Our Needs, Our Wants, Our Desires - What Drives Us, Our Understanding And Our Awareness

Motives: a need or drive that is stimulated and seeks to be satisfied, to take action. 
Need: becomes a motive when they are stimulated or aroused.

Motives have two categories:

1. Biogenic Needs. The needs for food and physical comfort and arises our physiological states.
2. Psychogenic Needs. The need for appreciation and self-esteem, and arises out of psychological states.

Maslow’s Theory of Motivation: Your needs are as follows:

1. Physiological - Need for food, drink, clothing.
2. Safety and Security - Need for protection and order.
3. Belongingness and Love - Need for affection and acceptance.
4. Esteem - Need for self respect, prestige and status.
5. Self-actualization - Need for self-fulfillment.

Perception: The uses of the five senses, and how we interpret the stimuli. 

Personality and Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud believed the mind and personality consisted of three parts:

1. The ID, where basic, sometimes inappropriate, drive exists (the part of us always seeking pleasure).
2. The SUPEREGO, acts as a conscious, develops moral standards and places a check on instinctive, sometimes inappropriate drives (our sense of right and wrong).
3. The EGO, acts as a control center, achieving a balance between the drives of the ID and constraints of the SUPEREGO (our part that keeps us in touch with reality - the intellectual part).

Attitude. A persons tendency to act in a certain way or to hold an emotion or feeling about something. The three parts to attitude:

1. Beliefs. What you think about what you do.
2. Evaluations. Judgments you make.
3. Tendency to Act. Whether you accept or not accept what you are doing.

      What separates, the player, from players - is ATTITUDE! Attitude determines how well you do it. Ability is what you are capable of doing. Inspiration is your change to Awareness, through self-motivation. Motivation determines your attitude when you would rather do one thing more than another particular thing at a particular time. Nothing you do comes easy. It comes from careful preparation, lots of practice and meticulous planning. 

      Raising your level of play is done with knowledge. Knowledge of your physical, emotional and mental game. Knowing yourself and your reactions to your emotional being in all situations, circumstances and events. Knowing that teaching your muscles to respond in a consistent pattern is as important as having a free mind. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses and know when to be flexible enough to adapting your style to changing lane conditions, playing environment and distractions from friends, family and fellow competitors.

      Know thyself. It is just as important as knowing your game, your movements, your feelings and the sensation of bowling, “with the feeling of no feeling.” A video may help, but understand and knowing yourself will help more. Learning that every experience you have delivering a bowling ball will fit somewhere in the overall master plan of life and sport. However, learning is hindered by anxiety, arousal, distractions, if those threats that causes the anxiety, arousal, or distractions cannot be controlled by the subject. 

      You must know whether or not your favorite playing angle is inside, 2nd arrow or on the gutter. If one or the other is not conducive to your game, you must know how to adapt to play these angles and still be competitive. You must be able to recognize if the heads are hooking; or the track is hooking early; or carry down is changing your shot. You must be so fine tuned that you know if you add one piece of tape to your thumb hole, it will snug it up and help you create a little more skid through the heads and a better grip on the ball. You must know that pin placements and mass bias positions relative to your positive axis point (PAP) will help you play different angles with carry and that the shell of the ball has more influence that all the weights. But the most important of all the things you must know, you must know YOURSELF, the operator. The operator, mentally overrides everything the operator does physically.

      Everyone looks for the quick fix. There isn't any. It comes from your day by day mental, emotional and physical construction. Once your convince yourself and believe in yourself, than you will start on your road to success, provided you have the right attitude. ATTITUDE is of utmost importance and you must be willing to sacrifice.

      You must be motivated or motivate yourself to reach out for your goals...it must be something you really want and it must be realistic. You must be goal setting oriented, starting with small goals and arriving at your larger goals. 

      You must be a positive thinker and believe in yourself. You should always strive to do what's right, to do your best and treat others like you want to be treated. Look within yourself, see your achievements (goals) and successes, build your feelings on these achievements and grow. There's OPTIMISM, a positive attitude. Combined with realization, practicality, you the person and you the bowler make failure only a temporary set back. With set backs you keep your mind open, and with your open mind you'll eventually succeed. When you're confronted with the pressure situation remember you create the response to the situation, new and old. Conscious worrying or negative thinking will have a definite effect on your performance and your life situations. You must control your emotions and you cant think about earlier shot or get the “ifs”, “should haves”, “could have”, etc., they are gone. The trick than is to keep your conscious mind out of your game plan and let the pre-recorded data in your brain through by muscle memory - perform.

      How do you develop muscle memory? Through practice naturally, and knowing that you are not just throwing ball after ball, after ball at a target. Take the time to stop and think about what you are teaching yourself. Realize what you (mentally and emotionally) and your body (physically) are practicing. Remember, too, bad habits will come easily if you don't maintain your self-discipline, and that you will eventually need a set of eyes or video to help you through a rough period. 

      Your competitive edge and pressure situations are present in every game you perform in. How do you maintain these? One answer is good sound quality practice concentrating on near perfect movements along with your muscle responses that are being recorded in your subconscious over time. You repetition of muscle movements becomes recorded through your central nervous system which creates and reinforces your muscle memory activities. From your repetition, your brain and body learns and knows what to do when you have to throw a soft shot, change wrist/hand positions, locations on the lane, and so on. 

      Be organized, feel your commitment to your shot, yourself and your goals. Maintain your self-discipline so your feel good about yourself. Be committed and realize your goals are within achieving and more important than yourself. 

      Know that you are important, but that there comes a time when your goal and that cause you represent have more importance. You forfeit your rights as an individual. When you walk off the lanes, you're an individual and you have rights. 

14 General Areas of Psychology:

1. The development of the individual organism, including heredity and maturation.
2. The role of the sense organs, including vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, pain, and temperature, as well as the senses that detect bodily movement and balance.
3. The nervous system, including the central and the peripheral nervous systems and the muscles and glands that cooperate with the nervous system.
4. Perception, the process by which we come to understand the world in which we live.
5. The processes of learning and memory, which enable us to understand and cope with our environment, on and off the lanes.
6. Consciousness, the process of awareness and the events that alter awareness.
7. Motivation, the unlearned and learned drives that impel action or inaction.
8. Emotion, the bodily conditions that we identify with feeling and that affect every thing we do.
9. The higher processes of language, thinking and problem solving.
10. The observable and unobservable behavior that we call intelligence, and its testing.
11. The specific characteristics of the individual that we refer to as personality.
12. The ways in which the individual adjusts to demands of the environment.
13. The many varieties of behavior pathology (disturbance).
14. Social behavior, the interaction of people in groups. Tom Blasco