Towards Trusting the Process
...or at least faking it until I make it.
Maybe the last 10% of improvement in this game happens all at once, only once everything comes together. I hope so, because otherwise I’m really wasting my time.
Results, plz!
I made a 5-year plan in December 2022 and there’s more past than future since then. My brain being the pattern-matching machine that evolution made it into, it wants to see results. In there is an impatient boss waiting to see the numbers change from 230 to 255 or something like that.
Internal Family Systems therapy, or at least the basics of it, makes it easier for me to handle this impatient boss, but he’s still in there somewhere and he won’t entirely shut up, so every so often I have to listen to him whine about the results not changing.
I’m still hitting the middle around 70%. I’m still averaging about 230. I’m still missing the playoffs about 90% of the time.
And let’s be real: I’m working this hard on my game because I want better results. I want to make the playoffs more. I think I need to hit the middle at least 80% to get there. I want to see whether I can get there before I decide that the competitive part of my bowling life is over.
Even so, I’m getting to those results quite differently now than I was before October 2024, when I began to Rebuild the Machine.
Improvement Inventory
It’s easy to forget how far you’ve come, because you see every minute of every day and because of the Hedonic Treadmill. You probably need someone outside you to remind you of how things have changed. You probably need to sit and review what has changed, so that you can notice it. I did that in preparation to write this.
I have a clearer and simpler intention before each shot.
I respond more quickly to distractions while on the lane and have more moments of deep focus.
I see the physical ingredients of my shot more simply and clearly.
I bounce back more quickly to disappointed reactions to inaccurate shots.
I ignore more easily one-off body mistakes.
I have longer streaks of hitting the target over 80% and shorter periods of “consistent inconsistency”.
I have a clear and simple understanding of what it takes for me to throw a good shot.
That all sounds quite good to me. Perhaps more importantly: I have much better understanding of why I throw accurate shots and why I throw inaccurate shots, so that the results are much less mysterious than they felt two years ago. This means that my results make more sense, so that I can feel confident about what to pay attention to in a way that I absolutely couldn’t do back then. (Those who know me better know that I spent a lot of time wandering from person to person, begging for ideas about what to fix, how to practise, and just what the hell was going on with me.)
What Now?
All this means that my shot has a vibrant core.1
And in order to make sense of what’s going on with me, I have broadly two choices:
Ignore the results, trust the process, and conclude that the results will suddenly jump when all the parts come together.
Trust the results and conclude that I’m just not going to ever break through to the elite levels of competition.
Guess which one I’m choosing?
(Well, the impatient boss inside me wants to trust the results, but every week, he gets just a little easier to ignore.)
I mean, rly, what choice do I have? If I trusted the results, then I’d remain stuck and success would only happen by luck. If absolutely everything broke right for me for 4-6 hours, then I would make the playoffs, but then wake up early on Sunday for nothing more than an early exit. That’s not what I’m trying to do here.
The only sensible strategy is to ignore the results, trust the process, believe what I’m feeling, and remind myself that the results will only change when the core of my shot becomes enough of a habit. When I can focus deliberately for 4 hours instead of only 2 hours. When I can feel the inaccurate shots after 2 repetitions instead of 6. When my habit in moments of struggle becomes to dig in instead of worry. And all that comes from practising deliberately, learning more, then simplifying how I think about it.
And I’ve been doing that. And I don’t intend to stop now.
Let’s see what happens.
Evidently, Ron used a different version of this joke on the album than he did in the video I could find on YouTube. “The core of this tree is alive” morphed over time into “This tree has a vibrant core”, which we can agree sounds funnier.
Yup: the best jokes are the ones you need to explain. :shrug: