No, I didn't learn that my bowling sucks. I already knew that. Most of the time, the ball ends up in the gutter instead of striking anything. I am so bad that one year, I actually won the encouragement award just to make me feel better.
What I learned was not so much positive thinking, than positive focusing.
Before I started the evening bowling, my boss had mentioned to me a study he read about where two groups of people were separated. They were taken to the bowling alley. One group was told to focus on what they were doing right and continue doing that, while the other group was told to focus on what they were doing wrong and work on correcting it.
By the end of the day, they compared the scores of the both groups. The group that was focused on what they were doing right had far higher scores than the ones that were focused on correcting what they were doing wrong.
And so I started the evening trying to do just that.
The first three tries, I failed miserably as the ball went into the drain. There was nothing right to focus on. I wasn't doing anything right at all. But then I actually hit something at the fourth try! And so I simply focused on how I actually did that and I swear, it worked.
For the rest of the evening, I was actually hitting things, even scoring a strike once! I was hitting nines and spares, although there was of course the times when I either missed, or only got three or something. But by my standard, it was a miracle. I actually went from not hitting anything at all over the previous years to actually hitting things.
My final scores for the evening? 74 and 76.
Not particularly impressive I know, but I reckon if I hadn't focused on what I was doing right, it would have been in the low 20s.
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