Cue Sports Psychology Ninja

• How to get out of your own way and unlock more enjoyment and improvement than you may have thought possible.
• How to ‘reframe’ situations to your advantage…

• How to remain unruffled in spite of distracting players, scores, tables, and ‘luck’ (if, in fact, luck even exists?!)
• Tips for coming to terms with on table disasters, faster than your opponents.

• Miss less easy shots with our simple three step process.
• How two simple day to day practices can you help you stay in the ‘here and now’ on the table.

• How I helped a player make his first 147 in a tournament with this simple law. This was possible because I had violated this law for years myself before ‘seeing the light’.
• The ten year psychology mistake I made after watching a Hollywood Blockbuster in 1986.
• What to do when intrusive thoughts and emotions seem permanent.
• The biggest mistake players make when they have intrusive thoughts at the table.
• How to get free of these thoughts.
• The two main types of distraction to be aware of (most players are not aware of the second one…)
• What to do, and NOT do, when you are driving a car in the rain. HINT: This relates to keeping focus on the table when things get tough.

• How to identify the key pressure points in the game, whether you suffer with them, and what to do about it.
• The four main principles of dealing with pressure.
• How to use pressure to your advantage (sounds strange, but can be true!)

• How to mentally recover from devastating mistakes.
• Symptoms that arise in the four main playing situations… and the fixes for them.
• The four options we have in ANY situation we are not happy with.
• What is the ideal length of time to be upset?
• How to find out if you WANT to be upset?!
• What is an ‘Expectations Detective’ (and should you become one?).
• The roundabout, the politician, and the meeting – a story of three expectations…
• Discussing radical responsibility – the simplest way to instantly escape frustration.
• The famous Winston Churchill quote, which liberated me from needing to deal with huge annoyances and troublesome people!
• What you get to keep AND lose, along with any expectation…

• Having a plan for when your ‘monkey mind’ is telling you to quit. This approach has worked with top pros, amateurs, and club players alike.
• The zone Ronnie was operating in when he came back from 16-14 down in the semi of the 2020 world championships against Mark Selby.
• The two little ideas that can give you the tenacity of a limpet – even if you don’t feel like you want to.

• Use these two simple phrases to improve your concentration, screw shots, cueing, positional play, and potting.

• How a little realization about what we always want, can help you deal better with any adversity on the table.

• Why ‘Flow’ is not a cause, but rather a side effect…
• The six major building blocks of flow. Most people do not appreciate that these can make such a difference to their levels of concentration. The shift in performance when applying these can be geometric.
• How a 40 break student in Norway applied one of these simple principles to their own game, and put in his best ever performance in a national ranking event.
• Little things to do before a match, that can make a big difference during it.
• Why what you do AFTER striking the cue ball, makes the biggest difference to what you do BEFORE you strike the cue ball.
• How to find out whether you love or hate the game!
• “The Flow Trap”, and how to avoid it. This is the number one mistake we make as soon as we are IN FLOW because it immediately gets us OUT OF FLOW!

• The five major variables you MUST accept in order to get the most out of your game.
• Why players snatch on slow cloths, and the simple mind hack that will allow you to stop doing it. This gives you a huge advantage against opponents who do now know this.
• How the ‘Motto Of The Marines’ can help you easily adapt to any table condition.
• Five unseen table variables that will give your game an edge IF you are aware of them!

• How to apply reverse psychology to your potting
• What most players do not realise about the quickest, and most counter-intuitive, way to learn potting.
• What you and Ronnie share in common with your potting ability!
• The way professionals aim that completely SHOCKS almost all sub 70 breakers.
• Nic’s method for potting a blind pocket, all or nothing, cue ball on the cushion black. This was against world number 7 Ken Doherty on Ken’s own match table. The shot won the match which gave Nic his highest ranked player victory.
• How Barry Hawkins applied the same method on his stunning blue to reach the final of the Masters.
• Why FORGETTING ABOUT POTTING (and what to think in its place) is actually the QUICKEST way to improve your potting.
• The best shot speeds to practice potting for quickest learning (one of these will surprise you).
• The one simple thing to do AFTER the shot, that is MORE important than potting the ball.

• The relationship between playing standard and consistency.
• The number of ruts that I recommend a player has to go though and get out of, before making their first 100 break.
• The building bricks in your game that you need to lay, one at a time….
• How to improve our ability to self diagnose and self prescribe.
• How good we must be at self diagnosis and self prescription, to improve our game at all.
• How to extract the three most important elements from every match you lose.

• The similarity between this area of the game and a gymnasium.
• The five most important techniques to build up in this part of the game.
• My mental endurance record in competition and how I built up to that. HINT: It was 15 hours match play in one day, finishing with a ton in the last frame.

• The six types of difficult opponents.
• Simple strategies on how to make things easier for you, and harder for them.

• The best way to identify and follow your Standard Operating Procedures.
• The quickest way to learn to install a habit automatically.
• The three reasons that convince us NOT to make the effort and create healthy habits.
• How most sub 100 break players assume they are better than John Higgins, even though they aren’t!

• WHAT IS, and WHAT ISN’T concentration?
• The minimum period of time we need to be able to hold concentration.
• What should we be concentrating ON:
  • When YOU are at the table (there are six major options here).
  • When the OPPONENT is at the table. This includes what Alex Higgins told me he used to do.

What is confidence?

• Five factors that determine the confidence you have in your results, in the game, and on the shot.

• The five ways that players become lazy, and how to eliminate them:
  • Rushing the shot
  • Not applying your routines
  • Not trying 100%
  • Playing the wrong shot
  • Assuming you will win
• The part of human nature that will always draw us to laziness.
• The four things we can work on consistently to reduce laziness.

• Three simple skills you need to regulate your level of ‘mental arousal’ at the table.

• Three keys for using the mental movie rehearsal process.
• The six different situation types you can mentally rehearse.
• How to remove the ‘inner thermostat’ that regulates our achievement levels.
• The dreaded ‘Inner Voice’ and the REAL reason it criticizes, judges, and berates you. Includes two examples of this in action from my life, and how I easily recovered from them.
• The five second mindset shift that helped me win my first big tournament in 1989.

• The five filters you should apply to every goal you make. This ensures it has the best chance of being achieved.
• The ‘Purpose Support Team’ system that I have been using since the 90’s to help me stay on track.

• Realising fun is allowed, and how to experience it fully from time to time.
• What Martina Navratilova did to re-discover her love of the game when she was thinking of quitting…

• An amazing and fun thirty second drill you can do to demonstrate the powers of your concentration!