I’ve trained a lot of people not only to be better bowlers, but better competitors also. A lot of that has to do with the drills that I’ve created for them to develop their physical skills and mental toughness. In many ways it’s easier to teach kids the mental and emotional aspects of 5 pin than it is to teach the same lessons to adults. The kids are less set in their ways and more open to learning and changing than most adults are, so in order to describe mental training in a way that adults could understand (and believe in), I created the idea of mindtraps. This article explains the idea of mindtraps and also delves into some of the most common emotional mindtraps.

To the outside observer, 5 pin bowling looks like a game without hazards. You don’t have to deal with a blitzing linebacker as you throw a ball and you will not have to contend with a lane that makes a dogleg left. The hazards in bowling are internal rather than external but that doesn’t make them any less real than a blitzing linebacker. It only makes them harder to contend with. Sandtraps, water and the rough are some of the obstacles found on a golf course but just as dangerous for bowlers are the sandtraps of the mind, mindtraps as it were. A mindtrap can be an emotion, an attitude or a single thought. Like a bunker in front of a green, they represent a place the athlete may not be successful in evading. They are impediments to performance. In order to improve your bowling game it may be beneficial to spend the next few minutes with a golfing analogy.

While some hazards seldom come into play, others are positioned to challenge the skills of the golfer. It would be irrational to suggest that they don’t exist. The prudent golfer acquires the skills needed to deal with each particular challenge. Golfers know that balls will wind up in the most inconvenient places.

When learning the game of golf, many beginners make the mistake of attempting to use every club in the bag. This problem is solved by reducing the number of clubs and learning how to use these proficiently. Only after a higher degree of mastery is reached does the golfer begin to use a greater array of clubs. The professional golfer is comfortable with every club in the bag and knows when they are best employed.

Mindtraps exist. From time to time every athlete falls into a mode of thinking that is not beneficial to performance. The professional is often capable of avoiding most mindtraps and is masterful as escaping them, but even the best can and do get stuck. Getting caught in a mindtrap can be devastating. It can render an otherwise skillful player ineffectual.

Just as a golfer will survey the course to identify the possible hazards, it is important for the bowler to take stock of possible mindtraps. A walk through some painful competitive memories of tournament gone sour may be enough to allow the athlete a chance to catalog some of the deepest and most enduring hazards. Part of the success of dealing with any menace is to know that it is there. This knowledge may be enough to avoid obvious pitfalls. However, bowlers will find themselves in mindtraps, they are an unavoidable element of the game. A golfer is aware of playing in a sandtrap. Unfortunately bowlers are usually unaware when they have landed in a mindtrap. They keep banging away hoping that eventually something constructive will happen while often digging themselves deeper and deeper into the mindtrap.

When a golfer winds up in a sandtrap, it helps if countless hours have been spent practicing how to get out. The professional is not only adept at getting out, but also of getting to the most advantageous position for the next play. The best golfers know where they are going.

Bowlers caught in a mindtrap should have a strategy to extricate themselves from the situation. Elite athletes practice the ability to change their mindset. Top competitors may have many ‘clubs’ or a few ‘clubs’ but what they have are effective ‘clubs’. Their choice of strategy helps get them to their most advantageous position. Knowledge is not training. Knowing how to do something is not the same as being able to do something. It takes time and practise to turn knowledge into training. Most of all it takes desire.

While water hazards and sandtraps are facts of life for the golfer, it is detrimental to dwell on them. As a matter of fact, focusing on them is a great way to meet them more intimately. Focusing on a mindtrap is a way to land up in one. Training allows the bowler to avoid the mindtrap in the first place and to make the stay in it as short a possible. Take heart from the golfer’s example. No matter how great the golfer may be, the ball will find its way into a hazard on occasion. It’s important to be able to do something constructive once you are there.

For bowlers, mindtraps tend to fall into two connected categories, your thoughts and emotions. The thoughts that you have, what you say to yourself, the images that you produce largely make up the mental game of bowling. How you feel makes up the emotional game. Emotions and thoughts complement each other. Disabling thoughts bring about disabling emotions while enabling thoughts bring about enabling emotions. It is also true that this system works in reverse with emotions producing thoughts. Some of the deepest mindtraps are the disabling emotions.

The ever-changing tide of a bowler’s emotions through a competition have been the bane of many a coach's life. The emotional state of a bowler is critical to performance and many coaches have few tools with which to work in order to change the bowler’s emotional state. The coach will intervene based on what that coach knows about the situation and the bowler. How much better will the coach do by knowing something about emotions and how to set up a chain to get from one to another? What are some emotions that constitute mindtraps?

Anger

Anger is usually expressed when the bowler has breached some deeply held standard. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the standard is well thought out and the anger is justified and appropriate in the situation. Anger most often happens as a response to the bowler not living up to a standard of performance. The bowler has a very good idea of how good they ‘should’ be playing and not bowling to that level (even on one ball) can lead to anger.

Anxiety

Anxiety occurs when the bowler is focusing on an uncertain future. The future is always uncertain but what builds the anxiety in the bowler is facing a future in which the bowler feels unprepared. The role of the coach is to identify what will make the bowler feel prepared and then set about designing a pre-competition program that will satisfy that criteria.

Frustration

The bowler is fixated on an outcome and it is only when a bowler perceives that no progress is being made toward that goal, that frustration sets in. This is the essence of frustration, there is the attempt to attain a goal however the goal remains unrealized inspite of the bowler’s best effort. There is an action quality to frustration. A frustrated bowler is a motivated bowler that has hit an obstacle and can’t find a way over, around or through it.

When a bowler is frustrated, a coach can recognize the goal orientation of the bowler. The challenge for the coach is to get the bowler to try a new approach to the problem. The difficulty in doing this is that bowler’s can get very easily frustrated any setback brings back all the memories of earlier obstacles that were unscaled. A companion to frustration is impatience. Many bowlers who are frustrated are also impatient for results. The coach will most likely have to deal with impatience while attempting to develop a plan of action which will address overcoming the obstacle that is in the bowler’s way.

Inadequacy

Inadequacy usually consists of an unfavourable comparison. The bowler may be comparing himself to other bowlers or may feel that his capabilities are not up to the challenge of the situation. In order to deal with inadequacy the coach may attempt to get the bowler to quit making these comparisons. That may be easier said than done, so the next strategy can be to get the bowler to make comparisons in such a way as to highlight that bowler’s competency. The coach can make suggestions that raises the bowler’s belief in that bowler’s competency by pointing to the training that has been done to prepare that bowler for this situation or by bringing up instances where the bowler was successful in past events. The alternative is to make suggestions that lowers the challenge to a more manageable level. Having the bowler recognize that the opponent is not some kind of invincible ‘bowling god’ is a good way to do this. In most instances the bowler perceives the opposition as greatly superior.

When playing a superior opponent it may be helpful to remind the bowler of the rule of upsets which is, if your best performance is better than your opponent’s worst performance then you have a chance of an upset. The more often this is true the better the chance of an upset.

Each emotion is a resource that carries with it a clue on how to deal with the situation. The coach not only needs to be able to use these clues but also must be able to help the bowler generate a series of emotions that will take the bowler from the disabling state to an enabling state. A bowler may be doing a pinpicking drill and may be performing poorly. The bowler begins to get frustrated (wants to succeed but is not making progress) and then begins to get angry (violation of a standard, in this case performance) eventually the bowler who is still being unsuccessful ends up apathetic (not caring, no emotional attachment) about succeeding at the drill and gives up. Apathy is often used by bowlers to shield themselves from failure (If they don’t care, then failing doesn’t really count.)

To be really proficient at dealing with emotions requires training. While the definitions will give a clue, the best way to become familiar with emotions and how to use them as a resource is to read THE EMOTIONAL HOSTAGE by Leslie Cameron-Bandler and Michael Lebeau. This book provides steps for moving from one emotion to another and should be part of every coach’s library while the skill to move from a disabling state to an enabling state should be a ‘club’ with which every competitive bowler is proficient.

As a bowler, Ken once held a season high average of 286 and has a silver medal in the National Open. As a YBC coach, his teams have won 16 zone championships, 8 provincial gold medals and 5 national gold medals, a silver and a bronze. He produced the indepth 5 PIN Instructional video, ‘UnBOWLIEVABLE - Building a Better Bowler’ and a 5 PIN learn-to-bowl video for the C5PBA’s Bowling in the Schools program called ‘Learning the Canadian Game.’ He is a member of the Saskatoon Sports Hall of Fame.