When does the round begin ?

Every thought you think, every word you say, and every emotion you feel in the 5-10 minutes before the game has a major effect upon your results.

The problems begin if we start imposing business patterns and every day rhythms into the bridge. room. These rhythms and mindsets are simply incompatible with the game. There are too many distraction, too many random thoughts, too many emotions.
The pre-game routine is the time when we begin to focus on the game and we are letting go of the daily hassles and distractions.

Before we start playing, we must have made the game into our religion, the bridge table its temple and we are the gurus.

Pre-game routine

It should be the deliberate, the same before every game, take 10-20 minutes. Any preparation such as line-up, who is the match against, which direction we will be sitting should have been made already (if at all possible).

A routine could be:

• Get to the venue early
• Check the room arrangement
• Go for a walk
• Get yourself a drink
• Sit at your table early and get your mind card ready. The surroundings should be absent from your thoughts
• Go through your system card
• Have a pack of cards and shuffle them
• Minimise or eliminate the chatting
• Use imagery to get into the right mental state. The degree of arousal required will vary according to individuals, some need more pumping up than others. (More on imagery later)
• Just before the game begins,check the opponents system cards (even if you know them)
• Count your cards always the same way. Shuffle your cards at every board
• Don’t go looking at previous days scores !
• If you have a captain, he/she will institute a routine, gather the team every day for a catch up.
• Whatever routine you use, always use the same one

Your pre-game routine should become a ritual. Remember, bridge is your religion and you are the guru.

The element of routine must be present before every match. It may seems a bit much right now, but it will pay dividends the day you have a bad set.

Check out these guys, they all do it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5p5zVl8Y-k

http://www.boston.com/sports/basketball/celtics/articles/2008/04/20/routine_excellence_is_allens_secret/

http://www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/44685/golf_guide/a_few_golf_tips_from_tiger_woods.html

Focus - Interlude

Three dimensions of focus:

1. Intensity
2. Duration
3. Breadth

And only one road to improvement ===>

Even then, if we do not train these mental skills every match we play, instead of improving our bridge mental skills, we are only maintaining their current state. Some famous person said:

A practice match should always include deliberate practice directed at improving focus styles and concentration
If we play practice matches without directed attention to our focus styles and concentration, we are only reinforcing out ability to remain unfocused !

The power of your mind - Goals setting

Your Conscious Mind = The Captain of the Ship
The conscious mind has the ability to think, decide, and to act. It is rational in nature and its purpose is to either accept or reject the information that it receives. He issues orders to his crew and they follow it without question or evaluation

Your Subconscious Mind = The Crew of the Ship
Your subconscious mind takes orders without questioning the conscious mind. It simply obeys and carries out those orders.

Your Thoughts = The Captain’s Orders
The quality and safety of the ship can only be as good as the quality of orders being communicated from the Captain to his Crew. If you think "I am fat and ugly", your subconscious mind will oblige and take you on a binge. If you think : I am tall and strong", you will start walking straighter.

Here is an exercise to see how it works.

Create a pendulum by tying about 20cm of string to a small metal washer, nut or bolt.

On a table put a piece of paper with a 2 crossing lines.

Get comfortable at a table. Pick up the pendulum in whatever hand you write with. Rest your elbow on the table. Holding the string between your thumb and forefinger, suspend the pendulum over the paper.

Holding the pendulum with the washer suspended over the paper, look at it (keep your eyes open), and think about the string moving in one of several directions from A to B for example. Don't try to make the pendulum move, and don't try to keep it from moving. Once it is moving, you can start thinking about another direction going from C to D. Or you can make try make the pendulum going in circle.

The same principle works for your goals. If you have a goal when you go to play a game of bridge, if your purpose is clear - you unconscious mind will also work toward the same aim. Remember: the goal cannot be to win - For you have no total control on the results.

The goal has to be related to your own performance, to your actions - whether your goal is to play card perfect, or to only make no more than 3 errors, etc.

The second point is that the purpose has some what in line with your capabilities. The ship may sink otherwise.

You don't have a choice over using your subconscious. You can only choose what instruction you give. If the instructions are not clear or do-able, you will get random results.

..

So step 1 toward the zone is:

..

...

Have a clear goal every step of the day

5,4,3,2,1 Golden Rules

F = Five More Rule
The set may not be going well, or you are doing some practice bidding/playing and you have had it. Get your second wind by the conscious decision to just play FIVE MORE hands right. In practice, continuing to concentrate when your brain is tired is the key to S-T-R-E-T-C-H-I-N-G your attention span and building mental endurance.

C = Cards
Car, cards and nothing but cards should be your mantra

O = One Think At a Time After a bad result, or distracting event, make your mind a deal it can't refuse. Instead of telling yourself NOT to worry about something. I will list a few techniques in the next post

U = Use Your Hands as Blinkers
Picture your mind as a camera and your eyes as its aperture. Be aware of the various focus styles required throughout the game. If you need to switch to narrow focus, cup your hands around your eyes so you have "tunnel vision" and are looking solely at the cards. Placing your hands on the side of your face blocks out surroundings so they are literally "out of sight, out of mind." If you cup your hands around your eyes every time you want to switch from wide-angle to telephoto focus, that physical ritual becomes a Pavlovian trigger. ( You know, Pavlov rang the bell, fed the dog, rang the bell and fed the dog, until the dog started salivating as soon as he heard the sound of the bell)

S = See As If For the First or Last Time
You mind will work best if you know how to be "here and now" and fully present instead of mindlessly rushing in your mind through a millions other concerns. Looking at something as if for the first time will bring your mind back to the task

Continuous effort ........

Regardless of one’s ability and belief in oneself, it takes a whole lot of effort and persistence to achieve anything substantial. You don’t become a champion by just wishing for it or believing you can.

I like this quote from Winston Churchill.

“Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential"


If I had did not already have a job I enjoy, I would like a job involving bridge. Playing would be top of the list for sure, but training and coaching would be high on the list as well. Coaching the Australian into winning skills, that would be cool. As long as I get to travel with the team of course.

So now, moving on to look at the aspect of improving these mental skills.

It goes goes without saying (but I will say it anyway !!) that a prerequisite is to develop one’s technical skills. Regardless how well strong our mental skills may be, mental fatigue will always be there to trigger mistakes - lack of concentration - incorrect focus - increased likelihood to respond with stress to tough situations - etc. So it is important that the technical play aspects be both well understood and well practiced to minimise fatigue, so as to "automate" the card play itself. This will minimise the internal focus required to search our mental stores for knowledge that is buried, and free our mind to attend to relevant cues and solve relevant problems.

Jahangir Khan who was at the top of the squash world for so long said:

"To be the best, I had to work harder than everyone else."

A key step to improvement is of course to make an honest assessment of our strengths and weaknesses. I will skip that step for now but more on this later.

Next post will cover:
· Techniques for improving focus styles and concentration
· Training practice for these 2 skills
· At the table

Styles galore

Before I move on to the journey of improvement, I must delve a little more into the concept of attentional styles.

I have summarised the different focus styles that we all use to varying degrees a various times:

• Broad external focus - taking in our surrounding, taking in a multitude of cues from our environment
• Broad internal focus - time for strategies and planning, selecting relevant cues
• Narrow internal focus - time for problem solving and processing complex information
• Narrow external focus - time for execution, playing the card, looking at the cards

While everyone is capable of using and developing these different styles, we each will have a preferred or a more developed focus style - whether we were born that way or due to our education or occupation. The CEO of a company is more likely to be a "strategic " thinkers, a programmer is more likely to be a problem solver...

Along these difference in focus styles, are also differences in how likely we are to become distracted and by what:

• "external distractability" = how easily we become distracted by task irrelevant external cues, using a broad external focus when it is inappropriate
• "internal distractability" = how easily we become distracted at critical times by their own thoughts and feelings, failing to narrow our attention and/or shift to an external focus when we should
• A third element is our "degree of flexibility" = how easily we can shift from one mode to the other

It is important to understand that under stress, or a times of mental fatigue, we tend to revert to our natural style - even though it may not the most appropriate.

Ohhh ...this is such dry topic, how about a quote from Dalai Lama to finish the day

We are all worms. But I believe that I am a glow-worm

Paul, Joe and the Confidence Yardstick

The story of 2 car salesmen

Ian Thorpe said in an interview:

"For myself, losing is not coming second. It's getting out of the water knowing you could have done better. For myself, I have won every race I've been in."

Here is an analogy to explain my yardstick business.

Paul and Joe are both successful car salesmen. They both exudes self-confidence. They both sell luxury cars and are doing very well. They learned their trade from their mate old Bill who wrote a bestseller on sales skills. They both live a very comfortable lifestyle and feel happy that they are very good at selling expensive cars. After a particularly good day, they like to show off a bit and it goes like this.

Joe goes home with a bottle of wine and flowers and confides to Dolly the wife: "Gee I sold another 5 cars today. Am I good or what? Do you know how many cars I have sold this year? 20. Surely I must be the best salesman there ever was."

Paul also goes home - to wife Penny - with chocolate and wine: "Gosh Penny, I sold 5 cars today. I feel good. I am getting really good at selling cars.You should have seen how I handled the sale of a Ferrari 250LM today. I knew exactly how to hook that old guy. I practiced my sales pitch yesterday. Old Bill would have been proud."

In both cases, success is helping boost the confidence of these 2 men of course. It confirms their skills as salesmen. Their yardstick is different however.
Joe's yardstick for his self-confidence is the number of cars he sells.
In the case of Paul, it is the knowledge that the selling process he uses is effective that is the basis for his belief in himself

Paul knows that he is a good salesman. He is confident that he knows the process of selling. He practices and is always seeking to improve it. The lack of sales does not impact his self-confidence. He knows that there are other factors that can impact the sales (Maybe there is a recession, or maybe the profile of the luxury car buyer has changed or maybe the car manufacturer has been building dodgy card and the market has caught on). So he changes the process, maybe adjusting his style to the new type of buyers and eventually success returns to him.

Joe on the other hand is getting more and more depressed.Without the success of selling cars, he loses confidence in himself. He tries harder and harder but with no results. The harder is tries, the more despondent he gets, which in turn does not help him sell more cards. By his yardstick, he no longer has a basis for self-confidence.
If Joe does not change his yardstick, he will have to leave the car selling business.