Readers of this column will notice a strong historical emphasis on structure, systems and procedures. Chapters on goal-setting, organizing and planning, and using routines have illustrated the basics, or fundamentals, of performance psychology. In every sport, top competitors start with a solid set of fundamentals.
However, as you know and have seen, merely mastering fundamentals is not enough to realize exceptional performance. Peak performers are adept at using fundamental skills in creative, flexible ways. Let’s look at how you can add creativity and adaptability to your performance-psychology arsenal.
Creativity
Creativity means different things to different people, and for this and other reasons, it is an elusive topic for psychological researchers. We do know, however, that creative people consistently exhibit emotional, behavioral and intellectual flexibility.
As tournament anglers, most of us can recall times when we used off-the-wall hunches or immediate impressions to make good decisions. It may be that we successfully switched lures, spots or casting angles without a good reason; it just seemed like the thing to do.
We may refer to these times as going with our gut feeling. Or we may call it trusting our intuitions. However we label it, we have and should cultivate skills for going where the nonlogical, creative side of our brain leads us.
Try this on your next tournament practice day: Start with the fundamentals of good map study and practice planning to lay out a schedule for your day. Mark and prioritize enough spots on your map to keep you busy until dark.
Then, during the course of practice, give yourself a one-hour window to respond to whatever creative urges strike you. You may drive to a spot you had not previously planned to fish, you may try a shallow bait in deep water, or vice versa, or you may elect to go with a technique that is clearly out of season.
For the purposes of this exercise, don’t think you need to justify your decision, just do it. You can later think about and analyze what you did. Of course, this doesn’t mean you abandon your practice schedule entirely. That would be foolish. Creative people don’t ignore fundamentals, they expand on them.
A few years back, we were fishing a prespawn pattern, and two of us were hammering 12- to 14-inch male bass by casting unweighted tubes and worms into dark-bottomed bays. It was pretty fun, and we were getting bit about every third cast.
The guy in the boat who knew what he was doing, however, turned his back to the bank and began slowly retrieving mid-diver cranks over the weed flats leading to the spawning bays. Guess who wound up with the big females on his line? Conventional tactics caught the most fish; flexible, creative techniques caught the big fish.
Experimentation
So when was the last time you tried something completely different? And I’m not talking about a different brand of crankbait or a new plastic-worm color. I mean something genuinely unique, outside your typical repertoire.
If you can remember and are already good at innovation, then use your Performance Psychology and Tournament Fishing notebook-calendar to schedule regular experimentation sessions.
As with the previous exercise, the process of being inventive and experimental is more important than what you actually do. Some professional anglers practice experimentation by sitting in their boats and trying to look at different pieces of tackle in unique ways.
The now-outdated process of drilling and weighting floating minnow baits to make them suspend is rumored to have popped into one pro’s mind after sitting with a balsa bait in hand for several minutes.
If you can’t remember your last innovative moment, perhaps you should consider ways to become more experimental. We know, for example, that happy, cheerful, up-beat people are more creative than individuals who frequently experience negative feelings. If you find yourself on the critical, worried, dissatisfied end of the emotional spectrum, you will probably struggle to adaptively try new things.
Psychological research also tells us there are several ways to induce or create the positive feelings that set the stage for creativity. One of the most important things you can do is hang around with people who are themselves positive, supportive and encouraging.
Most of us can think of a recent example when a positive interaction with someone lifted us out of a dull or disgruntled mood. Similarly, we can recall times when discouraging words or a nasty person dragged us down.
“Surround yourself with people who reflect your goodness” was, and is, sound advice. Contagious cheerfulness will also make it easier for you to be creative.
You can also purposefully think happy thoughts, say positive things to others or do something helpful. Numerous experiments have shown that altruism (a fancy word for helpfulness) tends to make people happy, and happy people tend to be creative.
Psychological research further suggests that trying to fake happiness doesn’t work. Pretend smiles and insincere cheerfulness are usually transparent to others, and they don’t really lead to the type of positive internal state that begets creativity.
Stamina
And don’t forget about persistence. Numerous people have been given credit for the saying, “Creativity is 20 percent inspiration and 80 percent perspiration!” And so it is. Just because your first creative idea or inventive thought didn’t work out, don’t give up. History books remind us that Thomas Edison’s first several hundred attempts failed before he successfully invented the electric light bulb. In the words of Mr. Edison himself, “Be brave … have faith and go forward.”
Jay T. McNamara, Ph.D., L.P., is a psychologist, who is also an avid bass and walleye angler. With more than 26 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.
