With Winning in Mind

Make it 'like you' to win

Lanny Bassham won the Olympic Gold Medal for rifle shooting in Montreal in 1976. Bassham believes that what sets great athletes apart, in any discipline, is mostly mental. He created the Mental Management® system, and has taught it around the world. With Winning in Mind is a summation of this system.

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Rifle shooting is more like bridge than I would have imagined. There is a physical element, but it’s not like basketball or track where your training is primarily building your muscles and endurance. You’re squeezing a trigger. It’s mostly mental.

There’s a lot of great stuff in this book that directly applies to improving your bridge game. Here are some of my key takeaways:

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“95% of all winning is accomplished by only 5% of the participants. What makes the 5% different?” That’s one of the key questions I’m trying to answer with this Leveling Up project. Here’s Bassham’s answer:

“Talent equals skill and it is acquired, not awarded. But skill alone will not make you a winner. Just under the top 5% are thousands of skilled participants who place high in the competition but fail to win. It’s not anything you are born with—we are all born with the seeds of greatness within us…The primary thing that separates the winners from the others is the way they think. Winners are convinced they will finish first. The others hope to finish first.”

A winning mindset is key.

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There are three mental components to Bassham’s Mental Management® system: the Conscious Mind, the Subconscious Mind, and the Self-Image.

Your goal is what he calls The Triad State: “When the Conscious, Subconscious, and Self-Image are balanced and working together, you perform smoothly, efficiently, and seemingly effortlessly toward your goal.”

Of these, the Self-Image is the most important. “Your Self-Image ‘makes you act like you.’ It keeps you within your comfort zone.” You have to believe that it is “like you” to win. I love that idea. Bassham says that “Your performance and your Self-Image are always equal.”

If you don’t believe that you can win, you never will. “I am not saying that everyone who expects to win will always win. What I am saying is if it is not like you to win, you have no chance of winning at all.”

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My biggest takeaway from this book was about developing this winning picture of yourself. “Your Self-Image needs to believe that it is ‘like you’ to win.”

OK. How do we do that?

“One way to enhance this attitude is to picture that you are having a winning performance every time you train. Your Self-Image imprints that it is ‘like you’ to win and adds to the likelihood that winning will fall within your comfort zone in the upcoming competition.”

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Here’s a really interesting concept: “Every time we think about something happening, we improve the probability that it will happen. Be careful what you think about.”

So rather than dwelling on mistakes, replay successes. He tells golfers, “You should talk about your good shots. By doing that you improve the probability that you will have more good shots in the future.”

Thinking about our mistakes or worrying about mistakes we might make actually makes them more likely. That’s an amazing insight. “I see far too many athletes reinforcing their bad performances by thinking and talking about them. Every time you talk about a bad performance, you improve the probability of having another one just like it in the future.”

In contrast, we should reinforce our positive performance.

“Each time you recall an experience the Self-Image imprints it again as a new event.” Olympic athletes have a technique they call “Feast or Forget”: when you do something well, reinforce it by saying, “That’s like me!” When you do something bad, forget about it.

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The idea of the Conscious Mind vs. the Subconscious Mind is similar to the Self 1 vs Self 2 nomenclature Tim Gallwey uses in The Inner Game of Tennis. To reach the Triad State, you need to quiet the Conscious Mind and get it out of the way of the Subconscious Mind.

“When the Conscious Mind is quiet the Subconscious can do its best work. We need to perform subconsciously in big competitions. When we think about winning while performing, we become outcome-oriented instead of performance-oriented and normally over-trying is the result. Over-trying has caused more good competitors to lose competitions than any other form of mental error.”

The way we train can help us quiet that Conscious Mind. “Champions work hard in training and work easy in the competition. The key is to work hard enough in practice to just trust your Subconscious in the competition.”

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Applying this to bridge is a little bit tricky, because we do need to engage the Conscious Mind. We need to think! But we need to quiet the judgmental part of our Conscious Mind, so that we can focus on our important bridge thinking.

This is similar to what Matt Granovetter is preaching in Method Bridge. Let your instincts take over. Trust the basics that you know, think in terms of patterns, and let your mind worry about more important things.

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The ultimate result is outside of your control—sometimes you play great and it’s just not your day. Or someone else plays even better. This is acutely true in bridge, where you can reach an 80% slam and lose 13 IMPs when today is one of the 20% of the time it doesn’t make.

“The best focus…is on a winning performance, not on finishing on top…If you goal set to have a winning performance you will always be process-oriented and not outcome-oriented. You will be much less likely to over-try in the competition because you are always focused on the next step and not counting your score.”

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Some other practical tips:

“If you catch yourself becoming a bit nervous…try yawning…The same chemicals that cause your muscles to relax when you yawn…work just the same when you fake a yawn.”

If you’re nervous, remind yourself “That’s OK. I do this all the time.”

“When we worry that bad things might happen to us we are actually rehearsing them. We are building new neural pathways toward failure.”

“Treat training days as if they had the same importance as the most crucial competition day. At some point in every day take some time to imagine that you are in competition and playing well. Be vivid in your rehearsal, see it, hear it, taste it, smell it, and feel it.”

“When you are playing well, play a lot…If you are having a bad day, stop training. Do not practice losing.”

“If you really want to change your Self-Image make a habit of writing down what you wish to have happen. You tend to become what you write about. But, be careful, do not write about anything that you do not want to have happen…If you record your mistakes you are making a huge mental error and the Self-Image suffers.”

“Every time we write down a goal, we are that much closer to its attainment. Only two things are possible. Your goal will be reached, or you will stop writing it down. As long as you continue to write down your goal statements, you are moving toward their attainment.”