In The Zone

Practice pre-visualization to help catch more bass

Pick up any book on sport psychology, and you’ll find at least one or two chapters on visualization. The reason for that is visualization just flat works. Golf, baseball, basketball, football, tennis, as well as track and field are a few of the many sports that rely on creating and using visual images to enhance performance.

However, anglers, including tournament anglers who should know better, tend to skeptically regard mental exercises as airy-fairy, psycho-garbage that can’t possibly apply to them. Even people who believe mental exercises like visualization might help are inclined to think of them as work. And the last thing a busy angler needs is more work.

Okay Charlie, I’m with you on that.  Like you, I have too much to do, not enough time and precious little room in my schedule for extraneous (that means unnecessary) stuff.  However visualization exercises can be fun; they can also be crazy sometimes. Here are a few examples of how fun and crazy visualization can make you a better angler.

With the exception of those suicidal fish that climb on your line even when you’re not paying attention, you and everybody else will fish better when you’re relaxed and having fun than when you’re tense, frustrated, or “#^%$&, which loosely translates: upset!

So the next time a jet skier cuts in front of your boat, instead of throwing a hissy fit, visualize one of those home video blooper scenes on television where the guy on the jet ski takes a dump and comes up spitting water like a whale. If you have any kind of imagination at all you can play this scene three or four times in your head and perhaps it will make you smile or laugh. Whatever the resulting emotional state, it will make it easier for you to fish effectively than if you get tied in a knot with anger, or worse yet, chase after the jet ski dude in your bass boat.

I know one tournament guy who had great fun using visualization in situations where somebody beat him to his best spot.  Instead of getting frustrated, he visualized the offending angler getting sick to his stomach and throwing up on the weigh-in stage!  So that’s a gross/goofy example, but it made this guy laugh instead of swear, and when it comes to concentrating on a complex sport like fishing, that’s a good thing.

Creating visual images is a great way to pass the time on long drives to distant tournament sites. Some guys get books on tape for over the road travel while others like soothing or inspirational music. However, you can also get audiotapes and CDs that walk you through creating a positive visual image of yourself as a confident, strong, resilient person/angler. Better to walk into the pre-tournament meeting feeling that way rather than feeling tentative, anxious and apprehensive, don’t you think?

The best use of visualization involves creating a mental picture of you at your very best.  This might be a time when you won a tournament under tough circumstances, where you fished calmly and caught your kicker fish in the last five minutes, or where you did some other equivalent of pulling a rabbit out of your hat that made the people you fish with go, “Whoa, look at that!” 

So, create the visual picture of yourself at the top of your game, and then replay that image over and over and over. Psychological research says the positive emotional state this exercise creates can lead to improvement in your next performance.