Some parts of your mental game work require a change in habits. The most basic being the need to break how you even engage with the mental game. In my experience a lot of people want to fix their mental game without actually spending time actively trying to improve it. And that won’t work.
Of course, there are many other bad habits you could have – such as skipping aspects of pre and post-routines, or missing them entirely, sloppiness in execution, or allowing distractions to reduce focus.
The list is too long to attempt to be comprehensive…but you already know your own bad habits. They are the firm aspects of your C-game and you have plenty of evidence to know that they are not serving your best interests and stand in the way of you achieving your goals.
Whenever correcting bad habits, it’s important to first distinguish between whether they’re caused by a discipline issue or an emotional problem.
Emotional problems are not bad habits to re-train. In fact, if you treat them like a discipline issue and attempt to correct them using tactics designed to improve discipline, you’ll make things even worse!
Correcting a discipline issue requires that you push yourself to build mental strength and endurance around a bad habit – but around an emotional problem, that will create a pressure cooker-like effect. Rather than correcting your emotional reaction, you suppress it and then intensify it so much that your mind will eventually be overwhelmed. The dam breaks and your mind is flooded with more emotion than you can handle and significant mistakes, losses, and setbacks can ensue.
That’s why it is so important, when analyzing your C-game, to distinguish bad habits that are firmly being caused by emotion. Emotional problems require deeper analysis to identify the root cause, something you can work through using the Mental Hand History (MHH).
After you’ve made progress with your emotional reactions you might find that while you don’t react with the same fear, frustration, or euphoria as you did before, some bad habits remain. Here you’ve cleaned up the reaction but haven’t trained the correct action – like staying in a trade longer, folding a hand on the river when you know you’re beat, or being clear on the exact shot you want to hit on a tough hole.
While the emotional downsides of those situations may be diffused, the habits still need to be broken.
Or it’s possible your bad habits are firm discipline issues, like impatience, procrastination, distractibility – that led you to develop habits which may not have been costly at earlier points in your career, but are now.
“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” ― Archilochus
With these habits, there have likely been times when you’ve broken out of them for a bit. A common short-term motivation is New Year’s Resolutions.
That time of year many people rely on the inspiration of a new year to avoid succumbing to the ills that plagued them the prior year. But this is a temporary fix. The magic of the new year may seem like it washes away your sins, but when momentum fades the old rhythms reemerge.
Unfortunately, bad habits truly do die hard.
How to Break Bad Habits
The MHH is a tool I recommend to analyze emotional issues tripping you up. When you’re trying to leave bad habits behind, the MHH takes a slightly different shape but with the same fundamental framework. You go through a series of steps to make progress.
Sometimes bad habits are only defined as “bad” because you are in the middle of improving. Those very habits might have once represented your A-game. They aren’t necessarily wrong, they’re simply outdated. And now that your A-game has evolved, they hold you back.
To truly break them requires identifying why they served you in the past and identifying the logic that supports that analysis. Next is evaluating why that logic is flawed in context of what you now understand.
Sometimes you know what the correction is. You have a process. Your A- and B-game don’t include these mistakes, so the answer could be as simple as being better prepared and having corrections in place more firmly. You might need to get tougher, and have more command, conviction, and desire to fix it. Find a way to Suck Less.
Or maybe you have been a little lazy, simply hoping it would go away.
Hope doesn’t cut it. You need to be actively working on it and be diligently focused on reaching Unconscious Competence. As long as you are still in the earlier stages of training, or re-training, a habit, you’re vulnerable to distinct steps backwards.
If you feel like you’re doing that and still getting tripped up, there may be some elements you’re not firmly understanding or in control of. At that point, revisit the MHH for underlying emotional causes.
Lastly, you might also check out Atomic Habits by James Clear, which is a book both I and many of my clients have enjoyed.
If you’d like my blog delivered right to your inbox, click here to be added to the list.
