Mind Gym 2 – Mind Games, and the Ironic Rebound.
From Mind Gym, Gary Mack, 2001:
“When the field-goal attempt sailed wildly wide of the mark … Stalling’s face hardened like ready-mix cement. In disgust, he turned his back and walked away, muttering under his breath. Once Gene [The hardened and judgmental coach] was out of earshot, I drew the kicker aside.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Mack, I’m a great field goal kicker … But I just can’t kick when Gene’s watching me”
“Well, you know, … I think he’s going to be at all the games”.
In this comical but relatable example, sports psychologist Gary Mack illustrates how an athlete with exceptional capabilities can sabotage him or herself by allowing themselves to focus on the wrong things. Like when Tina from Bob’s Burgers has her first driving lesson:
Allowing yourself to become conscious of the hazards, like a judgmental coach, or a physical obstacle, creates a form of performance anxiety. You fear the judgment of your boss, coach, captain, or CEO, because displeasing them could ultimately risk the loss of your employment, status and liberty. Fail enough times, and you know, subconsciously, that your children may starve and your wife may despise you. (You CEOs and managers out there need to remember this is why we praise in public but criticise in private. People naturally fear your disapproval far more than you may be aware of. Adding social disapproval to the already painful mix brings intensely negative feelings, further increasing the physiological distress of fight-or-flight, and thereby reducing performance).
Performance anxiety and target fascination, combine with other stressors to ensure an excessive cognitive load.
When first learning boat handling or ship handling, it is common to suffer from these cognitive errors. The junior officer at the helm suffers partial steering failure and begins drifting at speed towards sharp rocks, or another vessel. The lookouts on the bridge shout, ‘We’re going to hit that’, and the radar or electronic navigation starts blaring out collision risk alarms with a flashing red alert and a loud ‘alarming’ noise that also draws attention to the very obstacle we are trying to avoid.
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The brain sets up an algorithm in the background to monitor the danger. But as we approach the danger, this little software loop in our brain accelerates and grows, building in importance. It feeds the amygdala with signals that say ‘We’re going to kill 1000 passengers, pollute the nature reserve, fail to pass go, fail to collect $200, and proceed straight to jail, because of that thing over there, look, look, look at that thing!’
And so, we look at the hazard. And we hit it.
Sometimes people go to jail, and sometimes we don’t.
Our hands do not follow our orders; they follow our attention.
Thrusting away from a hazard, while staring at it, will often have your drifting back into danger. Instead, you need to focus on the open water and safety. Or on something unseen that is impairing your instruments, or ability to perform the manoeuvre.
Everyone who rides a bicycle, or motorcycle or goes skiing knows this. Look where you want to go, and your body will follow.
Mack advises to focus on the task, not the obstacle. The conscious mind can only focus on one thing at a time [and can only remember up to seven facts at once], so we must be careful how we spend the capital of our attention. Don’t waste that capital on suppression of negative thoughts about what you don’t want to happen. Learn to spend it on a positive or neutral thought, to achieve what you do want to happen.
Mack taught pro athletes to anchor their thinking by repeating a word, like a mantra, that is associated with previous competency or victory. E.g. a good golfer might say ‘Birdie’ to himself before his shiphandling manoeuvre, to remind himself of that feeling of control and confidence. It anchors his emotional state in a positive frame, and allows focus on the fundamentals, instead of the performance anxiety.
Then, he advises you to visualise the desired outcome. E.g. I will bring the ship into the clear part of the fairway, upstream and upwind of the hazard, and maintain 1 cable of clearance from the hazard by visually using my radar index line.
This takes our tendency toward tunnel vision, or target fascination, as an acknowledged fact of human limitation. Although, instead of trying to fight it, we acknowledge it. Then, we shift the end destination of the tunnel. (A telescope metaphor would be more nautical, but y’all know what tunnel vision means).
The problem when you are young and starting out, is that you don’t have enough of those experiences yet. You maybe haven’t witnessed enough shiphandling manoeuvres to be able to visualise the positive outcome. Or you have not been shown how to use the full range of techniques for monitoring such an outcome, like parallel indexing on your radar, or putting alarm-triggers on the ‘No-Go’ areas on your ECDIS navigation system.
That’s why companies want to recruit ‘experienced people’. While making it as hard as possible to gain that experience.
This becomes an issue again, every time you change your operating sector, or change vessel, or change the type of port or harbour.
Never be shy of such changes. There is no good or bad experience. Only, ‘experience’.
The captain of the Titanic famously said the following:
“When anyone asks me how I can best describe my experience in nearly forty years at sea, I merely say, uneventful. Of course there have been winter gales, and storms and fog and the like. But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident… or any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort.”
E. J. Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS Titanic
Sadly, 1200 deaths later, we all know how that went for him. His infamous last orders to the men who perished under his command, were, ‘Be British’, before going down with their ship. This may capture a form of Edwardian mental resilience and fortitude of a bygone age of Empire and Honour. But they don’t have much place in my own philosophy of seamanship, today.
Although to be fair, he was stitched up by the naval architects.
Or so the story goes.
All of this is to say, those of us who strive to be better in anything will always face this ‘gap’.
I’ve never used this steering system before. I’ve never faced eight knots of tidal stream while manoeuvring off the berth before. I’ve never had to do a controlled collision before. My ship has never been on fire before. Etc.
Sometimes these are b*llshit excuses we tell ourselves to let ourselves off the hook for our panic, fear and failure. Sometimes they are legitimate reasons for an incident. Usually, it’s a mix of the two.
Maturity comes with only one mantra.
‘So?’.
I do believe it is particularly bad with the younger generation who’ve grown up entirely online in the social media psyop, but I am certain that this cognitive barrier is the reason that every older generation looks at its’ youngest generation as a bunch of ‘excuse people’.
I’m also equally certain that every young generation coming to maturity has a legitimate complaint towards their elders that ‘nobody told me about x, y, z’.
Honouring your mother and father requires partly realising that x, y, z may not have really existed in that form, quite the way it does for you, when your parents were coming up. Just like the tidal stream in your harbour may be a lot stronger than the one in Captain Smith’s home port.
Fathers, trainers, teachers and mentoring-colleagues also need to realise that you can’t tell people anything only with words, and expect them to know what you mean. Just try writing a book or a Substack, and you’ll realise that hardly anyone gets what you’re trying to say. Unless they’ve seen the same principle in their own life.
That is the difference between education and training. Never forget it.
At sea, one of the hardest shifts for someone to make mentally, is from a long serving middle ranking officer, to a senior officer. It’s a bit like having been the straight-A student through high school, university, to postgrad, but then having to get a job in the real world.
You have excelled in one game, but now you are about to play a completely different one. It is almost guaranteed you will not excel in the new one. At least for a while. And that will hurt.
Among a ship’s company this may be especially painful. You’ve had the captain’s license for a while. You are super-educated. You know every system on the ship, every port, every harbour, every little micro-task on board that is required in the running of a complex floating town. You’ve seen every manoeuvre in every port that you’ll be trading in.
However.
When you step up to that role of responsibility, and put your hands on the sticks, something is different. You realise that being in the position of control is very different from being in the position of supporter or observer.
If you have spent a long time beneath a rock-star captain, you can idolise them. When they show unbelievable skill, and even flair, it can be very intimidating. You forget that thos controls were made for human beings, and ascribe his high performance to a form of magical talent.
Trying to follow that feels like going for your first karate lesson with Bruce Lee. The distance between your level and his is often too great. In those cases, the training master cannot teach the junior the basics of shiphandling because he has long forgotten the feelings and assumptions of the novitiate.
If this gets in your head, sometimes it is better not to take the promotion in that place. Rather, just move to a different vessel and a different master. Try your hand with an old rust-bucket in a backwater sh*thole with no witnesses around, before you come back to the six-star luxury cruise liner with 8000 passengers and crew staring at you, judging.
You’ve seen the captain adjust the throttle, but you’ve never been inside his body while he’s doing it. You can’t visualise it from his perspective. You can’t stand exactly in his spot while he is in it. So, until he is gone and it is your turn, you’ll never know exactly what it looks like to visualise.
I know if I’m bringing a 250 m vessel into a 300 m gap, where that next ship over should come into view on that starboard window frame so that it’s safe when I hit the rudder hard over and thrust. I know how the vibration feels when I’m coming into shallow water and need to pull back on the sticks and lose speed. I know what it looks like when the radar and the ECDIS and the lookouts are all screaming ‘we’re going to crash into that passing ship’, but really, we’re not, and I know to block those out and focus on the gap straight ahead.
That gap is the leap of faith.
When you become a husband and a father, you are dropped right into that gap.
Your toddler or young child is going to have tantrums. A tantrum is an extremely stressful thing for both the parents and the child. But the parent can make it worse.
If the inner monologue of the parent is ‘Don’t let her have a tantrum. I can’t handle this again. Pick the right food, or shoes, or avoid whatever trigger’, they are focusing on the hazard, not the open water.
Each child is different, but you can find open water for each of them. With my son, it was offering him only two choices of clothing to choose from. Or with a daughter who tantrums at bed time, distracting her from negotiation altogether by counting to 60 over and over, out loud. Or saying a prayer. Distracting her conscious mind from dialogue for long enough that she lays still, waiting for her turn to speak again, but falls asleep before it ever comes.
That is shifting the end of the tunnel. Moving the telescope.
It is not easy to do if you are stressed or tired yourself.
I often think smarter people are more prone to failure in this regard, because their minds race with more extrapolated hypothetical scenarios of failure than the average bear.
The suppression-loop algorithm being run in the brain of an Epstein-implicated politician, that repeats to itself, ‘Avoid talking about using your taxpayer funded salary to hire trafficked prostitutes’ is an obstacle-focused algorithm. The brain-space this occupies causes overload when a questioner puts them under stress, and it cracks. As it does so, the mind immediately drifts towards the hazard, because it has ironically been kept below the surface, but at top of mind. Like a submarine in bathtub, stress causes you to break concentration. Your focus gets broken, and the water rushes out as though you pulled the plug, leaving the submarine exposed. Before you know it, you’re spouting nonsense like, It couldn’t have been me, because I didn’t sweat between 1982 and 1997’.
A bad liar is made worse by this type of cognitive overload.
We can apply these frameworks of interpretation to every part of our lives.
When you become a parent, you become the priest of your family, the captain of your family, the policeman, the judge, the accountant, the theologian, and the servant, all at once.
You’ve seen it done before.
Fatherhood, I mean.
Even if you never had a dad around in your youth, you’ve seen TV sitcoms, movies, or other real-life families. You have plenty of opinions of how it should and shouldn’t be done. But until it’s your turn, you don’t know. Even if you think you know, that isn’t what knowledge is.
It’s the same with so much online discourse and politics right now. Everyone has opinions, but nobody wants responsibility, apart from the wrong people.
You have to realise that abstract opinions, propositions and theories are a different category of knowledge altogether.
Embodied knowledge is the real ballast in the ship, and the fuel in the tank.
Realising that is when atheism becomes indefensible.
You and your wife create a life in your own image. You try to create paradise on earth for them in your home. You try to tell them to embody perfect principles of virtue, and not to learn by biting into the outcome (fruits) of good and bad decisions. You use your authority as mother or father to guide them. And you see how, inevitably, there is no escape from toil among the thorns of reality.
It is simply the case that we are theomorphic reflections, dancing on the surface of the waters of chaos. Lesser than but participating in creation.
It is our turn to be the bark on the tree of life.
This is the pattern of existence. It is how we grow up, move out, and move up. It is the way we take responsibility, as functional cells in the body.
It is simply real.
As a father, or a teacher, it can’t all be reading, writing and arithmetic. Part of your responsibility is to fill your children’s lives with as many micro-tasks as possible.
My children can bake their own cakes, start a campfire from a spark, crochet outfits for their Barbie dolls, read books, ride bikes, select the correct PPE, and ask questions. I’m teaching the oldest to navigate using a map, now, as we’ve completed our first few hikes together, and recently did our first mountain shortly after her 11th birthday.
All of these tasks have involved hundreds of micro-failures, recalibrations, and realignments towards success.
These are all little rungs on the Jacob’s Ladder of life. The more you can give them, the better. So that they know the process of dealing with an excursion from their comfort zone of competence.
Many academics, young people, and politicians love socialism and technocracy, and loathe the marketplace. This is often partly because they fear that feeling of being adrift. I’m certain that Republicanism and support for laissez-faire policies within a monarchy correlates closely with physical strength, emotional resilience and competency in at least one area. I’m sure there are statistics on this, but I’m not going to look them up, because I don’t care to do that kind of thing. I am comfortable enough living with making mistakes.
Being comfortable with losing sight of the shore is an oft quoted cliché sentiment, like Live, Laugh, Love, or Bed, Bath and Beyond! But the thing that this metaphor misses is that losing sight of the shoreline must be done at the right time, only when you know you are at a clear latitude for crossing the ocean. And you should only lose sight of it, until you find the next shoreline at the other side.
The gap is where we live. Where we navigate by a higher star. But only until we focus the end of the tunnel, or the telescope, on a landmark that directs us to the next port.
These nautical metaphors never work when they stand alone. They are nested in the patterns of commerce, and time, and life. They sound great and semi-profound and simple when you remove them from their context.
Just like everything else.
The sports psychologists say, ‘Don’t look where you don’t want to go’. And that works at sea, or in business, or politics, as equally well as it works in sport.
In a marriage, this may have been precisely what was meant by ‘If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.’
I’ve heard pastors and priests say that was an exaggeration to grab attention. I dunno. Makes perfect sense to me.
When the captain has been idolised, he is placed too high. This is like trying to understand the world only by studying God the father, in the total abstract. This is the folly of modern philosophy.
The incarnation is a gift. Condescension of an embodied truth reminds us to get out of our minds and into our bodies.
In the same way, you can’t just stand in awe of your first captain for the rest of your career. At some point, you have to step into the gap and put your own hands on the controls.
In John 14, during the last supper, Doubting Thomas asks how we can follow Jesus if we do not where he is going. Jesus replies to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me”
To non-Christians, the new atheists, and many others who view Jesus as just Super-Rabbi-3000, I’m sure this phrase comes across as very arrogant. We are always told by these people that Christians have no monopoly on morality. How dare anyone entertain this most cruelly exclusive attitude? Or pretend that they alone have ‘the keys to heaven’.
This argument, of course, is a complete straw man. It is a painful fact for many that Christianity is viewed as a fulfilment of Jewish prophecy, and that nowhere does Jesus or any of the apostles say that they thought they were starting a new religion. Christianity is a sect of Judaism. A fairly successful one at that. Even Maimonides had to concede that this Jesus fellow did in fact bring the Torah to the gentiles. But aside from that, the concept of heaven as a VIP lounge at an exclusive intellectual club is a much later add-on expansion pack. Nobody in the early church would say that.
But, the point to focus on here, is not some theological ‘gotcha’. Rather, to connect this story to our own lives.
Jesus goes on to say, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the one believing in Me, the works that I do, also he will do. And he will do greater than these, because I am going to the Father.”
Now, I say to you, isn’t that a terrifying thought?
I’m supposed to do work, greater than, our best guy ever did? Bringing sight to the blind? Curing diseases and disabilities? Commanding spirits? Mass exorcisms? Feeding thousands of people? Commanding the weather, and mastering the seas? Raising the dead? Teaching the greatest stories ever heard on earth, that are applicable to every life before or since? Forgiving sins?
I can forgive some people. I can sit and share a meal with the marginalised or talk to a homeless person. I can elevate women and children in my life, and care for widows and orphans with an occasional bit of charity.
But, crikey. What a list.
And I can certainly not go one day without sinning in some way.
I have no interest in questions of translation any more. I can get over any trust issues with the bible, entirely because the stories are stories of action, more than a list of diktats.
Images and metaphors survive time and translation so well, because they show us.
Scholars say that this line means that Jesus ministry was only for 3 years, in a limited cultural and geographical area. That this element is achieved by our endeavour of human flourishing, modern medicine, schooling, engineering, sanitation, and international charity.
And so it is.
But if we can trust that the story we’ve received is, at the very least, about the creator of the universe coming down to our level to show us what we can do if we accept our limitation, and how to focus on the worship of Yahweh, the God Israel, who causes existence to be, then maybe we can accept that the story is deep enough to be trying to teach us something more.
A ship captain is the head. His orders, his mission, his cargo, is the adventure, and the meaning. He has a covenant with every person on board, and every piece of steel and machinery. Each head of department is one of his Mosaic heads of hundreds, fifties and tens. The ocean is the serpent of chaos below. The routines of life on board that rule our survival at sea ate the liturgical work of the people. The crew, the heavy machinery, the ballast.
The common folk religion of our time is a basic idea of Karma. ‘You do good things, and you get good things back in return’. This is a variant on the ‘Treat others as you wish to be treated’ Golden Rule.
The problem with the folk religion, as we see in the Epstein files scandal, as well as we see it in low level bureaucratic corruption, or in violent street crime, is that psychopaths love those rules. Do to others as you would have done unto you, doesn’t really work if one party in a transaction really loves a savage underwater knife fight.
We must have a few positive, ‘thou shalls’. Not only ‘shall nots’.
Maybe we can look at the challenges of promotion to a top position, as an insight into how we are called to be the body of Jesus Christ on earth, the living son of Yahweh.
If we focus only on the negative, the collisions, the fires, the consequences of making mistakes. I.e. the sins, the legalism, and the shameful tyranny of judgement and comparison that leaves us being found-out and falling short. Then we will fall short.
That is the problem with ‘Owning It’.
‘Yeah, I fall short. But so does everybody else. Everybody goes to heaven, I saw it on the Righteous Gemstones. Let’s just eat too much, drink too much, chill out, don’t worry about it, and download some AI porn’.
To move into a leadership position requires humility. Patience. Acceptance of limitation. Appreciation of context.
First you must understand the story of what it means to be a captain. Then watch one in action for a few years. Then master all of the little sub-skills. And pay attention. And celebrate the wins of others. And be happy for those in positions above you. And serve them, so that you know the details of the many ways in which your leader can be disappointed or failed.
Then when you take the step into responsibility, and act in faith, you know the risks you are taking.
You’ll remember the journey.
Don’t become a tyrant, who says ‘I suffered, so what is it to me if they suffer now, below me. That’s how they’ll learn’.
Instead, be a healer, and a teacher. And give those below you in rank a vision of progress, and model something to aspire to.
You wouldn’t have a religion that is all about the fasting and bending the knee and the suffering. Even though these things are necessary, what is more important is the feasting, the joy, the community, and the gifts. And so it should be, in your life at work, and at home as well.
That’s the real challenge. You cannot do it alone. We have a responsibility to each other, to show one another what to aim our telescope at. We can’t only have a negative vision. We need a positive one as well.
Just as the captain who focuses on the hazard too much, suffers an Ironic Rebound and ends up having a collision, so too do our political and media classes.
We have seen this in our politics and institutions as well. They were shaken by the rise of nationalism and industrial nation states that led to the horrific slaughter of world war 1, world war 2, and the threat of nuclear annihilation in the cold war. The democide of 200 million civilians by their own governments during the twentieth century. The holocaust of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and some Catholics in Nazi Germany. The sterilisation, lobotomization and other anti-natalist and dysgenic policies forced on populations from Greenville to Greenland, in the name of scarcity and population control, or climate change. The immense cruelty of command economies.
Their goal was well-meaning.
‘Never again’.
But like all bad leaders, they failed to recognise their purpose, context and limitations. The government of a corporate nation-state is a limited liability defence corporation and security contractor. Not an omnipotent, omniscient creator. The sky-daddy described by Christopher Hitchens was at least partly a projected-caricature, designed to justify the statist position of sky-daddy by technocracy.
In their hyper focus on suppressing nationalism at all costs, they’ve created their own Ironic Rebound. The surge in nationalism we’re seeing now is a result of decades of the suppression of democracy, of free speech, of autonomous property rights, of religious coherence, or of the profession of strong traditional values.
They looked at national socialism, and thought it was the ‘national’ part that was the danger, because they liked the debt-fuelled Ponzi-scheme of socialism. Now we’re bankrupt and becoming ultra-nationalist as a response.
They looked at populism and declared it all ‘irrational’. Instead of proving arguments wrong, or disinfecting with sunlight, they created the UN, the WHO, the WEF, and the EU to suppress popular democracy, and bypass it through use of international treaties. Now we have a parasitic class of technocrats worldwide who feel entitled to shut down schools, hospitals, and public spaces whenever they see fit. Rather than allow a pastoral discretion at the local level. So, fear of the tyranny of the mob, begets tyranny of a different kind.
They looked at the materialist scientistic racism of the twentieth century and suppressed and policed any criticism of any outsiders coming into to European nations so thoroughly, that any and all criticism is seen as racist. This type of criticism is literally punishable with prison time in the UK. As a result, people can now readily observe two-tier policing and unjust affirmative action, while their native sons are left behind. So now, many are saying en masse, ‘Well, I guess I am a racist now. So, what’.
Everything they suppress comes back to haunt them. The Ironic-Rebound is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
They need to learn from the good captain, who sees the danger approaching, but doesn’t suffer from an ideological impediment that says ‘I will not have an incident, because of who I am’. Instead, he accepts sense evidence, like one who listens to the argument of their opponent and processes it to avoid danger. He must not suffer cognitive dissonance. He must instantly jettison his ego, and deal with the problem at hand.
He knows his rank is a responsibility, forst and foremost. Not an identity category, that protects him from being wrong, by definition.
Therein lies the danger in the current state of society and politics in the UK and Europe.
Can our beleaguered institutions do it?
Not if they can’t realign their focus. And, not if they see their policies achieving the opposite of what they hoped and take it as evidence that they need to double-down on suppression of local autonomy, freedom of speech, racism, populism, or national pride. No.
They’re technocrats. They have no God other than their own intellectual consensus.
To be fair, practically speaking, it is also easier for a captain, or a president or monarch to change their mind, as an individual. Whereas the technocracy is an aggregate. The helmsman can see the danger out of the window and react instantly, whereas the hazards to a functioning society approach more slowly and abstractly.
But, on the positive side, bureaucracies are also communities. Their hive mind does in fact arise from an aggregate of the people within it. Socialism isn’t so anonymous and brutal if the local councillors meet socially with their benefits recipients, or go to the same church, for example.
Look at the media, academic, political and bureaucratic classes in our present-day nation states in Europe, and tell me that they have one person among them who can provide a positive vision for a society to build on, that includes community, family and freedom?
I may not be able to help them. But I can say to the younger people around me, if you’re scared of waking up in an Islamic caliphate, go to church on Sunday. If you’re scared about the population dying out, have some kids. If you’re scared of online censorship, buy some books, and get extra copies for your friends and family.
The conservatives among us tend to focus on the ‘plan for the worst but hope for the best’ model. Buying bullion, bullets, and bread in a tin.
Fear is not a strategy. Neither is optimism. Canned goods may get you through a week of war, but then what? You’re still going to die. Are you going to leave behind a pile of junk in a lonely world, or a community of friends, neighbours and extended family?
Be careful what you pay attention to. Don’t look, where you don’t want to go.
