Hey Jared, I've enjoyed your videos, so rather than sit back and reap all of the rewards from you, so I figured it's only right to respond to your blog post as you requested.
Intentive control
I view our control more so as having an intention and being aware to follow through on it. As you said if you try to control things, like say control your free throw shot in basketball, it actually hurts your performance because you’re thinking too much. This throws off your synchronization between body, mind and basketball. However that doesn’t mean there aren’t fundementals that you want to be in tuned with unconsciously competently. For example you may be a good but not great free throw shooter and have the perfect technique, however from time to time your form slips a bit because you get lazy. This is where having that intention and awareness allows you to recognize you’re making this mistake, and so in the future if you can eliminate this, you’re on your way to unconsciously mastering this skill.
I agree control is about making a decision to do something. Without the intention of doing so if you aren’t a master at something already, then you will be performing sub-optimally because unconsciously your mind doesn’t automatically do the things necessary to perform at a high level, given it hasn’t been ingrained properly.
As you said you can’t control variance, so the thing you should be trying to control is your reaction to it. This just comes back to emotional control, improving at it little by little and using good strategies to do so.
My philosophy kind of on free will somewhat ties into this. We’re sort of a slave to our knowledge. The decisions we make are based on the stuff we have learned inside of our brain, coupled with genetics which creates our tendencies. So the only real control we have is having an open mind and seeking more knowledge in a way that will give us the ability to change the decisions we make. Using intention to make a decision to create new tendencies, unconsciously competently we can change as a person.
On a change of topic, how is your book coming along? Do you have an idea when it may be released?
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