseball players who have difficulty hitting to the opposite field spend countless hours in the batting cage working specifically on that technique. Maybe you remember the time and effort it took to learn to dribble a basketball with your nondominant hand. It’s easy, comfortable and a lot more fun to go with what you do well. To move to the top of your sport, however, you had best spend most of your time improving your weak areas.
Self-management
In addition to technique improvement, world-class athletes seek to understand and manage their internal reactions. Self-management refers to the capacity to recognize and understand our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Recent research data in psychology has given us new insights into the relationship between positive and negative thought patterns.
Current findings indicate that optimal functioning represents a unique ratio of positive and negative thoughts. We have known for some time that too many negative thoughts can lead to discouragement or even depression. People tend to give up when their thoughts and beliefs become overly negative.
However, it turns out that too many positive thoughts can be problematic as well. An overly optimistic attitude can compromise objectivity and make it difficult for us to notice and fix our flaws. Excessive optimism also causes people to underestimate the difficulty of things, such that they are poorly prepared to address, even predictable problems.
Current findings suggest a ratio of three or four positive thoughts to every negative one is conducive to optimal functioning. You might do a little experiment with yourself and keep track of the number of both positive and negative thoughts you experience during a tournament practice day, for example.
You may find a great many negative thoughts in your head on a bad practice day, making it hard to stay focused and committed. On those days when you wore `em out, as they say, you may end up with an excessive number of positive thoughts that may also interfere with objectively assessing your performance. By keeping your positive and negative thoughts in a 4-to-1 balance, you increase the likelihood of maintaining an outlook that is both optimistic and realistic.
Jay T. McNamara, Ph.D., L.P., is a psychologist, who is also an avid bass and walleye angler. With more than 25 years of professional experience complemented by participation in competitive fishing at local and national levels, he is uniquely qualified to illustrate how performance psychology principles apply to tournament fishing.