Its all a mind game...

   Its 1:54 am, after a prolonged effort to get sleep,( in vain), i finally decide to bring myself to write this article.

90% of all battles are won in the mind they say. May sound hard to digest initially, but then after a lot of experiences, it seems like a reasonable statement. We often expend a vast amount of energy into refining a lot of superficial aspects before venturing into any enterprise, but fail to realize that all these outwardly important parameters help us just 10% in achieving what we set out to. History bares evidence to how huge, enormous talents have often failed to materialize to results due to lack of composure or mental stability at the deciding times.

  I'm sure we all can connect and relate to this point by recalling some instance from our own lives where we 'choked' or fell to pressure, when our 'potential' indicated a very high probability of enforcing a favorable result with ease, be it sports, or academics, or giving a live performance or for that matter, even simply walking up to a girl to make conversation. We often find ourselves in places wherein the very gravity of the situation and the grave consequences of failure apply tremendous pressure which gets the better of us. I spend  hours to practice a song on guitar, to reach a certain level of perfection, but fail miserable to even compare to the same when playing it to some one.

 Let us have a look at some of the examples from cricket:

1) The indian team under Sourav Ganguly (2002-2005) almost regularly chocked in the finals. The team would perform very well through out tournaments and would invariably loose to other teams in the final matches.

2) South Africa have earned the title of 'world cup chokers'.

3) Pakistan have never won a World-cup game against India. (Even on occasions when they were way better as a team and would either eventually go on to win the cup or end up as finalists)

4)There are also positive examples, like when a strong team faces the minnows, it sometimes so occurs that inspite of the minnows producing high quality cricket, the stronger team always ends up winners. (The fact that they are playing minnows gives them immense confidence)

There must be innumerable such examples, in diverse fields.

 The concept of 'subconscious mind' is astonishing and thrills me very much. The concept of a 'conscious mind' is something we are very aware of. Our brain allocates the different tasks we undertake to either the conscious mind or the subconscious mind. Its evident that most of the tasks undertaken by the subconscious mind are completed almost to perfection. In that case, the ideal deal one would think, would be to get your brain to allot as many tasks as possible to the subconscious mind. But we all know, this has its own limitations. How hard is it to push tasks into the subconscious brain and yet maintain enough balance between the conscious part and the former?

This is an intriguing point. food for thought!