If you’ve never heard of author Michael Singer, his story will fascinate you.
Having fallen in love with meditation in his early 20s, Singer made the extreme decision to give up all attachment to personal preferences by ignoring the endless avalanche of likes and dislikes we all hear inside our heads. Instead, he elected to simply let life choose where it took him, a decision that eventually led him to teaching himself computer code on a whim in the late 1970’s. Two decades later, his very first big project, the world’s first online medical billing system, sold to WebMD at a $5 billion valuation.
Following decades in the corporate world, Singer returned to his spiritual roots and wrote the now international super-smash hit book The Untethered Soul. He followed that up with his second consecutive New York Times Best Seller – The Surrender Experiment, both of which detailed how a simple shift in perspective could change the course of your entire life.
With that in mind, here are three key insights from The Surrender Experiment that will not only reduce your stress and anxiety, but have the power to help you completely eliminate tilt from your poker game.
- My formula for success was very simple: Do whatever is put in front of you with all your heart and soul without regard for personal results. Do the work as though it were given to you by the universe itself – because it was.
When we sit down at the poker table, we generally have an expectation for how the session will go. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, our mind anticipates that we’ll outplay our opponents, get lucky when we need to, and end up with more money than we started with. Unfortunately, when the results don’t live up to these expectations, as they often won’t, we feel a sense of injustice and are at risk of allowing the complaining voice inside our head to amplify our suffering in the form of tilt.
Instead, Singer advises that we approach each session with a commitment to the game itself, detached from the results. By focusing on the task at hand – playing to the best of our abilities, whatever that might mean in each specific moment – we eliminate the emotional turmoil that comes from unmet expectations and strengthen our resolve both at the poker table and in life itself.
- Could it really be so hard to just let it rain when it rains and be sunny when it’s sunny without complaining about it?
Taking the concept of surrender a step further, Singer points out that by accepting the natural ups and downs of life – like the ones inherent in a high-variance game like poker – we learn to respond to what actually is, rather than what we wish it to be.
Just as we can learn to accept the weather without complaint, we can accept the unavoidable “rain” within poker as well. When we encounter a bad beat, or even an extended string of losses, instead of letting frustration and tilt take over, we must recognize that these moments are as natural as the changing weather patterns. In doing so, we free ourselves from the resistance we feel towards unfavorable outcomes and utilize that energy to better ourselves instead.
- Because I had inwardly surrendered each step of the way, no scars were left on my psyche. It had been like writing on water – the impressions only lasted while the events were actually taking place.
One of the most important aspects of tilt management, and the one least talked about, is how cumulative it can be. You might find one bad session, or even one bad month, emotionally manageable, but stack two or three or four of them together and suddenly those once small flesh wounds begin leaving a real mark. In fact, an extended downswing is one of the most dangerous times for a poker player’s bankroll, not just because of the financial losses, but due to the deepening of the scars. If we’re not careful, a bad beat that would have previously rolled off us like a drop of rain on a waterproof jacket, has the power to derail us in a big way.
However, as Singer points out, if we develop a mindset of surrender, not allowing the mind to attach too strongly to how it wants the cards to play out, the scars get no chance to form and the bad beats take on the form of writing on water, there for a moment and then…gone.
