We've already discussed things like isolated exercises and dress rehearsals that can make our game more conscious. But in general, however, playing poker is more deceptive than anything else. If you rehearse a piano sonata, you can usually hear a missed note, but as a poker player you don't always know if you have made a mistake. Poker gives us constant feedback, but it is very noisy and chaotic. That is partly why it is difficult to learn the game.
Feedback causes mind conditioning. Positive feedback will encourage certain behaviours, negative feedback will discourage those behaviours. Imagine your mind as a rabbit in a cage, fed either with bits of food or electrified. Normally, you get food for doing good things and you get shaken up for doing bad things. But in poker, both the "food" and the "electric shock" sometimes come unexpectedly. Often there can seem to be no rhyme or reason: food, shock, food, shock, shock, food. When you experience such chaos, you feel lost and have all sorts of strange and alien confusions as to why the "food" or the "shock" comes. And that's not surprising, because that's what a newcomer does. When I was playing NL 10, after losing a few big pots with aces against 25o and 34o, I started to believe that playing low was the smart thing to do, because an opponent with a big pair would never guess that I had hit two pairs or trips with such a hand ...
That's what it means to be result-oriented. If you are result-oriented, you will respond to the surface level of feedback poker sends. For example, if you bluff and get beat, you lose confidence and decide it was a bad call. Being focused on the result means that you are affected by what the poker is doing to you at the time. But poker is a very capricious game and we, as experienced and thoughtful players, have to be aware of it. So, instead of letting poker 
to do whatever you want, you have to take matters into your own hands, put on a lab coat and become a scientist, powering or "electrocuting" your mind.
We want to be process-oriented. Instead of focusing on results and wanting to win every hand, let's focus on the process of making good decisions in the long term. This allows us to take actions that might make us lose the pot, but will not negatively affect us and will allow us to take the same action the next time. It gives us control over our own conditioning. Being process-oriented allows us to bypass the randomness and chaos of poker and directly shape our mind for the ideal game.
Well, how do you become process-oriented? How do you stop feeling bad when you lose a hand? There are two answers. The first is that it gets easier with time. Lose enough hands and you will become desensitised to losing and the negativity that comes with it. The second answer is a bit more complicated, and brings us back to the realm of cognitive shifts, but that's for another article.
Haseeb Qureshi
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