Posts Tagged psychology
Performance anxiety – Why players lose form
Posted by Peter Webb in Football / Soccer, General, Psychology on February 19th, 2012
Lovely piece on psychology in the weekend FT. It examines why players of a sport often inexplicably lose their form. I’ve been studying this specifically in a few sports to come up with predictors of decline. My research was sparked by the collapse in form David Duval after he won the British Open golf and I started to dig around deeper and deeper for events that can lead to a decline. I’ve found it useful in Golf and Tennis which are individual sports but less useful in teams sports, where team dynamics and the ability to not play or substitute can diminish it’s potency.
It has been a really interesting area of research, but this sort of analysis gets little coverage or chat. I have also found it applies to people participating in the markets themselves. It’s curious how you can show two people a very clear strategy and yet while one person executes flawlessly, the other just can’t do it. But witnessing that allows me to understand why and suggest corrective action. Curiously, it still sometimes means that people still can’t do it. The reason, performance anxiety. I guess they wouldn’t make good Chelsea strikers!
Read the article here: -
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e7c80640-5788-11e1-869b-00144feabdc0.html
How to win at rock, paper, scissors
Posted by Peter Webb in Psychology on January 25th, 2012
I posted this on the forum some time ago.
It’s actually a good analogy for the sort of though process you need to go through when trying to out-think others and one that I think is equally applicable in any market. Sometimes people don’t choose the most logical progression in a sequence of events. Even then is seems that people peoples decisions are often forced by an ‘invisible hand’. Anyhow, an interesting article I think: -
http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/win-rock-paper-scissors-215511514.html
iCons
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on October 6th, 2011
As you may be aware now Steve Jobs passed away last night.
Whether you agree with everything that key figures have to say or what they do, or whether you feel they were lucky, or not. One thing you should do with people who have trodden a useful path before you, is to learn from them.
Throughout my life I have actively sought to try and work with, meet and learn from people better than me. It’s easy to find negatives on things, but learning from the positives is much more productive in the long term.
I’ve flown thousands of miles to meet these people, offered to work for free to learn from them and changed jobs when I was forced to work under people I didn’t respect. But learning from others was always top of my list. So, if you aspire to great things, surround yourself with the right environment and you will learn from that experience. Make sure you do that on your own terms though and not blindly.
Talking of which, here follows some inspiration from the late Mr Jobs himself: -
Cock ups, blunders & mishaps
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on November 15th, 2010
You are either perfect or a liar and nobody is perfect.
Coming to terms with errors is the key to success in anything. If you stop or get put off by losses, errors or mishaps, you will never see the upside. Upside is always there, but a lot of people never ‘see’ it. Couple losses, cock ups, blunders & mishaps with a bit of psychology and it prevents you from getting to the good bits. It took some time, but I learnt to treat up and downside with equal weight. Psychology tends to do the opposite. Years ago I used to think that positive thinking was a load of bull but slowly I realised that it does actually work. Positive thinking does have its issues but overall it will help you.
Think about negative actions. Can you imagine for example, trying to solve a maze by stopping at the first mistake or by giving up because you keep making errors? No, to solve the maze you try to remember where you went wrong and avoid the mistake. Eventually you will attain success.
I recently forgot to code up a spreadsheet correctly and it failed horribly. It made loss after loss and was a bit of a disaster. By the time I spotted the error I was down hundreds. But….. it taught me something critical about the market, something I hadn’t spotted before. So I modified the spreadsheet and let it loose again with a mercurial change in results. I learnt from my mistakes.
The moral of this story, every mistake is just another step to further progress: -