Entry 25.25

I have a confession to make. I’m a hypocrite. Now before you completely write me off, please hear me out. It’s really not as bad as it sounds. I know I have told some of you this phrase. The same phrase that is a common phrase in the media and golf instruction everywhere. Here’s the phrase. “Trust the process.” I’ve been thinking about that phrase a lot lately. Months ago, I put together a presentation for my PGM students called “The Performance Process.” I’ve asked and encouraged my athletes from each of my instructional domains, MU PGM, PGA HOPE Fayetteville, and Dynamic Golf Solutions, to “trust the process”. As you embrace the journey and don’t get hung up on results, you begin to enjoy the process more. Then results start to show. Slowly, but surely, they manifest themselves. As I’ve taught, I’ve learned more and more to trust my process. I have made more gains in the last year in my own game than I did in the prior 9 years that I have been playing the game. So, trusting my process there isn’t where I have failed. It’s trusting the process in my teaching that I feel I have failed. I’ve been so worried about results that I lost my focus. I alluded to this a few weeks ago in one of my Ponderings. Thankfully, I got a wake-up call from a random video on Facebook. Now, this dip is bound to happen. No matter what you are trying to improve. You are going to hit a decline. It is part of the process. It is what you decide when these declines happen that makes all the difference. Instead of realizing that the dip was just a part of the journey, I let it consume me. I saw my goals slipping through my fingers. Hopefully, I didn’t allow my depression to leak into my teaching. I did my very best not to. And while some people still feel like mental health issues should be kept private, I have no issues with saying it out loud. I’ve struggled with depression in the past in other areas of my life, so I recognize it. But while depression is a part of everyday life, mine was just a small dip in my pursuit of excellence in my teaching. I failed to recognize it immediately and therefore failed to trust my process. That dip was caused by my focus on the end result and not on enjoying the journey. Thankfully, I am surrounded by you all, who uplift me when I feel down. That combined with my wake-up call, my focus is back where it should be.

Now, here’s the big question. What is the process? What am I supposed to be trusting? I think that’s why its so hard for some people. They have no idea what they are supposed to be trusting. Not going to lie, when it comes to trusting my process in my teaching, there are days when I feel like I have no idea what I am doing. It’s not like playing the game. In golf, there are pretty good prescriptions for what you need to do in order to perform better. If you want to shoot even par for eighteen holes, the first two numbers you need to focus on are Greens in Regulation (GIR) and Total Putts. Twelve GIR and thirty Total Putts are the two numbers most correlated with shooting par. People get so focused on strokes that they lose focus on the process. Now to hit that many GIR, you have to focus on getting the ball into play off the tee. Now you have indirectly added another prescription. Well, if we are missing six greens, then we need our short game to be sharp so we can get the ball close to the hole. That’s where those six one-putts comes into the picture. Add another prescription to the mix. We’ve now wrapped up pretty much your entire game. Except for one thing: how many strokes total you take. Don’t even worry about it. Let it be a result of you focusing on your process. Get the ball in play, make an attempt to hit the green, hit a good wedge if necessary, then read the green and roll the putt. It sounds so simple, but that’s what we want. We don’t want complicated. It’s much easier to follow a process when it’s simple.

Recently, one of my teaching peers and a close acquaintance, Sean Kennedy, the 2025 Palmer Maples Teacher of the Year here in the Carolinas, shared a story on his Instagram that Bruce Lee did. I don’t know where the original video came from. But it was all about trusting the process. Bruce Lee called it “Engaged Detachment” rather than trusting the process. Bruce defined it as “being so committed to the present action while remaining completely unconcerned with its outcome.” He then went on to tell a story about a 1967 karate tournament in Long Beach that he participated in. He said before one of his matches that he observed his opponent pacing, rehearsing moves and visualizing victory. Hmm, sounds familiar. Almost like the typical pre-shot routine we hear and read about (or in today’s age I guess ‘watch’ is a better word to use than read. Not enough people read anymore. If you are new to my Ponderings, you will learn that I am an avid reader. Currently, I’m reading a book on genetics in sport looking for nuggets to bring to my teaching). Find the feel that you need for the shot at hand and visualize the shot are two of the most common pre-shot routine steps that you will find. But Bruce has insight into what happened to his opponent during the match. Bruce says his opponent’s desire to win caused tension in his body and narrowed his vision. A little tension is good in the golf swing for some people. But that is what I call purposeful tension, different from the unwanted tension Bruce is talking about. If we have had the tight movers and loose movers conversation, you know what I’m talking about. I’m a tight mover. In layman’s terms, my mobility isn’t good. Most of the time, I don’t need any additional tension in my system. But I have days where I feel loosey goosey which you would think would be great for me. But it’s not. I rely on my normal tension to help me create speed and retain control so on days where I feel abnormally loose, my golf swing goes haywire. I have to add some tension back into the system. But again, a completely different kind of tension. Bruce is talking about mentally induced tension. The kind that tends to creep into you golf swing where you are trying to control everything. When you try to control everything, your sequence goes kaput and the control you are seeking remains out of reach.

The story continues. Bruce said he strangely found himself in the state of engaged detachment. He was present in the moment, engaged in every block and strike, yet detached from the desire to win. It allowed him to respond “without the delay of thought or the hesitation of fear”. But it is the next part that I find completely fascinating. Bruce says when we feel like we need something to happen in our lives, our bodies tense, mind narrows, breathing shallows, we become blind to alternatives, deaf to subtle information. Now we are talking two completely different kinds of sport because in one we have an opponent that doesn’t change much (the course) and in the other our opponent is constantly moving. But what Bruce describes is completely applicable to both. We’ve already talked about tension. But what about the other facets? Does our mind narrow when we feel like we really need to hit a good shot in golf? Absolutely! And that usually gets us focused on the result, not the process. Does our breathing shallow? I bet if we hooked you up while you played golf, we would see a difference in respiration rate during your shot process. What does shallow breathing do to us? What does shallow breathing even mean? I’ve come to despise the phrase “Take a deep breath” simply for the fact that very few people truly understand what that means. It’s something we actually do very naturally as youngsters. But some research has found that as we age, we tend to start breathing shallower. An easy test to see if you breath deep or shallow is to stand shirtless in front of a mirror and watch yourself breathe. To truly take advantage of this test though, you need the observation before you get the answer. So go watch the way you breathe before you read any further if you want to know what you do.

Did you do it? Great! Now let’s talk about what you want to be doing. If you noticed your shoulders going up as you inhale and down when you exhale, you are breathing shallow. Shallow breathing brings in less oxygen. We won’t go into the specifics of what happens physiologically when we don’t get enough oxygen. If you are breathing deep, your shoulders won’t move. The lower portion of your ribcage pushes on in all directions. That’s in a super quick nutshell is what true diaphragmatic breathing is. More oxygen typically equals better performance. The deafness and blindness Bruce talks isn’t physical, it’s mental. It goes along with the mind narrowing. You miss little things like a clump of grass clippings on your line or a small ridge in the green. You get so focused on making the next shot perfect, that you don’t take a second to see if you have any alternatives to the hero shot you think you ‘have’ to take. Only after things go awry in the result of the swing or stroke do you realize that you missed it. Or you could’ve played out to a different fairway to get a better angle on the hole you are actually playing. Remember, you are allowed to hit the ball backwards in golf! It’s those kinds of alternatives that you fail to recognize when you get so focused on the result. As Professor Trelawney reminds us in Harry Potter, “broaden your minds”!

It’s easy to be reactive in a karate match. You have an opponent that is on the move and if you don’t react, the consequences result in physical pain. Easy to see the need to react in that situation. There’s not many people who want to get punched in the face. But we need to be reactive in golf as well. As humans, we perform so much better when we are reactive than when we act. Reactive means giving yourself the task and just doing it. Pick up my Coke Zero is the task and I just do it. It’s that easy. We make it hard on ourselves when we start acting. Since I started my education in Applied Functional Science, I have been more aware of giving people too many things to think about. That’s acting. Pick up my Coke Zero which means extend my shoulder, extend my elbow, extend my wrist and fingers… you get the point. That’s action. Exactly what we do in the golf swing when we focus on the result. Hand needs to do this, knee needs to do that, etcetera etcetera. Now I’m working on making more of an impact with less cueing. Understanding anatomy and chain reactions, I am now able to make sweeping integrated changes with less input. Best way to get reactive? Start moving. Don’t stop your swing from a dead stop. Work on giving yourself a task and then just do. Best thing I’ve done for my short game recently, hardest thing to explain. I just tell myself what the shot calls for (lie, landing spot, hole location, etc) and then execute. “Hit this low and spinny”. Then I just do it. I have no idea why or how, but it works way better than thinking about the movement or technique. My initial hypothesis is that experience and knowledge are starting to meld and allow enhanced physical performance. I’ll let you know when I figure out the details.

“True detachment isn’t about caring less, it’s about clinging less. You can deeply care about what you do while releasing the grip on how things must turn out” says Bruce Lee. That’s trusting the process. Live in the moment. Focus on the moment. The result you want? It’s in the future and the only way you can impact the future is by what you do right now. The future is also a lie. It is always changing so what you think it will be, it probably won’t be by the time you get to that point in time. So, as Bruce said, be “so committed to the present action while remaining completely unconcerned with its outcome.” That’s all any of us can do. Trust the process. It’s worth it.