Stereotypes of thinking and their impact on the quality of your poker game

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Hi! My name is Sofia and I am a qualified poker psychologist. In my articles, I will gradually cover various psychological topics, starting with the basic ones. This will expand your knowledge in this area of human life. For poker players, psychology is especially relevant, which is why Alexey Exan13 writes and talks about it so much. In this article, I will talk about thinking, its stereotypes and their impact on your life and profession.

Thinking is a mental process that is actively involved in our lives.

1. How Thinking Stereotypes Affect the Game of Poker

Stereotypes of thinking regulate our behavior and often lead to the use of ineffective strategies leading to mistakes and failures. To prevent them, it is necessary to understand how the thinking process works. Our thinking is formed from early childhood, embedding the beliefs and behavior strategies of parents and other loved ones, later transforming into a personal way of life, but using the usual schemes and solutions.

So, thinking controls our lives by more than 50%, because standard solutions, such as:

​These are all stereotypes that are embedded in our thinking as programs and played out in life with a small degree of awareness (along the thrust of a rut). It is important to understand that being constantly in the zone of stable habituality, it is difficult to grow as a person and a professional in his field of activity. Analyzing one's behavior, thoughts, and decisions is always an impetus to growth. And knowledge of negative stereotypes that lead to mistakes is 50% of further success in life. Also in poker - in your game there are habitual stereotypes and automatisms that are ingrained in your behavior. These can be both strategic stereotypes and stereotypes like playing in a certain room or in a certain tournament. 

To stay on the wave of success in the profession, a poker player needs to constantly modify his strategy and approach to the game. Previously, a good tournament can spoil, and it is necessary to abandon it in favor of another tournament. It can also be very useful to change the poker room, to change the usual to a more profitable one. For example, few novice players understand that it is much easier to start a career not in large rooms, but in small rooms with weak players, such as RedStar Poker. 

2. The main negative stereotypes of thinking

I will dwell on some of them in more detail, and then I will give diagrams of working with them.

Stereotypes about the monetary situation

If you adhere to the point of view that "everyone is given according to their wealth", "you can't jump over your head", "a lot of money is a heavy burden", "money spoils friendship and a person", "money gets hard work" and so on - all this leads you to the fact that your subconscious thinking perceives money as something bad, even if consciously it is rarely noticed by someone.

As a result, certain stereotypes of behavior are developed that do not contribute to increasing their material wealth.

Stereotypes about others, gender stereotypes

This includes such things as "all people are evil", "everyone thinks only about themselves", "no one can help me", "all men are assholes", "all girls are mercantile" and so on. This type of stereotypes is quite extensive, I'm sure if you sit down and think about what stereotypes you will have – you will have something to write out on a sheet. All this builds your communication – communication with other people can lead to misunderstanding, conflicts, and sometimes drive a person into loneliness, which he has no one to share with.

Stereotypes about peace and life

This category of stereotypes is the most confusing, since it has both negative and neutral stereotypes, such as: "luck bypasses me", "connections are needed everywhere", "my life is boring", "I will never be as successful as ...", "happiness is a relative phenomenon", "stability is the best solution" and so on. They make a person dependent on himself and the opinions of others, overcoming them is the most difficult, since changing his thoughts, a person will not see a short-term result, which will once again lead him to confirm his stereotypes. This is only the smallest share of examples, I think everyone, thinking alone with themselves, will notice one or another part of the stereotypes.

3. What to do with stereotypes

Methods of working with them are quite diverse. It is a constant work on oneself, one's thoughts, actions. I will give you practical tasks in the form of steps that will already help change your life for the better.

1. Step 1 is to become aware of these stereotypes, search for them and write them out. It is best to write out in a notebook, notes or any medium with which you can later work and handle to supplement.
2. Step 2 is to determine the influence of this stereotype on your behavior, whether it is positive, negative or neutral. Try to label each.
3. Step 3 - replacing the negative stereotype with a positive one, such as you would like to see it. Here you need to go a little beyond the usual, let your mind look wider, look for other ways.

Important: at first, you need to refer to your list of stereotypes as often as possible, especially positive substitutions.

It is also important to note that working on your thinking and changing your life to a higher quality level is better when you contact a specialist.