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THE EMOTIONAL POWERS WITHIN

Presented by Macka Jensen

The best and the worse: When playing a lawn bowls game, have you ever had the experience of being on a winning roll, the feeling that you could do no wrong? A time when everything seems to go right? When every draw shot finished on target and every on-shot, running and drive shot hit the target irrespective whether it was planned or not. You can also probably remember times you messed up things that you usually do well, when every step and everything you did turned out wrong, and you’ve thought to yourself “Hell, what a mess I‘m in!”

Emotional states: What’s the difference? You’re the same person. You should have the same resources at your disposal. So why do you produce dismal results one time, and fabulous results the next? The difference is the emotional state you’re in. There are enabling states e.g. confidence, love, inner strength, joy, ecstasy, belief etc that tap great sources of personal power. There are paralysing states e.g. confusion, depression fear, anxiety, sadness, frustration etc, that leave us powerless.

Control: An emotional state can be defined as how you react to your senses; what you see, hear, feel, taste or smell. It is the sum total of the body processes happening within us, in other words, the sum total of our experiences at any moment in time. Most of our emotional states happen without any conscious directions on our part. It may be a resourceful and useful state or an un-resourceful and limiting state, but whatever state we’re in, many do not attempt to control it until the damage is done. The difference between success and failure is that successful lawn bowlers learn to understand and control their emotions, and bowlers who fail to achieve their goals just let their reactions rule what they think and do. We can get into these emotional states either by ourselves or with the involvement of other people’s help, this could happen as follows;

Self state: For example in the past, how did you treat your spouse, husband, son, daughter, girlfriend or boyfriend when he or she had come home much later than promised? Well, your behaviour may have greatly depended upon the emotional state you were in when your love one returned. Your state to a large degree was determined by what you had been churning over in your mind as to the reason for the delay. If you had been picturing this person you cared about as having been involved in an accident, covered in blood, dead or hospitalised, as the person walks in the door you gave a sigh of relief but then, may have greeted him or her with rage, anger, tears or a big hug or lots of questions. Over the following days you may have brewed about this or harassed them till an unnecessary argument took place. I have no doubt that you have at some time in your life experienced such a self imposed state when self control would have altered the whole dramatic situation.  

Paralysing state: We all go in and out of good states and I have no doubt that during a lawn bowls game you have been confronted by a skipper who snarls at you by saying “For heavens sake concentrate, you got to be up!” Your immediate mental reaction was to think, “Boy, are we in for a hard time, I’d better tighten up my game.” But no matter how hard you tried your performance either remain the same, rose slightly or deteriorated simply because your enabling state had switched to a paralysing state. Overall it’s more likely the skipper had a pressuring start to or during the game. Or may have been stifled by other lawn bowlers; those who confront you in this manner are not bad people, but just in a terribly un-resourceful state.

Enabling state: Another example is the reverse of above. You’re playing slightly below the par of the team or your opponent is outplaying every move you make or play. Your skipper approaches you in a friendly manner and explains “I’m going to change tactics and play to a short end and bring your game into play by drawing your bowls 1 metre behind the head so that they cannot rest or play off your bowls. The friendly manner, change of tactics, giving you a feeling of being needed and changing your role will have an effect of taking you out of that paralysing state and enhancing your enabling state. If you can change your emotional state you can change your behaviour and change your game.

Resourceful state: Understanding what emotional state you’re in is the key to understanding change and achieving excellence. Our behaviour is the results of the state we’re in. We always do the best we can with the resources available to us but like the skipper above we also find ourselves in un-resourceful states. It’s important to remember these times when someone treats us poorly, thus you create a sense of compassion instead of anger. The key is to take charge of our emotional states and thrust your behaviour into a dynamic, resourceful state in which you’re excited, sure of success, your body is crackling with energy, your mind is alive. If you understand your emotions it can be done with a flick of the fingers.

Cause and affect: What causes one to represent things out of our emotional state? We may have modelled the reactions of our parents or other role models to such experiences. Thus, our beliefs, attitudes, values, and past experiences with the particular person all affect the kind of representation we make about our behaviour.

Factors: If we take control of our own communication with ourselves and produce visual, auditory and kinaesthetic signals of what we do want, outstanding positive results can be consistently produced, even in situations where the odds for success seem limited or nonexistent. On the down side of ourselves, there are factors that determine in advance how we represent our experiences of the lawn bowls game, factors that in certain situations create the kind of states we will consistently be in if not controlled, they are commonly called our emotions! (See the National Bowls Coaching Manual, August 1999, Page 205 to 216, Appendix (Q), Mental Training Part 1 to 4).