While gambling certainly involves luck, your mental outlook can be equally important – and influence whether you walk away from the roulette table, the slot machines, a sports bet, or a more sophisticated wager a winner (or a loser).
Winners had clear goals about where they wanted to go. They believed they could control their destiny, not through any magical voice speaking from within but through careful work. This is why they cultivated winning habits, and applied them on to the concrete situations that arose in their lives.
Positive Mentality
You see, a positive mental attitude is the ability to imagine winning scenarios, who knows if by having a positive attitude a gambler can make better choices and also enjoy the playing process more! In addition, a positive mental attitude might help gamblers break free from cognitive diseases. The general mental disorder of gamblers is distinguished by illusion, since many players use their imagination to delude themselves into believing they are winning when the reality is that they are utterly lost. That’s exactly what makes people bet more and more, even though they really can’t afford to. There are indeed two common cognitive errors associated with casino gambling: gambler’s fallacy and confirmation bias.
Gamblers who want to adopt a good ‘cognitive set state’ must think positively – that is, they must think of themselves, their inner motivation, which serves as a source of motivation and energising of people, and helps them achieve their goals in a cheerful, confident manner, while being resilient and positive. Recently, researchers studied regular ‘slot machine’ gamblers to ascertain what kind of positive thinking strategies are used during playtime at the one-armed bandits because this would help online game and land-based game developers pave the way for safer gambling in the future. After an exhaustive interview with regular gamblers, nine strategies of ‘positive thinking’ and various intricate sub-strategies were identified. The participating gamblers and their gambling behaviour produced the following ‘positive thinking’ strategies during their playtime:
1. Comparative Thinking: Consciously comparing one’s current gambling session with a past ‘hot’ session;
2. Prophylactic Thinking: Consciously excluding any negative interpretation of a near-miss outcome for a previous wager.
3. Expectancy Reduction Strategies (ER): Consciously reducing their expectation for a winning outcome.
4. Avoidance Of Reversals Strategies (AR): Consciously avoiding a win which would be followed by a reverse winning status.
Chasing Validation Techniques. Consciously pursuing a desired outcome (e.g., win or jackpot) to be validated.Biased Frequency Thinking. Consciously indicating that ‘my machine has a short-cycle’ or ‘the machine was getting cold’.Responsibility Avoidance. Consciously refusing to acknowledge and assume responsibility for the loss (e.g., ‘It ‘s not my fault’, ‘I’m not a loser’).And Resourcefulness. Consciously thinking ‘I can afford to play; I have enough money to lose’.
A winner is someone who thinks she can, who knows she can, and who continues to work toward the goals that are most important to her.Try more free tips on growing into a positive thinker. Click here now to access Denis Waitley’s classic personal growth program The Psychology of Winning. It’s been one of the best-selling personal growth programs ever released!
Fear of Loss
Winners do not concern themselves with what might go wrong. Instead, they focus their energy on what might go right. Much like the golfer who imagines hitting a perfect drive, winners visualise success; their concentration on this positive possibility is vital to their success, and should encourage risk-taking.
A form of loss aversion is how gambling starts. A loss is personal and our mind is structured to do whatever it can to avoid a loss. We will put on a brave face but the truth is that if some of your money is sucked away from you, it is much harder to regain than in cases where the odds are in your favour and you actually make money. The money you win does not have the same psychological impact. In fact, it’s startling to realise how people — gamblers in particular — can undergo a complete transformation and instantly act as if their financial life is under their own control, when they should be acting exactly the opposite. Gambling addiction always starts here. Gambling addiction always starts with this awesome feeling of having control over one’s finances, and leads directly into financial suicide and the lifelong need for actual gambling experiences.
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Self-Esteem
In fact, one of the greatest weapons in a gambler’s arsenal is simply a healthy amount of self-worth. ‘Positive expectations motivate, and a motivated person gainesse confidence,’ says Waitley. ‘You can change a person’s physiologie just by their thoughts; the health-minded person tends to be healthy, tend to be sick, the sickly person tend to be sick because the body is governed by the mind.’
Winning people do not let emotions, negative or irrational, steer things; nor do they let mistakes, Real or imagined, take over. Failures or setbacks play no part in their over them, as they have treated themselves at a certain moment as part of nature, not apart from nature. They have decided to go along with whatever is happening and do what they can to fit in.
In The Psychology of Winning, the self-help stalwart Denis Waitley — an award-winning motivational guru and the author of more than 12 books, and more than 16 million audio programmes sold — maps out a 10-lesson blueprint to total victory.
Motivation
Another difference is a factor that you’ve probably heard many times before: winners are highly motivated while losers are not. Winners are people who have a positive outlook, see the bright side and are optimistic. These mindsets promote motivation and, therefore, promote success. Not so for losers, whose past failures (replayed in their minds thousands of times every single day) set the bar for their future failure (which they almost certainly anticipate), thus detracting motivation and driving them down the path of poor decisions.
In our study, 184 college students in an introductory psychology course completed a motivational checklist assessment, a measure that asks individuals to rate how much each gambling motivation applies to them and why they gamble. Analysis of the results revealed that participants rated enhancement and coping motives highest, and a minority of participants cited financial motives. The finding that these disordered gamblers exhibited significant negative projections was consistent with research that suggests that a generalised tendency to infer internal and harmful traits in others – a bias termed ‘Participation Motivation’ – can serve as a defence mechanism in some people, making them resistant to seeking help. We believe that the use of a fictional significant other will make such projections more likely, thereby decreasing resistance and possibly aligning more closely with Motivational Interviewing strategies (Miller and Rollnick, 2013). The utility of motive checklist measures in assessing gambling motivation needs further research including analyses of the validity of motive-based measures.