Making mistakes is inevitable when you are pursuing a life of competition and high performance. You might roll your eyes when you get the advice of ‘just accept your mistakes and see them as learning opportunities’, but the reality is, this is not as simple as it sounds.
In this blog we want to highlight one aspect of how to make it easier to accept your mistakes at the tables and embrace the fact that no matter how good a poker player you are or will become, you will always be making mistakes. We want to teach you how to embrace the idiot in you.
Your identity as a poker player
The biggest thing that is holding you back from truly accepting your mistakes is the identity you have built around yourself as a poker player. An identity is the set of characteristics, beliefs, experiences, and roles that define who a person is.
It encompasses many facets, such as personal values, cultural background, personality traits, social roles, and even things like interests and life experiences. Identity can be thought of as both who you see yourself as (self-identity) and how others perceive you (social identity).
Self-identity
To make it a bit easier we want to focus on self-identity, so how do we see ourselves? What are our own set of characteristics, beliefs, experiences and roles? Especially beliefs is where we can make the most impact with the least amount of effort.
What we experience in our work as mindset coaches is that poker players have built a certain belief around their self-identity. They view themselves as good poker players. They have overcome so many hurdles to get where they are now, they should, after all these years, be capable of making the right decision in these relatively easy spots right?
Beliefs
Their belief is that as a good poker player, they can’t make mistakes, because that would go against everything they believe in. This is especially true when they are surrounded by their peers, so is more prominent live than online.
Accepting mistakes and embracing the idiot in you is really fucking hard, nay impossible if you have created a believe that says you can not! So it doesn’t start with accepting mistakes, it starts with truly believing you may. And this requires a bit more digging and self reflection.
Ego & mastery orientation
It starts with your goal orientation. What determines your success as a poker player? Are you here to outperform others and become the champion or are you here to optimise yourself and grow? Those are your two flavours.
The problem and solution in accepting your mistakes lies in making the shift from the first one, ego orientation, and start perceiving the world from the second one, mastery orientation.
Making the shift
Outperforming others and crowning yourself champion of the poker world can be a great driving force, but will create friction and problems if you are not winning and when you are making mistakes.
Because if being a succesful poker player means being better than others and not making mistakes, then making mistakes and losing makes you per definition an unsuccesful player. That creates a discrepancy with the image you painted of yourself and the reality. And that bloody hurts. That is where you want to change.
Shed your skin
To make the shift you have to start identifying yourself as a poker player that makes mistakes. This shift doesn’t happen overnight. It takes deliberate practice and it can take a while before you shed your old skin and properly believe you are a new and better version of yourself.
Once you’ve adapted this new identity, you start to truly believe you as a good player, are allowed to make mistakes at the table no matter how basic or whatever others might think of you.
Because we are here to grow, we are here to become a better poker player and with your permission you are able to embrace the idiot in you.
