Poker With Presence

When you learn how to savor, you can walk away from things free of regret

When we experience fear, our brain chemistry changes—and we become vulnerable to believing things to be true that we otherwise never would.

It's not about the words—it's about the feeling being experienced when the words come through.

Talking about your issues rarely is enough to solve them—and quite often just enables you to continue repeating your mistakes.

Sometimes the most profitable spot is the one you haven't even studied before.

You don't become a consistent high performer through a single moment of enlightenment. It only happens once you become the person who chooses presence—moment after moment, day after day.

The worst advice you can implement into your game in big moments is to "act like you've been there before," because you haven't—and trying to pretend you have will create tension in your system and take you out of presence.

Relaxing into your highest performance happens far more often when you are completely comfortable in your own skin—which means you've got to learn how to get out of the blame and criticism game, and deeper into the appreciation game.

When you don't know what to do, the best way to get to the answer is to focus on getting completely present and curious—and from there, you build your emotional resilience and let the answer find you.

As you continue to learn how to play with presence, going back to the old way is no longer an option.

When you lack the ability to understand what context your opponents are living in, you can't make the proper adjustments against them.

When the nervous system gets stuck in a loop, strange things can happen.

Insight follows experience, and to get the full insight, you've got to let the entire cycle of an experience play out.

Sometimes success can be your own worst enemy—something I had to learn the hard way.

The key to getting where you want to go isn't about projecting a certain image out into the world and to yourself. 

Checking your results during sessions isn't what creates an emotional reaction inside you—the emotion was already there before you ever did it.

When you stop trying to pretend you're something you're not, a huge weight drops away and you can finally play and perform from a place of creativity and flow.

When we lock in to a read without being open to feedback from our environment, it can often lead to big errors in judgement later on.

When the action starts heating up at the table, you need a reliable way to notice when you start to "spin out," which is the sign that you're about to do something you'll regret later.

When you feel like someone is "in your head" and always a step ahead of you, they're not—they've just reached a higher level of emotional congruence than you have. Fix this, and you can play your game the way you want.

Nothing is more damaging to your long term success than avoiding the emotions that come with the swings of the game. To play your best in big moments, you've got to learn how to feel it all as it comes.

We all love the idea of truly reaching our full potential, and we've all caught glimpses of it—but the way to make it happen may not be what you thought.

When we have unresolved issues about our own lives, it can quickly get in the way of creating connection with others, and also get in the way of being able to see and think clearly at the poker table.

To reach your highest levels of performance, you need to understand that certain situations require you to stop thinking, and start feeling.

Entitlement isn't something you rise above, it's something you learn how to be with and redirect into higher levels of performance.