The Silence of the Ticking Clock

"Between the lines of our thoughts are vast uncharted territories.  Ask this - can I free my self enough to go there?"

I was doing a bit of one-to-one work with a young cricketer which involved my feeding him tennis balls to hit - but with a fast repeat on the feed. I stood about ten metres away and fed six balls underarm in the time-space of between 6-8 seconds. For him, the exercise was to hit each ball as it arrived roughly back in my direction.

A fairly simple exercise, of course - and I've used it on many previous occasions to illustrate a number of things, viz:-

• The sharpness of his visual concentration
• How he re-sets into his stance after every shot
• What happens when he doesn't re-set to 'ground zero'
• What happens when he watches where he has hit the ball
• How light he is on his feet
• How integrated his stroke-play is with his body movements

These are what I would call the top 6 "outer" discoveries from such an exercise and there is much to notice and learn for both player and coach from them in technical terms.

• The depth of engagement, absorption and focus on the data of the moving ball
• His sense of balance when grounded in the stance
• His ability to hold the stance at 'ground zero' rather than inching forward after every shot
• His ability to disengage and progress to 'next task'
• His balance, agility and fluidity of motion relative to the ground
• His balance, agility and fluidity of motion relative to himself

With the last two, the stability of his head (and therefore eyes) is hugely significant - as is how his feet are making contact with the ground.

So that's all technical feedback which will help him advance and condition his technique, and move along the endless ladder towards Mastery.

Familiarity with the "Oh Dear" response

Of course everything and nothing does ever end there now does it? And we know - as with all things in life - that there is so much more that can get in the way when we are doing, when we are performing. Even in practice, like this simple exercise, we lay down our "pitch" using our beliefs about ourselves - beliefs based upon ??? (Well, you decide!)

We are not robots, even though we might consider that some of our abilities are robotic. We can make repetitive and robotic responses in countless processes, in the a la mode as illustrated by Forrest Gump

Here's the thing though ...
Forrest Gump's outward abilities all extended from his inner ability, as some might call it, to disengage from his thinking.

The lad I was working with in the simple fast repeat ball-hitting exercise fell into the self-dialogue trap. Shots 1-3 all had good outcomes. Shot 4 had a poor outcome and his response (as I heard it) was "Ohhh" in a sinking and downward tonality. Shot 5 he missed the ball completely, Shot 6 he scrambled to play poorly (as it turned out) and more "Ohhh"s ensued.

Now we've all done this - and still do - on many occasions in the course of life's learning and conditioning. So what's going to help us most, at this moment in time, in terms of learning and moving on? Teachers, parents, coaches, friends, fellow life-players - all have a role to play here, as well as ourselves.
The trouble is that many of them, like many of us, fall into the self-same emotional and linguistic traps - traps characterised by "Ohhh" responses.
When babies are learning to walk, what happens when they fall over? For them there's no emotion in the act of falling - only a response to pain or discomfort after landing. They don't think "I can't do this, I'm useless, I'm rubbish, I'll never get the hang of this." The thinking comes later.

And yet, although the thinking comes later, the auditory familiarity with the conditioned response "Oh Dear!" starts at the same time as we become familiar with hearing our name. How we code up such a phrase, in childhood, says everything about how we perceive it, re-code and then use it for ourselves.

Inner Learnings for Players

So we took a break and I talked to him about what is there for us to discover in the non-technical side of the ball-hitting exercise. I talked about humans and robots doing the same exercise, where robots are only as good as  they are programmed and where humans are limited only by their propensity to distract themselves.

"Look how it started with the first 3 shots," I pointed out. "Focus was drawn, movement flowed, balls were hit, outcomes satisfactory, thinking nil!" He nodded in agreement.
"After Shot 4 there was judgement of outcome as being unsatisfactory - and then a response to that judgement with a behavioural response. We all heard you say 'Ohhh' and you also FELT something different on the inside compared to the first 3 shots. All of this - for you as a human - was destined to get in the way of the next thing you were about to do, which was to play Shot 5. The robot wouldn't have had this problem. The next GoTo in his program would have executed as normal."
He smiled and, although I'd stated the obvious for him, he now had solutions placed in his in-tray instead of someone saying 'pull yourself together'.

Pull Yourself Together

Rather like the childhood coding of "Oh Dear!" we all have a coding of meaning in the phrase "Pull Yourself Together".
And yet, if we examine it robotically, what are the words saying here!?
There is a presupposition that "yourself", or your "self", is somewhat fragmented - is broken into a number of parts. The advice, in order to take the next step, is to bring these parts that were previously split asunder, back together again - to be re-integrated.
Now, telling someone to "Re-integrate Yourself!" would carry minimal emotion and a totally different perspective of advice - but there is an assumption in there that we (or the I we are advising) knows how to allow that re-integration to take place.

Self help begins when we know how to re-integrate; we can direct our own destiny beyond this fragmentation of self. And it is here where we particularly need to be on firm ground.

For my young player, it wasn't "Ohhh", but what went on just before that, that caused his distraction, that 'blew' his mind into enough pieces so that he couldn't apply his technical abilities to Shot 5.
So - what went on?

Shot 4 - the outcome was judged. He ran what he saw as a result of his applied technique past his beliefs and in-built expectations, and gave himself a low mark - in the moment. Some thought-energy had been gathered to drive this process. The player's feelings and gasp of "Ohhh" came next, which were responses on the outside to what had happened 'on the inside'. And we can describe this as noticing our thinking.

This exercise contained no instruction to judge the outcome - how or where the ball went to. It was merely to hit ball, return to 'base', hit ball, return to 'base' etc.
And he started out by doing just, and only, that! Then there was an error, a judgement, a breakdown, a blowing-apart.

We ran the exercise again several times, and he had great moments of absorbed thought-free engagement interspersed with occasional errors and on or two more "Ohhh" moments. It was good to hear him laugh after every "Ohhh" however, because in there is the severing of the bonded belief that judging like that is always a permanent necessity.

Between the lines of our thoughts are vast uncharted territories

If you listen to the ticking of a clock, I'd invite you to notice the silences between the ticks. Focus on them and really get in touch with them. There's purposeful information in there.

And we can direct our attention using our R.A.S (our perceptive filter), to notice more about those silences - rather like we can use the R.A.S to direct our sensual attention to pretty much any where  we might choose. Although it's not widely accepted, we can even direct our senses of smell and taste as well - and I speak from experience here in the process of "Like to Dislike" **

So - in terms of performing a program of sequenced actions - our thoughts, we know, get in the way of being able to best perform those actions. Between the lines of those thoughts are the profound stillnesses of the Flow State. They are, indeed, uncharted territories. We cannot describe them, we can only use metaphors to paint a verbal picture of what the territories are like - for us.

Yes, the clock is set to tick - but without the silences there is no tick.

And so, for each and every one of us going through life's performances there is really only one question we need ask:

"Can I free myself enough to go there?"

** - Like to Dislike is the process of 'mapping' the sub-modalities of something we like onto the holographic location of something we dislike.
My personal experience is described here:
http://pjwhypno.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/mapping-across-bye-bye-to-jaffa-cakes.html