Coaching Corner: The Whac-A-Mole Process, Part 1

Have you ever been in an arcade or an amusement park, and seen or played the game, “Whac-A-Mole”? It’s shaped like a flat table with holes in it, and inside each hole is a plastic rodent, what they are calling a mole.

Armed with a rubber mallet the player attempts to hit the heads of the plastic moles as they pop up through the holes at random intervals. The player tries to anticipate which one is going to come up next and then gets points for each mole they whack.

The thing is, once you whack that mole, it goes down for a little while, but then it comes back up again. And so you never know where it’s going to come from. You don’t know what order it’s going to happen in, and you’re going to see the same mole over and over and over again.

This is a very important concept for us to wrap our heads around. Personal development gurus make it sound like transformation is a one-and-done process. You take the course, or you do a round of coaching, and you get to the heart of what’s keeping you stuck, where your blocks are, what your limiting beliefs are, you do exercises to deal with it and that’s it – you have those breakthroughs, you get your transformation and you’re done – you’re fixed.

Sounds good when you’re trying to sell something. But there’s an integrity issue here, because it’s not quite that simple. Yes, all those things I just said are true – you get to the heart of what’s keeping you stuck, where your blocks are, what your limiting beliefs are, you do exercises to deal with them and you have those breakthroughs, you get your transformation, you will never be the same again. But it doesn’t end there!

That transformation is an ongoing process, and it has to be maintained.  And the real crime of this is that people go through the initial process, and they think they’re done, and then when something does pop up, they think there’s something wrong with them, that they must be broken, because everyone else has gone through their transformation and they are now fixed. Forever.

It’s important to understand that if this has been your experience, you are not unique AND you are NOT broken! You just need the tools to maintain that machine so that it keeps running smoothly, so that when the mole pops up – as it inevitably will – you can say, “Oh, I’ve seen that before,” and knock it back down quickly, effectively, and without damaging any other part of who you are, or your life.

The good news is that unlike the Whac-A-Mole game, in real life when we deal with the moles correctly, they begin to pop up less and less.

Because habit does affect personality and new patterns create new neural pathways, which really do change how we think at a very core level.

But first we need to learn how to create a pattern for dealing with the moles in our lives. We can do this by looking at the best strategy for playing the game and then applying that strategy to our lives. 

Aaron Fechter, the creator of Whac-A-Mole shared some insights on how to effectively play the game. He says that the most useful technique is to take a hit and return to middle position above the table, never looking at any of the moles, but using your field of vision and peripheral vision to watch the playing field. Just look at the whole field and react when you see something out of the corner of your eye and then immediately return to center position ready to hit the next one. Moreover, he says, if you look at any particular mole, you will miss another one.

Another major point that Aaron Fechter makes, which is not something most people consider, is that to score points, you aren’t actually trying to push the mole back in the hole, you simply need to make contact with it. The game registers contact when a certain amount of pressure is placed on the rodent’s head, so you don’t need to hit it with maximum strength to achieve the goal, even though it might feel like that’s what you need to do, especially in the heat of the moment when your adrenaline is pumping.  In fact, says the game’s creator, if you do you are just wasting energy and slowing down your response time! Taking the slight extra time to just tap the mole on the head instead of whacking it with all your might actually makes your response time on each mole faster.

Now any metaphor only goes so far and according to Mr. Fechter there’s no point in trying to memorize the pattern because there isn’t one pattern to memorize. The arcade game has been programmed with an algorithm that is about as random as you can get.  On the other hand, for us humans, there usually is a pattern and if we can learn to see it, we can anticipate when another mole is going to pop up and deal with it appropriately.

Ok, so what can we take from all that?  What is the Whac-A-Mole process?

1. Don’t look directly at the moles, rely on your peripheral vision

When we realize that some things are still coming up for us, we tend to worry and become hyper-vigilant. When that happens, we enter a state of heightened alert, keeping our eyes open for things about to come up.