Self-awareness
Chapter Three: Understanding your temperament and learning


As a successful competitive fisherman, I’ll wager you can describe with comprehensive precision the equipment you use. You most likely understand the specifics of which rod, reel and line combinations efficiently present crankbaits, for example, and you know which components to change when flippin’ wood cover becomes the order of the day.

However, do you have the same in-depth understanding of yourself? Do you recognize and appreciate the basics of your temperament and personality? Do you know your primary mode of learning? Can you list the advantages as well as the risks associated with your unique fishing style?

It is not possible to give detailed information about your individual personality or learning style in an article like this. For a full and accurate picture of yourself, you will need to enlist the assistance of a good assessment psychologist.

However, let me describe a few common characteristics and then illustrate how self-understanding might positively influence your fishing career. This month’s discussion should get you started on the road to productive self-awareness.

Temperament

For starters, would you say you are principally a calm person, mostly enthusiastic and excitable, or inclined to flip-flop back and forth? As you have read here before, it is my view that people often see what they want to see when it comes to self-appraisal. For an accurate picture of your basic temperament, ask three or four friends, colleagues or relatives – people whose opinions you trust – to offer their impressions of you. Recognizing this fundamental tenet of your personality may have important implications for your fishing success.

Typically, calm people are less emotionally affected by successes and failures than excitable individuals. Being calm makes it easier to remain focused if a person loses a fish or if equipment breaks down. However, a calm, low-key individual may also be slower to react to bad situations than an emotional person. I have a fishing buddy who takes broken equipment in stride, so much so that his stuff stays broken way too long.

Excitable, emotionally intense individuals are almost always in motion, and when problems arise, they move fast. However, such persons are at risk to react too quickly, perhaps making changes prematurely. You may be thinking that your partner who wants to move four times in the first hour of a tournament is an emotionally charged individual, and you would probably be correct.

Emotionally intense individuals also expend a lot of time and energy being, well, emotionally intense. And whether you are jumping up and down for joy or throwing a tantrum, just remember that emotional episodes can wear you out. Especially during multiday competitions, emotional burnout is a distinct possibility for such people.

Learning style

One way to understand your primary mode of learning is to think about what kind of information you remember most easily. Using a new fishing reel as an example, would you be more likely to remember the characteristics of a reel if someone told you about it or if someone showed it to you? Depending on your answer, you may primarily have an auditory information processing mode, or you may be principally visual in how you encode new information.

Many successful competitive anglers are exquisitely skilled in the art of visually processing information. The capacity to see and quickly make sense of several pieces of visible data is a huge asset in our sport. Reading water currents, visualizing underwater structure, and observing cues in the natural environment are of obvious value.

If you already primarily process information visually, there are exercises your sports psychologist can show you to maximize this capacity. However, you will probably not be surprised to learn that predominantly visual individuals may have trouble remembering information which is heard but not seen. A standard coping technique for such individuals is to use a notebook to write down important information they hear. This can be especially helpful with phone calls, for example.

However, let’s say you already have a well-developed auditory information-gathering mode. You are the kind of person who hears something once and remembers it. In order to be most successful as a tournament fisherman, you may need to sharpen your visual processing skills, and, here again, a trained performance psychologist can be an invaluable asset.

Let’s go back to that new reel for a minute. Holding it in your hand, are you thinking about the specific situations where you might use this new tool? If so, you may have a fairly practical approach to dealing with information. Many good competitive anglers are this way.

However, if you find yourself wondering about how the reel was built or about whether it is worth the money they are asking for it, you may have more of a conceptual orientation. Those of us with Ph.D.s have this tendency. However, I can tell you from personal experience it can be a real distraction to get overly theoretical during a tournament.

As it turns out, that little mental computer under your hat has even more features in it than your new zillion-dollar color-map depth finder/navigation system. Certainly learning to use that new console unit can be a big advantage, though getting a handle on yourself, your personality and your learning style can reap even greater rewards.

Jay T. McNamara, Ph.D., L.P., is a psychologist, who is also an avid bass and walleye angler. With more than 25 years of professional experience complemented by participation in competitive fishing at local and national levels, he is uniquely qualified to illustrate how performance psychology principles apply to tournament fishing.