Ask Better Questions

While this is generally good advice in any field, when it comes to psychology it can be a game-changer. I have used this as a guiding principle in my work ever since, and take great care when working with clients 1:1 or during interactions via The Mental Game of Trading LIVE to ask questions that lead to informative answers.

The value of asking good questions is to help my clients dig through specific problems they’ve come to me to work on, as we look to identify and eliminate the root cause of what’s going on, not just manage the symptoms.

Often the answers don’t need to come from me, they come from the clients. Good questions can help them, and you, uncover truths already known but not verbalized or understood. Tapping into knowledge that hasn’t been readily accessible because you were asking the wrong questions, not looking deep enough, or assuming you already knew what was wrong without probing further.

Of course that’s not true for everyone, or at all times. I frequently make the link, provide direct advice or call out the deeper issues for my clients, but the questions I ask along the way make them more open-minded and receptive to my suggestions.

Since I can’t work with all of you as individual clients, I write books, like The Mental Game of Trading or The Mental Game of Poker 1 & 2, to bridge the gap. In these books I set out to provide both the knowledge to help you identify the issues you’re dealing with and an interactive approach that is not as typical in a medium that tends to be pretty static. While you and I don’t get to talk directly when you’re reading one of my books, I pose direct questions to get you thinking like I do in a client session – often they’re the same questions. I ask you questions in a very purposeful way to go through the profiling/mapping process, examine the root of your problem in the Mental Hand History, and peer deeper into individual problems. 

The benefit of these questions only materializes if you engage with them seriously. Your progress doesn’t come just from your consumption of the material. It comes through your interaction with the material.

My questions, both in the books and in my client sessions, are intentionally challenging. They’re intended to encourage you to connect to the issues you’re facing in a different way, and see them from a different angle since often your perspective about your problems is the first thing to correct.

Interestingly enough, in responding to these challenging questions clients will often say something at the end of an answer that, to them, seems like a throwaway comment. It’s often a joke or their tone of voice and delivery indicates they don’t consider what they’re saying to be relevant. Often, however, this is where the gold lies and where the deeper understanding comes from.

My co-author from The Mental Game of Poker 1&2, Barry Carter, shared the following story in The Mental Game of Poker:  

“Never joke during a session with Jared Tendler. He doesn’t let it go. He probed me on why, if my image of success is winning a tournament, do I hardly ever play them? Lots of ‘Jedi Mind Tricks’ later, he made me realize that risk aversion was stopping me from working on my game this time because I was equating success with something I wasn’t even trying to achieve, so I had a perfect excuse when I didn’t achieve it.

This ultimately led me to the core of why I wasn’t working on my game. I didn’t want to put myself in a position where I had to be accountable if I lost. Being a poker journalist, I have to report on successful players every day, and I’m friends with a lot of pros. What I really feared was humiliating myself in front of them, so I took the low-risk route of not working on my game, blaming bad luck, and not leaving myself open to ridicule.

Playing out the fear like this gave me an end point. I knew that the absolute worst thing I could experience if I started to work on my game was ridicule. I also realized from the whole experience that I wasn’t nearly as good a player as I thought, which was a good thing, because it meant I could improve. Thanks to some pretty solid learning concepts like the ALM and Inchworm, I now know there is always something I can work on, and I have ways of noticing small gradual improvements no matter how bad it gets.”

With that story in mind, when you get to the recommended exercise below, don’t censor yourself. Don’t allow your internal editor, or the logical part of your mind, to omit the emotional side. This is not about writing good prose. This is about you uncovering deeper layers of problems that you’ve had for a long time. Your internal editor prevents you from accessing the gold locked within.

Whether you do the next exercise or not, start the digging by asking the question “why?” and actually answer it. Then follow it up with another “why?” Repeating this process like a five-year-old child does when they’re allowed to explore with boundless curiosity. Kids will ask “why?” all day long, and, unfortunately, this is a simple question that as adults we forget to ask. This is a situation where emulating a child is a great way to start getting unstuck.

Complete the New Client Questionnaire

If you want to use an additional tool to go farther to assess your overall mental game and dig deeper into key areas, I suggest completing my new client questionnaire, even if you never plan on working with me.

Each time a new client signs up they fill out a very detailed questionnaire that is designed to help both of us prepare for our first session. I’ve heard over the last 15 years that just filling out the questionnaire has helped many clients make connections or gain insights.

To be clear, this is not a solicitation for new clients. (I mean, if you are truly interested, feel free to check out my coaching page, but I obviously can’t coach all of you 1:1 and that’s not what I’m going for here.) Rather, I want to offer this tool as a way to ask yourself some better questions to help you get unstuck.

If you are serious about improving in trading, golf, or poker, take this process seriously. If you are going to half-ass it, it’s not worth doing it at all. You’ll just regurgitate info you already know and won’t gain any value.

To start, it’s important to fill the questionnaire out in a relaxed environment and add detail over time. Although some questions may seem redundant, asking overlapping questions is important to properly assess all areas of your mental game. Fill out the questionnaire in two phases following these directions:

First phase. Write down answers that come easily to you. If you are having a difficult time answering a question or believe that it’s not relevant to you, skip it, and come back to it at the end.

Second phase. Three to five days after completing the questionnaire the first time, read each of your answers and only add anything new that comes to mind. Begin these answers with the notation (2rd) in bold. This gives you the opportunity to identify new details that weren’t originally at the top of your mind and gives you access to deeper layers. Details matter a lot when resolving mental game problems, and digging additional ones out of your head can make a big difference in how quickly you improve.

You can download the questionnaire from the middle of this page.

After you fill out the questionnaire, if it’s obvious what you need to prioritize in working on your mental game, use what you found to engage in a more practical way with the poker or trading books.

With a more precise understanding of your issues, work through them by using the chapters and completing worksheets like the profile/map, Mental Hand History, A-to-C-Game Analysis, or Goals Worksheet, all of which you can find here: https://jaredtendler.com/worksheets/ 

If it’s not obvious what to prioritize, since you can’t improve everything at once, put the questionnaire away for a week so you can examine your issues from another angle. As a coach I provide clients a third-person perspective, but you can have a bit of that yourself with a written document describing what you’re dealing with and a week to clear your mind and come back to it with a fresh set of eyes.

Feedback

Once you have dug deeper into an individual issue or completed the questionnaire, it might be a good time to share what you are wrestling with.

I recently asked readers to describe a problem they were having and I would provide some feedback, along with insight into how I got there, in a future blog. If you didn’t respond before, going through this exercise might give you a clearer idea of where you could use more direction. Click here to share a problem for feedback.