Perfect Poise, Perfect Life
Bring your body into balance and revolutionise your life
By Noel Kingsley
Publisher Hodder Mobius
AVAILABLE HERE
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Beginner’s luck
I've never played ten pin bowling, at least not since I was a teenager, forty years ago, but when we were visiting a country fair there was the opportunity to try my hand. The biggest incentive was that the highest overall score of the day at this stall would win a pig. Not that I would know what to do with a pig if I won, but the idea seemed like fun anyway. So I gave it a go.
It was mid morning and the fair had just opened and it seemed that I was their first customer. For £1 you could play three games with three balls to get all ten pins down. To my surprise I did quite well. I think my scores were 8, 10 and 9. Not bad for a beginner. After returning home that evening, the phone rang and surprise, surprise it was the stall holder at the fair telling me that I'd won a pig. Great! ... Bad! Where on earth would I put it? It was eventually explained to me that it's against the law for them to give me an actual pig without a license, so I was offered a number of fillet steaks in compensation. I only had to drive out into the country again to pick them up. I'm not a big meat eater, but it was fun to pick up our surrogate pig in the form of red cow steaks. I might have another go sometime and see how I fair.
Isn’t it interesting that when we have our first go at something new we can sometimes excel beyond our expectations, surprising ourselves and our friends? We make a golfing stroke for the first time and it almost goes straight into the hole, or we throw a dart and it hits bull's eye, but when we do it again, the success of the first attempt eludes us. How frustrating! I believe that this situation often occurs when we don’t have any preconceived idea of how we are going to perform or any previous performance experience to match up to. There is no stress and we are probably relaxed, and loose. We have only the idea in mind of putting the ball in the hole or hitting down the ten pins and therefore we just do it.
As a beginner we have not established any habits related to our performance because we’ve never done it before, but we may be visualising what we’d like to happen. When it comes to subsequent attempts to repeat our initial success, we are likely then to have expectations. We want to repeat our good fortunes so we feel that we must try hard. We end-gain. But in the process of trying harder we’re setting up tensions in our body that didn’t exist during our initial attempt that was so successful. In other words we’re not doing what we did the first time so how can we expect to achieve the same performance?
So there must be a moral in this somewhere. One way is to do anything once only and be a star. Just keep moving on to the next activity and show how brilliant you are at absolutely anything, from archery, speed skating, Russian roulette, one-hole golf, one-throw darts, apple ducking and ten pin bowling.
The other way is to think about the process of doing it. Firstly visualise what you want, ....the dart on the bull's eye, the ball in the hole, the pig enjoying your back garden. Then put this out of your head and bring your whole attention onto the process. Don't try and copy what you did the first time. It's impossible. Each opportunity is a fresh chance to go through the process again. Each time is the first time. And forget about the end result. Keep yourself free and loose, keep your balance, keep your neck free. You may be surprised to find that you have a natural aptitude to perform successfully every time!
Have a good weekend!
:-)
