The successful careers of many of poker’s elite have been built partially on the back of failure: bad reads, mistimed aggression, and final tables that go sideways and refuse to fade from memory.
Jared Alderman, one of poker’s leading mindset/performance coaches, knows all too well that success doesn’t come from avoiding failure, but from extracting value from it.
“My life in the realm of performance has been marked by failure,” says Alderman. “I learned many hard lessons throughout trying and failing to do a myriad of things.”
To hell and back
It wasn’t until Alderman had joined the Navy and finished dead last during a tenure in their (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) program, after previously quitting Navy SEAL training during its brutal ‘Hell Week’, that a self-destructive pattern became impossible to ignore.
Beneath the career and physical failures was something deeper: a cycle of self-loathing and non-acceptance that had been an unconscious undercurrent quietly shaping almost every decision Alderman had made in life.
Alderman’s turning point came when someone finally paid attention to the burdens he was carrying. Someone cared. Someone saw beneath the superficial persona he’d been projecting for far too many years.
For the first time, Alderman gave himself permission to speak openly about deeply buried fears, pain, and disappointment. That release changed everything for him.
“To many people who heard I had quit BUDS (Navy SEAL six-week initial training program culminating in hell week), they’ll think I was some massive failure. Yet it was one of the most important experiences I've had. I needed all those pent-up feelings to be pushed to their edge, for them to be released, in an environment where they could be taken care of.
“From there, my life, my experience had a new trajectory. I had a new awareness of the pain I had felt and what I really wanted. I cherish that moment as one of the best moments of my life.”
Through that journey, he eventually gained momentum toward self-acceptance and being fully present in the day-to-day living of life.
Along the way, poker played an essential role in Alderman’s journey toward healing and, eventually, a rewarding career as a performance coach to many of today’s poker superstars.
“I think attempting many things and pursuing becoming an elite in many different areas gives me a unique insight into what it takes to perform well at something.
“What I find myself doing now is helping people to perform at their best while understanding themselves, focusing in their own way, and most importantly, helping people be happy doing it.”
Poker is the creative mind in action
Alderman shared with PokerOrg during the recent ‘The Interview’ podcast (premiering soon) that the logic in math is a linear problem, where there are purposeful discrete steps that are applied to any mathematical problem to get a correct answer.
“Poker is this really big creative game,” says Alderman. “Any creative problem you have to process the information in parallel to the math logic of the game.
“The big poker spots are not a linear problem; they’re a creative problem-solving task. It's a process you need not to interrupt. We know about how the brain does creativity, the stages of the creative process, which happen in different regions of the brain. And the moment you fire on a linear process, it actually interrupts the other processes.
“This is really important because linear processing is really an important part of creativity, but it's the last step of the creative process. It actually verifies, checks, and critiques a creative idea. It is not what gives you the creative idea.”
Alderman stresses that you need to be calm and open to allow your mind to put all the pieces of the puzzle together to gain insight into the problem-solving process. And that a personal meditation practice can add exponential value to your life and your poker game.
“I find that meditation is one of the most valuable practices for people. It is the training of the use of your attention in a skilled way, where it's not just something that happens based on what attracts you, but it's something you actually utilize.
“At the moment of creative problem solving, a person’s attention comes inward to their bodies and to their experience, where their ability to interpret and organize that information is stored.
“But for so many people in poker, they're doing the opposite. And this is what non-creative people do on average. Their attention is kind of inward while they're playing. They're in their own head, they're thinking. And then, when something stressful happens, they go outward. They go outward to try to solve a problem out there. ‘What is he doing? What is he thinking? Why's he doing this?"
“If you even think about what you're trying to do when you're trying to solve something creatively, you're trying to absorb information and then interpret it. Right? It can't be characterized by words. It can only be characterized by a felt sense in your body.”
Poker is a very special community
Alderman is host to the popular ‘Seeking Balance’ podcast and finds great value in understanding that all of our journeys through life are very similar.
“It's funny to me how in this pursuit of becoming great at something, people stumble upon a lot of the same kinds of ideas.
I find it very uplifting and amazing for me to get to interview people whom I only knew from a distance in poker to share their ideas and perspectives and get to know them as people."
The full, exclusive episode of The Interview with high-performance coach Jared Alderman will be available soon at PokerOrg, on YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts.
Follow Jared on X or visit Jared's website for more info.
