Friday Musings

Part of my talk at the last Thematic was on handling stress. This is what I said. Stress in tournaments are unavoidable. Tournaments are stressful; one of your opponents aim will be to pile on the pressure. Those conditions cannot be changed and are largely beyond your control. What is in your control is your self talk, how you manage your internal stress. At a certain amount of pressure everybody cracks, disassembles. By managing your internal stress you can keep the level of stress from tipping over.

This brings up another point for reflection today. I first presented this argument to the PICA committee. They said I was writing negative things about the organisation, presumably bringing stress to them. So I said this. Do something good and I will write about that. I am not about disparaging PICA. But I will not stay silent if I see fixed matches, unfair practices. Hence the onus here is the other way. We can change those bad practices. And trying to silence people from saying that those practices is wrong is unreasonable and destructive.

So what I am saying is that Officials, Organisers, Parents and bloggers can and should point out the bad practices if there are any. We should not go out looking for them but we should voice out if we see them practiced. For this can be changed.

The players on the other hand cannot do much once they are in the tournament. Change what we can change for the better. Then we can grow and move forward.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Isnt it Jimmy?