Consider the following scenario: You’re a new poker player who is invested in a strategy coach to get you on the track to making steady income at the tables. You end up in a hand with Kh2h on a board of AsTh9h4c and your opponent accidentally flashes you his hand of Ac6d.

You want to know what your chances were of winning, so you review the hand with your coach during your next session. Your coach tells you there was a 20% chance that you’d catch a flush on the river and moves on to the next hand you want to review. Technically, your coach is correct, but has he improved your game? Not really.

From my perspective, coaches who give these kind of answers are not coaches at all. Luckily, no decent strategy coach would gloss over this obvious opportunity to teach you how to calculate probability. Unfortunately, in equivalent mental coaching scenarios, you may be settling for the right answer and not even realize you’re missing out on game-changing information.

In the example above, it’s easy to spot the problem with handing you the answer instead of teaching you how to get the answer yourself. The former only helps with one situations that’s unlikely to come again anytime soon; the latter helps you handle a wide variety of situations that you’ll encounter every time you play.

Consider a similar scenario with a mental coach: You’ve found a soft game and you’ve tripled up. Then your pocket aces get cracked by a recreational player who gloats about it for the next 15 minutes. You end up spewing off half your stack over the next five orbits before you leave the table.

The next week, you schedule a session with a reputable mental coach, tell him you’re struggling with tilt, and he tells you to do the Fibonacci sequence in your head to calm down next time you take a bad beat. The problem with this answer is much more subtle than the strategy example, especially if you’re new to mental coaching, but it’s just as significant.

The problem with this coaching style is two-fold. First, it creates dependency. By spoon-feeding you answers, you have to come back to your coach for every subsequent question.

Second, it teaches you nothing about the underlying causes of your problem. Even if your coach’s advice works for you, you’ll never be able to address the root cause or extrapolate on that advice to develop your own mental techniques. In short, you’re unlikely to ever reach your optimal mental game.

So what should you be asking to ensure you do reach your optimal mental game? When in a mental coaching session, you should be looking for the why. If you can figure out why something is or is not happening, you can begin to understand it and begin to effect change.

Do not just settle for an answer and accept it as true before moving on to the next question. If your problem is tilt, it’s possible that the Fibonacci sequence may actually help you most. However, your coach shouldn’t recommend that solution unless he or she is basing that suggestion on knowledge of how you personally think and react to situations at the table.

By taking the time to understand you personally, your coach can help you better understand yourself and teach you how to change your own mental game.

Here is another way to think about it: imagine you are taking a taxi somewhere you have never been before. You say, “Driver take me here please” and you end up where you asked to go. However, you were staring out the window lost in thought or looking at your phone along the way and have no idea how you ended up at that destination. You will need to call another cab when you are ready to leave.

Mental coaching should be more like driving yourself with a friend in the passenger seat. Your co-pilot tells you where to turn and what landmarks to look out for along the way. When you end up at your destination, you not only remember how you got there, but you learned what signposts were along the way so you can explore on your own next time without getting lost.

Over time, clients should be able to map out processes that work for them so that they can solve their own issues. What I want for my clients is for them to no longer need my help. This should be the ultimate goal for any mental coach. If you have any doubt that your mental coach has another goal in mind, you may be settling for the right answer instead of pursuing your optimal game.

John Wood is the on-staff mental coach at Alex Fitzgerald’s Pokerheadrush.com. For a discount on his mental coaching services, please visit this link.