I've never been to a sports psychologist myself, but I always remember my coaches in whatever sport I played talking about 'visualizing' what you wanted to do during practice, like meditating, but with a specific goal in mind, not just trying to clear the mind of anything and everything. I had a coach in high school who was very big on that, and at the end of practice when we were dead friggin' tired, we would lay down on the ground, close our eyes and visualize a match for 5 minutes or so. I'm not sure we understood the importance of 'visualizing' a shot, match, game or whatever back then, but having played pool for a while now, I feel like I get it. You have to see the shot going in, you have to believe it will fall. It sounds simple, but I've been trying to talk myself out of making difficult shots for a long time, and when you stop doing it, it's like opening a door to another level of play. We all know confidence is important, but it can be very hard to change if you're just don't have the natural confidence some players do. Anyways, that's obviously just one small piece of any successful athlete's mental game/prep, but it's the one I remember best.
Now, I'm not into golf at all: don't play it and don't really care to learn it. That being said, the best books I've read/listened to on the mental side of a game were the the ones on golf and especially on putting by Bob Rotella:
http://www.amazon.com/Dr-Bob-Rotell...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274622031&sr=8-1
I got some of these on CD from the library and listened to them in the car. I think they helped a lot, and I think listening to them was much better than reading them. Now, there's obviously material in these books that is specific to golf, but you'd be surprised by how relevant 80-90% of it is to pool. The most relevant to pool is the sections where he discusses putting. It's crazy how much it sounds like he's talking about a pool shot at some times. Every player could definitely learn something from these, and while those who have very specific issues they want to work out or those who are at the pro level might gain from seeing someone reputable one-on-one, these books should help with recognizing and beginning to overcome most of the mental obstacles.
One last thought. While it's clear that the pro/shortstop level player has a lot to gain by improving their mental game as they're at the level where every little optimization is key to maintaining an edge on their opponents, I think it's as or even more valuable for a player who can't play that often, maybe has a job, doesn't have a table at home, not that many players in their area, etc., to improve their mental game. The reason is that the return value is huge. If you can't afford to or just don't have access to a table to play every day, it's going to be very difficult to ever get past a certain physical level of play. But you're still going to be missing shots and losing matches you shouldn't, even with your limited play time each week, because you lose confidence, talk yourself out of a shot, let the other guy get in your head, etc. If you can improve your mental game so that when you miss a shot, it's simply because you missed it, and not because you made yourself miss it or let outside stimuli influence you so that you became more likely to miss it, well, then you're going to be a much much stronger player. I know it's helped me a lot, and while I don't have the time to practice every day like I wished I did, I can work on my mental game whenever. Hope this is of help or at least interest to someone. I assume it is if you made it this far...
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