Positives

When you’re learning something new you have to remember to reinforce the positive.  Making mistakes is part of the learning curve and when this happens it’s really easy to linger on the miss rather than learning from it and moving on.  And, the more we think about the miss the more ingrained it becomes in our brain.  You can start to expect mistakes rather than know that you are building the correct skills for further down the road.

It is crucial to reinforce the positives.  If you are trying to adjust your swing, change your piano fingering, construct a new opening chess sequence, etc, observe the mistakes only long enough to make the proper adjustment and when things work out how they are suppose to, spend time internalizing how that felt.  Linger on the positive as that is what you want to remember.  When you get to the point where it counts you don’t want to recall all the missed shots during the learning curve, rather the times where you pulled it off perfectly.  If you spend extra time thinking about success that is what you will recall when the spotlight is on.

No matter if you miss nine out of ten attempts, don’t forget to ingrain how the one successful shot felt and looked.

I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving and a wonderful weekend.