I don't know about that, I think I'll have to disagree somewhat. Practicing doesn't necessarily lead to confidence. If you're practicing with the mindset of "OH man, my swing is horrible, I need to fix it!" and you don't immediately solve it, your confidence becomes even worse. I know this from experience, considering the last year and a half I had bowled, my mindset was simply "Gotta fix this crappy form" which ended up just putting me in a negative thought process, since all I thought about was what I was doing wrong. After a good shot, I didn't think "All right, see, I'm fine"...All I thought was "I likely won't do that again since my swing/approach isn't great". Coaching only helped while I was being coached, otherwise I went back to the same mindset once I was on my own and mad a poor shot.
I haven't bowled since August, but I can tell you all this time off has made bowling and therefore my form much less important to me; I'm not constantly worrying about it like I used to. As a result, I actually have a lot more confidence than I used to. In fact, you could almost say I'm arrogant now. Is it really founded on anything? No, I'm still no David Ozio in terms of form by any means. But taking this time off helped me realize "So what?" Just make do with what you have, because to be bluntly honest, a lot of people have pretty poor (textboox) form but do just fine. Why? Because they don't worry about that, they just go out and make shots. I would look at someone who others would tell me has worse form than I did and wonder exactly how they were beating me by 30 pins. It's because their mental game/confidence overcame their lack of physical perfection.
Also, the time off has helped me loosen up not only mentally, but physically. When I was at the peak of my correction-obsession, everything I did was insanely forced because, well, I was trying really hard. Don, I know you're obviously not me (I'm insane), but I'm willing to bet you do suffer from the same general sense of "I'm trying to get better, but I'm still not awesome, therefore I'm horrible and won't ever get better" thought process. You may not be willing to take off 8 months (6 is probably the minimum to do something really effective) but at least try to just calm down and realize that A) Bowling's not the most important thing in your life, just enjoy it and B) I'm sure at some point Walter Ray has thought "Wow, I jerk my head a lot and muscle my swing. That's not textbook at all. Hmm, my vast amount of titles don't seem to care." A healthy attitude will FAAARRR outweigh the fact that someone has some flaws in their form, while someone with decent form will continue to put up bad scores if they don't believe in themselves.
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- Andy
Edited on 4/30/2008 6:20 PM
