To paraphrase Yogi Berra, “Bowling is 90% mental and the other half is physical.” You’ve spent a lot of time working on your physical game, assuring you look like a highlight film at the line, learning to read lanes, developing different releases, etc. All that will be for naught without a solid mental game, however. A player who enjoys a great physical game will fail without the mental game to go along with that smooth form and great delivery. I believe it’s true that a great mental game with only a medium physical game can often make a winner out of a journeyman player.

Do you remember that great shot you threw that time? That shot that was absolutely pure, where everything came together at the foul line? It felt so effortless. The ball flowed off your hand, rolled right over your target, and blew pins everywhere. If you’ve had one or two of those shots in your bowling lifetime, you should know (and believe) that you have the mechanical skills and physical resources, strengths, and coordination to do it again. So, why can’t you seem to repeat that shot a lot more often?

The reason is simple but like everything worthwhile, the cure takes some work. What is happening to you is the same thing that happens to athletes the world over. Your mind is preventing your body from performing at its peak proficiency. Bowling out of your mind is the goal.

As you probably know, there are two hemispheres of the brain. The left-brain controls all the analytical functions such as sequential planning, problem solving, rational thinking, deductive reasoning, and data analysis to name a few. It is the evaluator, the decision maker, and it devises all your shot-making tactics.

The right brain is the intuitive side. It is responsible for creative functions, feelings, visualization, emotions, imagination, and the orientation of your body in space. The right brain visualizes the entire motion of your shot: the picture in your mind of what the lane wants the ball to do, what path the ball will follow to do that, what is required of your body to put the ball on that path with the correct angle, speed, and rotation, etc. In addition, it is busy sensing your body’s position in space, making sure to keep you off your nose, and providing whatever physical muscle contraction, movement, and effort is required to execute this intention. Your right brain is the synthesizer which collects and collates all the data into a workable scenario for you, fitting the goal with your physical abilities. It translates all that left-brain analytical information into a picture your body can execute.

It was a wonderful lesson for me to learn that I did not always have to tell a client how to do something. In fact, I often find that the less I tell someone how to do something, the more quickly they are capable of doing it. The secret, I believe, is in the verbal painting of the picture and then letting them interpret the words with their body. For example, the request “Raise your backswing 4 inches” invariably gets the backswing we’re looking for. “Delay your release that (snap my fingers) long” achieves the amount of loft we’re working toward. That’ll teach me to think I’m necessary…

The best possible outcome would be that your right brain executes the shot you have in your left-brain and that it does so unimpaired by any conscious thought or detail. Since we are not unconscious unless we are unconscious, that unimpaired state of mind is pretty difficult to achieve. Therefore, it would bring great bowling (and life) joy to be able to acknowledge the left-brain information and then act upon it with no fear of outcome. That ‘what if’ stuff is what splits, opens, or a seven-count-when-you-need-eight are made of.

It certainly makes things more difficult if you can’t let your right brain execute its picture because of continual interference by the left brain (Mildred). The absolute here is that once you have accumulated the data and processed its application to your shot, your right brain and your body are ready - let them do it. The job will get done if your left-brain will just butt out!

The complex motor skills used for bowling require the participation of both hemispheres. The left-brain gathers all the data from your previous shot and, combined with your experience, uses it to guide your decision-making about the next shot. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it could work this way all the time? You would throw a shot and make non-judgmental observations about it. If the shot worked, your left-brain would send the ‘multiple copies of that, please’ message to the executor, your right brain. If it didn’t work, your left brain would analyze where a change might need to occur: “go around the high board; this line is no longer working, move 17 and 10 left; this lane now requires the high RG, slightly polished ball and a 90º release.”

Not good or bad. Just the facts. I’m not much of a sci-fi fan but I remember many many years ago reading a wonderful book by Robert Heinlein called Stranger in a Strange Land. There were several things from it I got to keep forever, always a wonderful gift. One was the word ‘grok’. The other was the concept of a ‘Fair Witness’. As I remember it, a Fair Witness was someone who could be hired to neutrally observe things. They did so without emotion or opinion. For example, Jubal asked Anne about the color of the house on the hill. She responded that it was “white on this side”. I nearly fell out my chair! She was making no assumption about the parts of the house she could not see. There was no judgment, no opinion, and no assumption - just the unencumbered FACT that the house was white on this side.

ISNESS

If you have not been told to trust what you see in bowling, let me be the first. We are surely into conditioned responses. We are supposed to feel this way if so-and-so happens. We are supposed to do this if that happens. If we could make pure decisions based on the observations of our experiences, we would be in great shape. What actually happens, though, is that we make decisions based on how we feel about our experiences. In fact, sometimes we even deny our experiences or what we see in favor of what we have been taught or what we think should have happened. We will often watch the ball and be surprised at its behavior. Having been there, done that, the thoughts are similar to: “That ball could not have done that. I didn’t really think when I let it go that it was a problem. Still, I must have (tempting though it will be, please pick only one): let up on speed, missed my target, turned it early, juiced it a little, missed it at the bottom, been a little late, etc. I’m either going to throw another one just to be sure or pretend that didn’t happen. I’ll be sure to a) bear down, b) try harder, c) throw it better, d) all of the above.”

The FACT is that the shot was just a shot. It did what it did. It is neither good nor bad. It just is. When you truly can just observe the shot’s ‘isness’, you can make a quality decision about whether or not you want the shot to do the same thing again. The ball will always communicate with you if you’ll pay attention. “If you stand there and throw me here in that manner, I am going to do this.” If you don’t change something, you can’t expect something to change!

Sometimes we think in should’ves and always. “I should’ve moved here.” “I always do this when that happens.” These responses are based on your experiences. If you get locked into these responses, you leave no room for new experiences. If you imagine what the shot OUGHT to look like and it doesn’t, where will you go?

Alternatively, you could be living in a very pleasant place: the lane is a canvas and your ball the paintbrush. Wherever it goes, it goes. You observe the ball’s action. What matters now is your REaction. In all of life, not just bowling, it is not the action; it’s the reaction that dictates joy.

If you don’t change your reaction (to a bad shot, a bad break, getting cut off in traffic, burning the lasagna), nothing else in your life will change either. This type of change in thinking affects your whole life, not just your bowling life. I think this change is made a little more easily by feeling like you are replacing one attitude with another rather than thinking that you have to stop doing something.

This change isn’t a dogmatic must. There’s no demand that you stop feeling the way you do. It’s merely a conscious effort to view the action differently. For example, you miss the 6/10 spare. You can either do the “You jerk. What were you thinking?” or “I always do that in pressure situations”, or the “Everyone will think I’m a bad spare shooter,” thing or you could think this: “Hmmm. Now, on this next shot, I’m going to…” Please don’t think this means that you don’t care or that you will either pretend you didn’t miss or ignore that you did. You did miss. It just doesn’t matter. It is in the past and has nothing to do with the future. The shot just was.

That is a non-fear based response. It acknowledges what happened without deciding that it is inevitable that it happen again or that it defines you as a person and a bowler. You are in charge, you know. The secret is in your investment. If you are invested somehow in the outcome, you cannot be unbiased in your view of the process. Conversely, if you release yourself from being outcome-oriented, what will matter to you is your performance - the process - that, after all, is the only thing you’re in charge of. Sometimes you bowl well and sometimes you score well and sometimes you even do both at the same time! I am reminded of little kids arguing. “You’re not the boss of me!” When your commitment is to your best effort, you understand that the score is not the boss of you. You are not your number.

There has to be a solid partnership of both hemispheres of the brain. Both the analytical and intuitive sides have complementary roles to one another, working together but performing independently. Anytime one side interferes with the other, you throw a bad shot. How often have you thrown a good shot and then said, “Yeah, but HOW did I do that?” That good shot is an example of the left brain deciding and right brain executing. If we could just let the right brain do its thing instead of that buttinksy left brain trying to analyze how the right brain is doing it…

It is a common tenet in coaching that ‘everybody can do it one time in a row’. When your coach asks you to try something, have you noticed that generally you can do it? They explain what it is you are to do and behold, you did it! I believe that is because you have no preconceived ideas about HOW to do it. You just gave an order or mental picture to the right side of your brain and it executed your thought unimpeded by how-to’s or what-if’s. The right side of the brain executed your thought. Isn’t it curious that we have so little faith in something we continually do? This is just like health food. We know it’s good for us, we just don’t do it!

If you threw the shot of your life every time, you’d quit this sport and go on to something more challenging. Knowing that every failure gets you closer to success is what keeps you coming back. Success is elusive and therefore worthwhile. You must never forget the incredible amount of precision and extraordinary skill required to bowl well.

It is hard sometimes for us to separate our performance from our self-worth. A bad bowling experience does not mean you are a bad person. How you see yourself as a bowler and how you value what you see is critical to your continued success. If you think you’ll chop that bucket, you’re right. Expectation affects performance. If you expect to miss that bucket, you’ll be sure you do, reaffirming that you were exactly right, you missed it! A negative self-fulfilling prophecy like this is easier to put into effect because there are so many more ways to fail than to succeed.

THE BRIDGE AND YOUR CUES

There is a communications network between your left brain and your right brain. It is really called the corpus callosum but we’ll just call it a bridge. It provides a method of communication between your analyzer and your executor. What you want to avoid are traffic jams (a bad shot) or no traffic (an uncaring or indifferent shot). The bridge is a one way street at all times. It’s just that the direction of the traffic flow changes at various times during peak hours of business - anytime you’re bowling. The trick is to use the bridge for the right communication going in the right direction at the right time. This can be accomplished through the use of cues or keys you’ve developed for your game.

The best time to determine your cues is when you’re bowling well. What did that stroke feel like and how will you repeat it? The key to its repeatability will be in how you conjure from the right brain the ability to do it again. For some people the cue needs to be words that elicit a feeling - like ‘free-wheeling’ or ’smooth’. Maybe it was flowing, like a river. Perhaps it was more of a yaaaa-hoooo! Maybe what works for you is to feel like you’re holding an egg or a bird. If you are this type of performer, your cues will be descriptive of the FEELING you had when you executed that shot and will help elicit that feeling again. Pick a phrase that describes for you the feeling of that shot. That will cue your right brain to execute that feel again. Some of you might need words which are more like orders than feelings like “Drop and Through!” For you this would mean to drop the ball into the swing and come through the shot. The more accurate and succinct the cues, the easier it will be to retrieve the magic later.

Perhaps your cue needs to just be thoughts that will elicit that feel. Sometimes these words are only descriptive to you. For example, you might try to bowl like David Ozio looks. That statement to you conjures up images of a smooth flowing approach, a solid and balanced position at the line, everything in perfect time and rhythm. Or you might think “Okay, let’s have the Barnes follow through” and since you have a mental image of what that looks like in your right brain, your right brain can do that follow through for you.

Cues like “hit it hard” or “don’t miss left” will not give the proper information to your executor. A thought like “hit it hard” will cause muscles to become tense and contract before you need them to contract affecting your speed, accuracy, and roll. Other than that, it’s a good idea.

Your body cannot “not”. It can only do. A thought like “don’t miss left” plants a vision in your right brain of missing left and guess what? Your right brain is a great mimicker and sure enough, off to the left the ball goes. Your right brain is just doing what it does best - executing the shot in your mind. Although your perception may be that your body disobeyed a direct order, it actually performed what you visualized. So don’t get mad when your body does just what you told it to do.

That’s why so much emphasis is placed on positive self-talk and visualization. Your executor will perform perfectly when its communication from the left brain is not flawed. You’ll be a more successful player thinking, “I’ll just hit the pocket and take my chances,” rather than “Don’t split again”.

DON’T BE A ROBOT

We’ve all seen bowlers who look mechanical and roboty - like they’ve studied a lot of books and are all tied up in the “As I’m taking my first step with my right foot, my right arm is moving forward to push the ball 4-6 inches over my right foot and I’m breathing in as I’m taking the second step with my left foot as my right arm continues to arc back so that the ball is over my right calf while my left arm moves out and back from the ball…” These are left-brain bowlers. Without the right brain being involved, you will lack fluidity, have too much muscle involvement, and your game will collapse under stress.

An overloaded left brain cannot perform but a properly cued right brain can do it all. You know very well you can’t control every muscle needed to execute a shot at exactly the time you need to control them if you THINK about it. However, why not have some fun experimenting and try it? This will help you see how much you really do on cruise control. Try to think your way through the motions of a shot the way I just listed those motions. It will give you a real appreciation for how much your body can do without you!

The secret of cues is finding what works for you. It might be a ‘feeling’ cue or a ‘do it’ cue combined with a vision. I believe all cues should be accompanied by the image in your mind of what you want to accomplish. Whichever type of cue you choose for yourself, its purpose is to elicit an IMAGE. The more often you can see a shot in your mind - going over your target with the right speed and roll, reaching the breakpoint exactly as you intend - the easier it will be for you to execute that shot.

 SEE IT!!

If you can visualize a shot that is reasonable for your physical abilities and the lane conditions, your right brain can execute it. This doesn’t mean that if you are a stroker playing in a lot of oil with a White Dot and just because you can visualize a cranker-type shot going across the 25th board out to the ditch and getting it back, you’ll be able to do it. Your analytical left brain knows this is not a shot that you can reasonably be expected to perform so your right brain won’t try to help you perform it.

If you have a plan, step up on the approach and doubt your plan, you cannot succeed. You will fail because there is traffic on the bridge. Let’s say you have decided to shoot your spare the way you always do. When your left brain has completed the analysis of what needs to be done, it has sent this message across the bridge to the part of you which can execute the plan. As you get up on the approach, you wonder about the amount of oil on the lane and think maybe you should have moved a little. If you doubt any of your left brain input, conflicting signals are being sent back and forth across the bridge. Your left brain has given up on the original plan and your right brain does not have a new plan. NO PLAN = NO CHANCE. If you go ahead and shoot the shot, you will be trying in your approach to overcome your doubt or misalignment. One side interferes with the other and you throw a bad shot.

I can remember vividly when my coach told me about visualization. I knew I could visualize a shot but what if I visualized that shot (down 8, let’s say) and the shot turned out to be swinging 15? Then I would have spent my mental preparation time executing over and over in my mind the wrong line and I might not be able to overcome it. I had taken him too literally. What I had missed was the CONCEPT of visualization. (Don’t tell me to get lost or go jump in the lake!) What I needed to imagine was the general shape and feel of a successful shot, the minimal effort of gliding to the line with the ball flowing off my hand, going where I wanted it to go to get the job done.

Notice I said the GENERAL shape and feel of the shot. Overanalyzing what you visualize is just as bad as not visualizing. “I crossed the 11½ board at the arrows traveling at 16.9 mph at an angle of 22 until the ball hit the 8¼ board at 37 feet 9 inches where it made a move left of 16 …” Just know it was about here at the arrows and went out to about there on the lane so that you have a sense of the overall shot pattern. Collect these impressions of a good shot. The more inventory you have, the easier it will be to retrieve successful shots from your right brain more often.

Visualization is not an option or something it would be nice to do later in your career. Regardless of how many times you see a shot in your mind and the reality is that you miss by an arrow, you must continue to visualize the right shot. It can’t be something you forget to do or only do on strike shots. (I firmly believe this lack of concentration is the #1 cause of missed spares). You must imagine the shape and path of every shot so that your left brain can engage and decide how to get it done and your right brain can do it.

RECLINER PRACTICE

Mental practice is a devastating weapon. Consider this: if you’ve ever sat in your recliner and imagined yourself bowling, what did you see? Did you miss a spare? Leave a split? Run out the 5 - 7? NO! In your mental practice, you did everything right. You struck when you needed to or said all the right things in the post-victory interview. We don’t ever practice the wrong things mentally.

When we do something physically, the body knows exactly what to do to duplicate that effort. It’s like water on a rock. The more the water runs over the rock, the deeper the rut it makes in the rock. When you imagine a shot in your recliner, those neural impulses don’t know whether you’re physically doing it or not and don’t care. The activity is still making its rut and providing an easy path for those impulses to follow when its showtime.

It is a documented phenomenon that mental practice can be effective in achieving physical success. Mental practice can prepare you to deal with every situation you might face on the lanes. Do it frequently. It will help lower your performance barriers.

THE FOURTH ESTATE

Writing down your cues when you’re playing well will help you recall them when you’re not. You’ll then have solid data and a proven successful feel from which to pull a needed successful feel. Keeping a journal of your experiences and feelings during competition can be very helpful to your continued improvement. This is not a chart of how to play the lanes or which ball worked on what condition. You certainly should do that but with this tactical information you need corresponding information about the psychological implications of your play - the mind games you play with yourself that precipitate failure. You know how important it is that you know your own game and your physical abilities. You should also know your psychological tendencies under stress (any competition). You’ll find there are all kinds of ways we talk ourselves out of a great performance.

How many mental, emotional, or psychological errors do you make in a game? When do you show poor judgment? When were you distracted, inattentive or lost concentration? When did you get angry or fearful? When did you allow Mildred, your evil non-bowling twin, to talk to you while you were trying to execute a shot? If you stepped up on the approach and for whatever reason it didn’t feel right, were you too lazy or embarrassed or indifferent to step back and reevaluate the shot? Your right brain cannot make up for the left brain’s failure to plan. You cannot throw the ball well enough to overcome a mental mistake.

Use the journal to discover when you tend to make mental mistakes. The beginning of change is knowing what the issues are. If you can figure these things out, you’ll more easily be able to self-diagnose and implement your plan to deal with it. How many times have you stepped up on the approach to shoot a 10 pin still thinking about how or why you left it and then missed it? That spare shot is a shot which you played indifferently. Your performance shows a lack of focus on the task at hand - staying in the moment. You’ll have plenty of time before your next turn to figure out why you left it.

The journal should help you discover your psychological tendencies. Once you know which situations cause you to become embarrassed or afraid or distracted, you can begin to learn to deal with them. Use the journal to set goals for yourself. When you set goals in a concrete fashion, your motivation improves to get that fix done.

I’M AS GOOD AS I BOWL

If you have not practiced sparing the bucket hundreds of times (or any other aspect of the game), positive thinking becomes wishful thinking. Practice breeds confidence in your ability including converting this evil combination. If you think positively about sparing that bucket, you may still miss it. It just won’t be because you thought you would. There will be another reason. Perhaps you didn’t have the lane condition and your alignment figured just right. So what? You learn from that miss and if, by some miracle you should leave it again, you’ll know you can convert it because of the new data your error gave you.

The main reason you want to harvest your cues from a good performance is that when you have thrown a great shot, savoring it while it’s fresh allows your right brain to intuit all the things necessary to repeat that shot. Your right brain re-experiences that feeling again and again, engraving its feel and reinforcing good results. Why is it that so often we’ll throw a strike on the left lane and dismiss it so we can move on to worrying about the Big Four we left on the right lane? Remember that the longer you savor a shot the more likely it will be repeated. So it makes no sense at all to think about a bad shot. We so easily dismiss a good shot thinking that if we just try harder on the right lane or analyze the heck out of the shot, we can fix it.

Stay with the bad shot for about as long as it takes to turn around from the line and start making your way back to the ball return. Your analysis should be very quick and the more experience you have, the quicker it will be. Before you turn back around toward the pins, you should already be plotting the fate of that spare. The left brain, of course, performs its instantaneous analysis. If you don’t use your analyzer, your right brain will become anxious. Anxiety produces more bad shots. What if you made an unsuccessful shot with a good swing? Identify the error. The error was in your analysis of the lane condition, not your execution of the shot. If you don’t identify this, your executor might be tentative next time, magnifying the mistake.

Dwelling on the bad shot will make it easier to repeat - never a good idea. How many times have you seen a bowler coming off the approach moving their hand and frowning, indicating what they think they did wrong in their release that caused the bad shot? Don’t re-experience the feel of a bad shot or mistake. That only reinforces it. What you should be doing is moving your hand the way you WANT to release the ball, reinforcing the feel you want to repeat.

You are not your number. You know when you shoot 720 that you are not a 240 average bowler. You should also remember that when you shoot 510, you are not a 170 average bowler. You are not as great as your best performance and not as bad as your worst. Evaluate the shot, not the shooter. You should confront problems during practice, not during competition. After the competition is over, you can perform a post-mortem on your performance and sentence yourself to a reward - a workout with your coach (the quickest and most effective fix possible) instead of slapping yourself around.

‘TRY’ SHOULD BE A FOUR LETTER WORD

Trying is one of the most destructive things you can do in bowling. What we really have to do is work hard not to work hard. If you’re trying, you have decided there is a weakness in your game or ability to perform. The instant you start to try, you become tense. The primary cause of performance errors is trying. How many times have you been told that you are ‘trying too hard’? It’s not that you try hard, it’s that you try at all. Remember that inadequate feeling you had when someone told you to “Try again”? Regardless of the intent, the translation is that you failed and you need to do it again and see if you can’t get it right this time. It’s bad enough we have to hear that from well-meaning folks. For joy’s sake, don’t do that to yourself!

Do you try to walk or try to breathe? No, you just do it easily and naturally. If you had to focus on walking, thinking about contracting the correct muscles at the correct time, worrying about the length and direction of your steps, you’d be slow, very tense, feel a great deal of pressure, and fail. When’s the last time you felt this way about a shot?

I’m sure you’ve heard about the example of walking across a 2″ by 12″ on the floor to retrieve a $20 bill at the other end. No big deal and easy to accomplish. But place that plank between two buildings and what happens to how you feel? You try harder to achieve something you already know you can do. Your ability is not different but your thoughts are and therefore your ability is compromised.

There are hundreds of performance barriers for every bowler. We’ve already discussed negative vs. positive self-talk and its effect on your performance, but why do you always seem to choke with four or five in a row? The truth is the more often you get four or five in a row, the more likely you are to get the sixth or seventh because the barrier to your performance gets lower and lower every time you get close. The lower the barrier the easier it will be to get by it.

A good performance is put together one shot at a time. If you treat each shot as though it were a mini-tournament, you can forget the previous shot and concentrate on the only shot that matters - the next one. Pretty soon you’ll have several good ‘tournaments’ in a row. If you treat every shot as a mini-tournament you’ll learn that one shot is not any less important than another. The only one that matters is the next one.

What shot would you throw if it were up to you? It is.

Human nature is quite interesting in this area. We are pretty convinced that past occurrences influence the future. What really happens is that a bad shot causes us to fear another one. I believe that what happens to us is about the What-If’s. “What if I score poorly (have bad timing, pull it, miss that spare, etc.)”? We convince ourselves that past behavior will occur again. We fear. Here’s an example. You are at a venue that really, really matters to you: your local association tournament, scratch league with the big boys, a regional event, whatever. I am telling you that to start the tournament, in front of all those fans and spectators, all those competitors, you are going to throw the worst shot of your life.

How do you feel?

Was your thought “Oh, here we go again”? Did you want the earth to open up and swallow you? Did that put you in a place where you remembered such a thing happening and you can feel all the feelings you felt then? That’s fear. Now you are in What If Land. The problem is not that you threw a bad shot. Everybody does that. The problem is that you fear you will do it again.

Move to a parallel universe. Here you are at the same tournament. Again, you are going to start this experience with the worst shot of your life. This time, however, I am telling you that it is the last bad shot you will throw in this tournament. You had a bad shot in you and you got it over with. What’s your reaction now? How do you feel about throwing that awful shot since you know you will not throw another one? Can’t wait to throw that bad shot, I’ll bet, get it over with, and move on to see the outcome of this movie! Once that ugly one is done, it’s on to the real you, the authentic bowler you are. You know exactly what will happen. You’ll flow effortlessly to the line. Your target will be huge, the pocket wide.

You remember that feeling. You wish you had it more often actually. If you think logically about this, you throw a bad shot and fear it will be repeated. When you throw a good shot, why don’t you attach the same significance to that? Why don’t you believe that will be the one that is constantly repeated? And don’t tell me it’s because you throw bad shots all the time. If that were true, you would either take up ping pong or get a coach!

Fear initializes the fight or flight response. That tightens up the muscles and affects breathing and the amount of oxygen you use. When that happens it is difficult to have a clear mind. The left brain stays very involved assessing the perceived threat.

Throwing another bad shot is entirely up to you. How you feel about any less-than-perfect shot is the predictor of the next one. This is a really interesting exercise and the beginning of understanding how much of what goes on in your head is in your control. You’re not responsible for your thoughts unless you hold onto them. Your mind is your own and you are in charge of what STAYS in it, not what goes in it. The more often you get yourself into a position to deal with success, the less intimidating that situation will be for you.

THE GROWTH OF AWARENESS

When I’m working with clients I will often have them do things wrong on purpose. Why in the world would I have them do that? It’s hard enough to do it right. Well, that’s exactly why. When making a change in your game, you often don’t know how that change is supposed to feel. Sometimes, in fact quite often, the only way to know how it’s supposed to feel is to learn how it shouldn’t feel. This gives you a growing awareness of what does feel right.

This growth of awareness is commensurate with your progress. When you do something deliberately wrong, you bring the error to the surface of consciousness which allows it to be dealt with. Once you can feel it, it is much easier to recognize and repair quickly. For instance, let’s say that your pushoff needs to be a smooth and continuous motion not going up or down but slightly out and into the swing. After working on this for a few minutes, I suggest you pushoff and then hesitate or hold the ball in front of you for a split second. Then try pushing it up into the air and then out. Next shove it downward. It will become apparent to you very quickly what ‘right’ feels like.

The beginning of learning is awareness. Sometimes when you think you’re getting worse or not improving, it really is the growing awareness of errors - a good thing and the true beginning of proficiency. If your hand does this, that happens. If you push it like this, that happens. Be aware. No judgments, just awareness. Develop a feel for what actions produce what results.

Too often the game you’re playing is centered around the game you think you should be playing.

How do you think you’d bowl on television? You watch every bowling show thinking ’she pulled that one’ or ‘if it were me, I’d move two to the right and change balls.’ The reality is we don’t have a clue how we’d behave on television because we haven’t been there. Sure, there are the dream-like stories of success about someone’s first time on television or the player who won the first tournament they ever entered. It could happen to you but the likelihood is that it will not. It is more likely that we would have to be there a few times so that we had the opportunity to experience how it feels. Then we can get back within our game and stay there instead of being distracted by the overwhelming differences of bowling on TV vs. bowling like we do it everyday.

This is a great role-play exercise by the way. While you’re practicing with a friend or friends, do a TV show! One of your friends should stand right behind you and mutter and whisper as if they are doing the commentary on your performance. Another friend could stand in your field of vision and pretend to be the camera person, moving at inappropriate times (it helps if you are on an end pair when doing this!). Have people be very quiet or make noises at inappropriate times. It would really be great if you could really have a camcorder and lots of bright, hot lights…

OVER/UNDER REACTION - YOU, NOT THE BALL!

Try some of these mental images as you get to know your psychological game. You have inside you an emotional tachometer. As long as the needle stays in the green, you’re calm and serene and can perform effortlessly. If your reaction to any stimulus starts that needle inching toward the red, you’re in dangerous territory for a good performance. You could use a thermometer for this mental image as well if you’d like.

In psychological jargon, this is called arousal. An over-aroused bowler will not perform well. Being over-aroused causes muscles to tighten at an inappropriate time inhibiting a smooth flowing approach and swing. How often on TV have you heard the announcer say how easy it is to strike when it doesn’t matter? Bowlers who have already lost the match strike out. What they’re really saying is that a calm and relaxed shot is executed well and produces better results. Duh!! If it invariably works, why wouldn’t we do it all the time?

Obviously, we’d like to. And it’s not that we don’t try. There are a few reasons we can’t just throw our best shot all the time. Sometimes it’s one of the reasons, sometimes combinations, and sometimes different reasons on different shots. Our peak performance comes when we are not expecting it. You know how it is. You had a bad day, the traffic was terrible, and you can feel a cold coming on. You don’t even want to bowl but you feel a responsibility to your teammates, so you go. You shoot the series of your life. Then there are those nights when you feel great. You can hardly wait to get to the bowling center and….. you can’t break an egg. We cannot possibly predict when we’ll have a good outing. If we could, we’d be waiting in line to pay the magician who could teach us to be in the zone on demand.

Another reason we don’t always throw that smooth flowing shot is our perception of the consequences of failure. Have you ever noticed that when you’re in a 10 pin slump and feel you couldn’t convert one if you were throwing a tree limb at it, you can always get the 6-10 when the 7 is standing with it? This is about consequences. You know you’re probably going to open so the pressure of converting is off and you easily get that important two pins of count. If the 7 is not standing, you fear chopping the 6 off the 10 or the 10 off the 6. This is actually a pretty good mental mindset when you’re in a slump. Imagine any opposite side pin with those corner spares and you’ll probably convert every time!

Yet another reason for not being able to relax is that scattered feeling we all have now and then. You just can’t concentrate or get focused no matter what you do. All your usual tricks for concentration don’t work and it’s going to be a long night. I find it interesting that this happens to most players only during league play. Tournaments seem to be a different mindset and focusing is somehow easier. I discuss this concept more in depth in the ‘League Attitude’ chapter.

SNORING DURING THE SHOT

Being under-aroused is no better than being over-aroused. An under-aroused shot is one described earlier as being played indifferently. What you have to constantly work toward is being physically aroused but not tense and mentally relaxed but not indifferent - in the green of your tachometer.

What works for Pete Weber in managing his thoughts and therefore his performance is very different than what works for Norm Duke. Pete’s level of arousal would be disaster for Norm just as being as calm as Duke would be catastrophic (more likely impossible) for Pete. If you are a quietly intense and calm person, trying to act like Pete Weber will take you out of your game and assure a scattered and disoriented feeling as you bowl. If you are gregarious and outgoing, allow your game to reflect that. Trying to be careful and stoic will handcuff your natural feeling and flow and preoccupy you with your demeanor instead of enhancing your performance.

SETTING UP FOR SUCCESS

You know that sometimes you will bowl well and sometimes you will score well and sometimes you even do both at the same time! You cannot control the scoring environment, however. You can only make the best effort you can on every shot and take your chances.

Your pre-shot routine is one of the most important things you can do to assure a good outing. It sets you up to succeed. It is a comfortable and familiar pattern you use to calm yourself and prepare for the next shot. Your pre-shot routine can help you stay at the proper arousal level because you are focusing on the act of your comfortable routine, not the outcome of your shot.

Do you feel that you are sometimes over-aroused in tournaments and under-aroused in league? That’s just experience (or lack of it). Touring pros sometimes find themselves under-aroused with the grind of traveling to tournament after tournament. They sometimes have to make themselves get up for this week’s tournament. Can you imagine trying to get up for shot after shot for fifty or more games a week plus intense practice and whether or not your family ate depended on your ability to do so?

You have heard before that when you practice like you’re competing, you’re more likely to compete like you’re practicing. So perhaps your league outing should be where you practice being a little more aroused than you normally are. Set specific goals for yourself - you will make every spare you can reasonably be expected to make, you will get count on every split, you will hit the right side of the head pin for all three games, you will be totally focused on every shot you make.

If you find yourself over-aroused at tournaments, perhaps you need to focus on that ‘league feeling’. You are calm and will throw this shot to the best of your ability and take your chances. Hale Irwin once said that he no longer got nervous at the U. S. Open or the Masters, but he did get more “interested”. Perhaps you could change your mindset to be more interested and not more nervous. This might stimulate you just enough to keep you from becoming under-aroused but not allow you to become over-aroused.

DON’T FORGET TO BREATHE

It might be fairly uncomfortable if we did! You’re probably tired of hearing about the importance of deep breaths to help you relax. The reason you hear so much about them is because they work. Clichés like ‘breathe deep’ and ‘one shot at a time’ are clichés for a reason!

Try this. When you take a deep breath (which should be in through the nose and out through the mouth for maximum effect), feel like you are inhaling a calming color and exhaling a color you find uncomfortable or violent. For instance, in with the lavender, out with the red. This will give you a mental image of bringing calm into your body and expelling anger or tenseness. Choose your colors carefully; they will make a big difference in the success of this effort.

This is known as a cleansing breath. Breathing provides the most available and effective way to calm a sense of panic, slow down your staccato thoughts, and get blood to the muscles so that they’re ready to help you do your best. Thinking of your breathing as ‘cleansing’ is a technique that really works to clear your mind and ready your body. Just like finding cues to help you repeat the shots you want, you’ll need to find cues to help you breathe. Breathing in a manner that helps you relax is one of the things you’ll need to be able to do on demand so you can perform to your highest capabilities every shot.

IT’S OKAY TO FAIL

Unless you are in the zone, bowling has a very small margin for error. A certain amount of failure should be expected and tolerated. If you don’t get a coach and practice enough to appreciate the difficulties inherent in the sport, you will be the victim of your ignorance, not your ability.

You know that bowling reflects life. They can both be a little unjust at times. How many times have you seen your opponents slop their way to a victory over you? Brooklyns carry, they roll the bucket, and nosedives crush the pins. Here you are, taking lessons and practicing faithfully, trying to demonstrate patience as you learn, and somebody with no clue of what this sport is about carries the first six hitting the 1-2-3 pocket. Why do you bother to try and do it right when slop and luck are all it takes?

Bad luck is just as much a part of the game as good luck. After all, if you were carrying those hits, you’d think you deserved them for all the times they didn’t fall. If you allow yourself to get angry at someone else’s fortune or devastated by your misfortune, you can’t help but dwell on that anger or hurt. If you’re thinking about that, you become tense which equals tight muscles which equals poorly executed shots - never a good idea.

Bowling is not an act-react sport. We have a lot of time to think, which is always dangerous. It’s nearly impossible to think and bowl well. When you are shooting hoops, you don’t think “How high should I jump for this rebound and in what direction?” When you’re playing tennis you never think “I need to run to my left 16 feet, get the racket head back at 90º, and volley this shot just over the net”. You just do it.

Not with bowling. We have to make decisions and then act on those decisions. I believe in the D-C-E philosophy. You must decide with your left brain what you are going to do, commit totally to doing it, and then step up on the approach and execute the shot to which you have committed with no doubt in your mind. If you doubt any part of the process, step back, rethink it, and commit to a new plan.

Let’s say you leave a 2 pin to spare. You decide what you are going to do, step up on the approach, get set, start your push, and think, ‘What if there is more oil going across the middle than I’ve planned for?” There’s a 9 dash. You have no plan and therefore there is nothing for your mind and body to commit to and you open. How many times have you seen spares missed because of tentative shots? It is much more embarrassing and hurtful to doubt your plan and go through with it, making a bad shot, than to step back, rethink it, and make a good shot. Will your teammates be grateful to you for making a bad shot that they did not have to wait on or would they be more appreciative of a good shot you took a little more time with?

How we react emotionally to what has happened dictates how we will handle the next opportunity we have. Bowling will always be affected by luck and skill. Sometimes more luck than skill and sometimes more skill than luck. The presence of either cannot be denied or ignored.

SHUT UP AND BOWL

What a great philosophy! A bowler with this philosophy will perform calmly and competently, unaffected by others play or any bad luck they might have experienced. They enjoy their own good luck with restraint, not getting over-aroused about an off hit that carries. They also don’t rush to stick their head in the toilet if a great shot sticks a 9 pin.

The results of your best effort are unpredictable. Every split brings you that much closer to your next strike. If you choose to think that every strike brings you closer to your next split, you’ll not be a very good bowler and will certainly be a miserable one. You won’t be much fun to be around. If you’re wondering who would want to bowl with you, you’d be right. Who would?

It is commonly said that when you begin to learn a sport, it is 90% physical and 10% mental. The better you get, the more these numbers begin to change places - it becomes 90% mental and 10% physical. I believe thinking like that can be an error. When’s the last time you stood on the approach and thought the pins down? Bowling with your mind is not effective. Your body knows how to bowl. It is your mind which prevents it from doing so. Try bowling out of your mind.