Wrestling Blogs - Mike Tamillow
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Daydream.
January 22, 2008
I accidentally rented “The thin blue line†and “Twelve angry men†a few weeks ago. In my mind our justice system lost all credibility. If you don’t know what either of those movies is about, the thin blue line is a documentary on a murder case in Texas where and innocent man gets convicted. Twelve angry men is a classic movie worth watching. In both movies witnesses testify things that couldn’t have possibly been true
It seems odd that anyone could remember something that didn’t happen. Actually it shouldn’t at all. How many times arguments have been started over details of a situation that two people disagree on. They don’t just slightly disagree with an ‘I could be wrong’ attitude. They disagree to the point of no return where they’d be willing to risk a friendship just to be right. It’s a little disturbing since one (or both) have to be wrong. One explanation is that it is that person’s point of view and is subjective, but a better way is to realize it is that person’s memory.
This is my last segment on mental skills. The first focused on creating beliefs, realizing that you may already have existing beliefs and that if these beliefs are not beneficial to you then you have to find a way to replace them. The next was on the power of talking to yourself and what to say. Talking to yourself is the simplest mental input to control, it is just like reading. It’s much harder to imagine a sight, sound, or feeling. This blog is about taking the next step. Recreate everything. Encoding information similar to your memory to create patterns that become actions.
I want to try to diffuse a common paradigm in psychology that I think should have been dealt with a long time ago. It’s the paradigm that our past is going to come back to eat us alive. In reading about relationships (for class) I realize how much this paradigm is used. The reality of the situation is the things that affect you are those you believe and remember. It may be beneficial for you to say “I’m so independent and cold because my dad told me not to be a crybaby when I was four†because you are no longer blaming yourself for acting in a way you disapprove of. But it’s also detrimental because now you are making your actions much more permanent. And more so, because you believe it, you have just made this paradigm true. The reality of the situation (I would like to believe) is that your actions are more determined by beliefs and patterns. It is the things you remember, the things you tell yourself every day and how you repeatedly act every day, that determine why you do what you do. Just to shot the paradigm in the foot doubly, I’d like to mention it originates from a Freudian Oedipus complex, which was entirely based on assumption and not evidence. On a side note Freud did a lot of Coke.
The real concern is about how your brain does encode information. It encodes information by creating patterns and familiarities more than any other way. Sometimes I get nervous before a match and think, “what if I forgot everything I know?†and then I remember, “I don’t have to know anything all I have to do is wrestle.†It’s my mind and body that have communication going on when I wrestle. It has nothing to do with the time when I was seven that my dad left me at a wrestling tournament and I started crying or when I was eleven at wrestling camp and got most improved wrestler. It is mental, but it’s a mental pattern, a pattern of position and movement that I have developed by wrestling, imagining myself wrestling, and talking myself through both. Your conscious and your subconscious lose control in the moment where semi-instinctual and flash judgments matter.
If you have read anything on mental skills then you’ve probably heard of visualization. I like to think of visualization as the opposite of talking to yourself. The left side of the brain functions by processing grammar and organization while the right side is more spatial functioning. So I as I have made the assumption all along that your mind can create your world, you have to be able to recreate all the inputs- sight, sound, touch, vision, words – that are memorable and affect you. You have to be able to create the world around you that causes you to act and creates patterns for you. In this way you can create your own patterns, the ones you want to create. For people who don’t know what to visualize yet then just watch someone better than you. The more you get familiar with something, the easier it is to imagine yourself doing it. I find myself in familiar situations thinking, “It’s like déjà vu all over againâ€. I just watch something and imagine myself doing it. Or I may have done something familiar and can feel when the pattern begins to resurface even though I don’t remember it that well. Watch it, close your eyes, and repeat it. Connect your mind and your body in a pattern that will resurface when necessary.
You may be having trouble watching and repeating things in your head to form patterns. Whenever I sit down to close my eyes and imagine something I find the picture drifting away faster than I can finish my match. If my focus can’t last seven minutes how am I ever going to win a match right? It’s a good thing that my left and right hemispheres are connected. Because of this I can create pictures from words. It’s just like reading a book; you create a picture of the characters, the events, and the atmosphere. Essentially, you create a movie in your mind without ever seeing anything. Use this as a tactic for talking yourself through mental imagery.
The way your mind works is it connects little bits of information together to form strings. For example, in general you can only remember between 5 and 9 things at a time (Average of 7). So if I told you to remember the words BIR – DCA – TDO – GFR – OGMO –USEL – ION, you would struggle. But if I said remember bird, cat, dog, frog, mouse, lion, you wouldn’t have much trouble. You still know the pieces of the pieces but by association you only need a key word such as Bird to know B-I-R-D. So in order to use this attach a lot of words to each main word. For example: Double leg – Level change, step, penetrate, head up, hips in, turn the corner, and drive. Now attach a picture for each one, level change, step, etc. Now, when you think of a double leg attach all the pictures together. Imagine it more than once so you actually remember it. Now you can come up with a sequence of more motions so you can create a whole movie. The more detail the better. If you try to just visualize by just focusing hard you may find yourself losing attention with more choppy thoughts about “what to do next?†There is a method to the madness. You’ll have and easier time creating new patterns and destroying old ones by first identifying what you need to do and then imagining it.
The last step of using mental imagery is to connect everything to feelings. This should be the easiest part of the process. Like I said I watched “twelve angry men†recently. It is a simple movie that takes place in a jury room. However, the real beauty in it is the ironic twists and human emotion. I never actually had to be there to feel the tension or to have strong feelings about it. I simply watched and my body and mind took over unconsciously. This is the reason why sports have fans. For one moment you get to feel what that athlete must be feeling. It’s also the reason why I have to smirk when mom’s cringe when watching their kids wrestle, because they are actually feeling more than is happening. If you just go through the mental imagery and physically respond naturally a little bit, you’ll have a full picture developed. You can recreate the patterns that need work.
Mental skills are really about doing half the work and getting twice the results. They’re about being twice as happy about the results you get and still improving on them. There are times when I think I’m in a stalemate with my improvement. It is hard to see what I need to improve. Of course I know that unless I’m living my dream there is something else I can work on. Have a dream; see it all in great detail. See yourself doing all the little things it takes to be better. Create a montage of your hard work that you can push towards. Wake up every day and imagine what your ideal day would be. Don’t just say “here are my plans for the day: class at ten, lifting at eleven, practice at four†Imagine that ideal class. Imagine the perfect lift. Spend a little time to just imagine yourself enjoying life. If you catch yourself in a pattern – giving movie style speeches to your team, hitting double legs like they’re your job, and having conversations like they mean everything to you – you’ll forget the time and pretty soon you’ll be living your dreams.
Lesson #3 – Dreams don’t come true if you don’t have any. Dream on Dreamer.
It seems odd that anyone could remember something that didn’t happen. Actually it shouldn’t at all. How many times arguments have been started over details of a situation that two people disagree on. They don’t just slightly disagree with an ‘I could be wrong’ attitude. They disagree to the point of no return where they’d be willing to risk a friendship just to be right. It’s a little disturbing since one (or both) have to be wrong. One explanation is that it is that person’s point of view and is subjective, but a better way is to realize it is that person’s memory.
This is my last segment on mental skills. The first focused on creating beliefs, realizing that you may already have existing beliefs and that if these beliefs are not beneficial to you then you have to find a way to replace them. The next was on the power of talking to yourself and what to say. Talking to yourself is the simplest mental input to control, it is just like reading. It’s much harder to imagine a sight, sound, or feeling. This blog is about taking the next step. Recreate everything. Encoding information similar to your memory to create patterns that become actions.
I want to try to diffuse a common paradigm in psychology that I think should have been dealt with a long time ago. It’s the paradigm that our past is going to come back to eat us alive. In reading about relationships (for class) I realize how much this paradigm is used. The reality of the situation is the things that affect you are those you believe and remember. It may be beneficial for you to say “I’m so independent and cold because my dad told me not to be a crybaby when I was four†because you are no longer blaming yourself for acting in a way you disapprove of. But it’s also detrimental because now you are making your actions much more permanent. And more so, because you believe it, you have just made this paradigm true. The reality of the situation (I would like to believe) is that your actions are more determined by beliefs and patterns. It is the things you remember, the things you tell yourself every day and how you repeatedly act every day, that determine why you do what you do. Just to shot the paradigm in the foot doubly, I’d like to mention it originates from a Freudian Oedipus complex, which was entirely based on assumption and not evidence. On a side note Freud did a lot of Coke.
The real concern is about how your brain does encode information. It encodes information by creating patterns and familiarities more than any other way. Sometimes I get nervous before a match and think, “what if I forgot everything I know?†and then I remember, “I don’t have to know anything all I have to do is wrestle.†It’s my mind and body that have communication going on when I wrestle. It has nothing to do with the time when I was seven that my dad left me at a wrestling tournament and I started crying or when I was eleven at wrestling camp and got most improved wrestler. It is mental, but it’s a mental pattern, a pattern of position and movement that I have developed by wrestling, imagining myself wrestling, and talking myself through both. Your conscious and your subconscious lose control in the moment where semi-instinctual and flash judgments matter.
If you have read anything on mental skills then you’ve probably heard of visualization. I like to think of visualization as the opposite of talking to yourself. The left side of the brain functions by processing grammar and organization while the right side is more spatial functioning. So I as I have made the assumption all along that your mind can create your world, you have to be able to recreate all the inputs- sight, sound, touch, vision, words – that are memorable and affect you. You have to be able to create the world around you that causes you to act and creates patterns for you. In this way you can create your own patterns, the ones you want to create. For people who don’t know what to visualize yet then just watch someone better than you. The more you get familiar with something, the easier it is to imagine yourself doing it. I find myself in familiar situations thinking, “It’s like déjà vu all over againâ€. I just watch something and imagine myself doing it. Or I may have done something familiar and can feel when the pattern begins to resurface even though I don’t remember it that well. Watch it, close your eyes, and repeat it. Connect your mind and your body in a pattern that will resurface when necessary.
You may be having trouble watching and repeating things in your head to form patterns. Whenever I sit down to close my eyes and imagine something I find the picture drifting away faster than I can finish my match. If my focus can’t last seven minutes how am I ever going to win a match right? It’s a good thing that my left and right hemispheres are connected. Because of this I can create pictures from words. It’s just like reading a book; you create a picture of the characters, the events, and the atmosphere. Essentially, you create a movie in your mind without ever seeing anything. Use this as a tactic for talking yourself through mental imagery.
The way your mind works is it connects little bits of information together to form strings. For example, in general you can only remember between 5 and 9 things at a time (Average of 7). So if I told you to remember the words BIR – DCA – TDO – GFR – OGMO –USEL – ION, you would struggle. But if I said remember bird, cat, dog, frog, mouse, lion, you wouldn’t have much trouble. You still know the pieces of the pieces but by association you only need a key word such as Bird to know B-I-R-D. So in order to use this attach a lot of words to each main word. For example: Double leg – Level change, step, penetrate, head up, hips in, turn the corner, and drive. Now attach a picture for each one, level change, step, etc. Now, when you think of a double leg attach all the pictures together. Imagine it more than once so you actually remember it. Now you can come up with a sequence of more motions so you can create a whole movie. The more detail the better. If you try to just visualize by just focusing hard you may find yourself losing attention with more choppy thoughts about “what to do next?†There is a method to the madness. You’ll have and easier time creating new patterns and destroying old ones by first identifying what you need to do and then imagining it.
The last step of using mental imagery is to connect everything to feelings. This should be the easiest part of the process. Like I said I watched “twelve angry men†recently. It is a simple movie that takes place in a jury room. However, the real beauty in it is the ironic twists and human emotion. I never actually had to be there to feel the tension or to have strong feelings about it. I simply watched and my body and mind took over unconsciously. This is the reason why sports have fans. For one moment you get to feel what that athlete must be feeling. It’s also the reason why I have to smirk when mom’s cringe when watching their kids wrestle, because they are actually feeling more than is happening. If you just go through the mental imagery and physically respond naturally a little bit, you’ll have a full picture developed. You can recreate the patterns that need work.
Mental skills are really about doing half the work and getting twice the results. They’re about being twice as happy about the results you get and still improving on them. There are times when I think I’m in a stalemate with my improvement. It is hard to see what I need to improve. Of course I know that unless I’m living my dream there is something else I can work on. Have a dream; see it all in great detail. See yourself doing all the little things it takes to be better. Create a montage of your hard work that you can push towards. Wake up every day and imagine what your ideal day would be. Don’t just say “here are my plans for the day: class at ten, lifting at eleven, practice at four†Imagine that ideal class. Imagine the perfect lift. Spend a little time to just imagine yourself enjoying life. If you catch yourself in a pattern – giving movie style speeches to your team, hitting double legs like they’re your job, and having conversations like they mean everything to you – you’ll forget the time and pretty soon you’ll be living your dreams.
Lesson #3 – Dreams don’t come true if you don’t have any. Dream on Dreamer.
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