In previous entries we reviewed Bill Walsh’s experience as a head football coach and how he came to fall into the trap of a negative scoring system as well as how it affected himself and management of the San Francisco 49ers.

We also looked at a couple of poker examples of how failing to maintain our awareness in regards to managing expectations could turn good situations into negative ones.

Our last entry reviewed looked at a few solutions to the “Zero points” scenario.

For our final blog on this topic, we will look at a couple of our existing tools that can be put to use to either keep us from entering or pull us out this situation:

USING OUR EXISTING TOOLS EFFECTIVELY

Warmup Regiment and Our PHTL:
The first tool to help us continue to play the game that will provide us with the highest overall expectation is our Poker Hand Task list. As discussed in the Tilt Series here at Leggo, we can use our PHTL during our warmup to provide a clear perspective of the default game that we are looking to play. The PHTL will help heighten our awareness to how we play our A-Game and help us to avoid the situation discussed in our previous post of coming off of a sick session where small suited connectors and one gappers are big paydays for us and we potentially roll into our next session misplaying them.

Post-Session Notes:
As discussed in an earlier blog, I believe that Post-Session Notes are an excellent addition to our cooldown process (for myself it is actually the task that I focus on the most immediately following a session).

As part of our Post-Session Notes process we can review our expectations. How did we feeling going into the session? How do we feel now that the session was over and we have either won or lost? Do our wins make us unrealistically optimistic and unhealthily excited to play the next time? Do our losses make us gun shy and assume that we need to play a more conservative style so that we feel like we are losing less while our bankroll is really dying a slow death?

When we come back later to review our Post-Session Notes, we can determine how realistic or unrealistic our expectations are as well as what is driving them. What is driving them is the key – if they are unrealistic there is an unrealistic interpretation that is driving them. Once we determine this unrealistic interpretation we can work to replace it with a more realistic interpretation and correct the expectation in the process. Even before we swap out our unrealistic interpretation we can heighten our awareness to the unrealistic expectation by updating the PHTL that we review during our warmup and refer back to during our gameplay.

FINAL THOUGHT
One of the biggest issues with a negative scoring system is that it will begin to take over both our professional as well as our personal lives, and become incredibly difficult to correct once entrenched in our psychological makeup. Therefore, as with most things in life, we are much better offer working to prevent the situation than to correct it.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to post them here, shoot me a PM, or contact me on Skype.