Entry 25.32

It was sometime in my first year as a student as Methodist and I was done. I don’t remember exactly what day it was, but I can remember that it was slightly cooler with gray overcast skies. Pretty sure it was in the spring semester for some reason though. I was in the same place you could find me almost every free moment I had. I was on the golf course. Not much has changed in that regard. I’m as every much in love with this game as I was when I first started. But in that moment, I felt far from being in love with golf. I was angry, frustrated and at my wits end. I had blasted yet another tee shot right off the tee on hole #4 and found myself in the tall grass between the fourth and fifth fairways. I was able to locate my golf ball as I had found a spot with knee to hip high, but sparse grass. But I had a long way to go if I was going to carry the second ravine. The smarter play would’ve been to take my medicine, get back into the first fairway, and get myself into a position to possibly make par. But I wasn’t smart. I was angry, young (a spring chicken at 34 years old) and dumb. So I did what anyone would’ve done in that situation. I picked up my golf ball, tossed it back in my bag and headed off the golf course. If only. Definitely what I probably should’ve done but that would make for a pretty boring story. No, I pulled out a long iron. A 3-iron no less. Told you I was dumb. Looking back now, I know I wouldn’t make that same decision. I mean who pulls a 3-iron in tall grass like that?! If you do, you are either dumb, or desperate, or both. In that moment, I was probably both. Needless to say, I thinned the crap out of it… and hooked it… right into the ravine. Now I was the pot on the stove not just whistling but boiling over and burning all over the stove top. Think the end of Braveheart when Robert the Bruce throws William Wallace’s Claymore when rallying the Scots behind him. Except instead of a sword, it was my golf club flying through the air. I mean that thing was hurled. I mean why not? Feeling no better than I had before the world record club throw, I stomped off to pick up that stupid club. I grabbed it and turned to head back to my push cart when I discovered I was not alone on the golf course as I had thought. Standing back on the tee box was one of my classmates. We’ll call him “The Artist”. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die I was so embarrassed. I had acted the fool and the universe had decided to hold me accountable for my actions. I sheepishly waved, grabbed my push cart and “leisurely” walked as fast I could down the fairway. I later found The Artist and apologized for acting like a three year old. He tried to make me feel better by saying it was no big deal, but I wasn’t going to let myself off the hook so easily. There’s a few lessons to be learned here, the first being: Integrity means doing the right thing, even when you think no one is watching, because more than likely, someone is.

As important as that first lesson is, it isn’t what I want to focus on. I have been doing a lot of reading and studying on the mental game as of late. Thanks to one of you as it often is. You ask me for help and when I feel my answer is woefully inadequate, I plunge headfirst into the topic. One of my students, whom we will call “Texas Ranger”, has been struggling with his game lately. We talk every few days at minimum and have been having quite a few conversations of his struggles with the mental game in both practice and on the golf course. One of my peers posted a story on his Instagram of a quote from The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey. Unfortunately, the story has expired so I can’t tell you exactly what it said. But it grabbed my attention immediately and I sent it to Texas Ranger. I also told him that I would read the book because it sounded like it might be worth it. That was on 26 July. As of today, 10 August, I have sixteen pages left to read. I have used a highlighter and three different color pens in my study through the book. It is so applicable and insightful that I have already purchased another of Gallwey’s books, The Inner Game of Golf. I haven’t read a word of that book yet, but after my kitten knocked over my coffee this morning all over it, outwardly it looks like it has been read a thousand times. Now Gallwey is a tennis coach, so I don’t know how good the golf version of his book will be, but I’m guessing just as good as his original work on tennis. In The Inner Game of Tennis I was met with a slap to the face, like a massive unlooked for, yet necessary, wake up call. I have already started to include his wisdom in my teaching and in my own game, and I have found it to be efficiently effective in both.

I don’t want to ruin the book for you in case you plan on reading it, but I know that some of you probably won’t read it, so I want to bring out the key points. As a side note, it you don’t read, you are missing out. Reading is like having that author as a mentor. Which means you can have mentors you will never actually meet or have conversations with or who have been dead for thousands of years. Think of how powerful that is! And when I say reading, I mean reading. Not skimming or scanning, but reading slowly enough to digest the information and be able to put it into practice immediately. For me this means only a few pages at a time with highlighters, pens and pencils involved marking, underlining and scribbling notes in the margins. Off my soap box and back onto topic. In his book, I found an insight that is so incredibly complex yet simply written so even a dunce like me can understand it. Gallwey came up with the idea of the “Inner Game” while taking a year off from academia to teach tennis. As he taught he started to notice some of his players struggled to play even decent tennis, no matter how many lessons they took. But when he gave them cues that had nothing to do with their form, their tennis improved, almost instantly for some. And instead of the typical regression, those players continued to play better day after day. As he put his academic interest in learning to use, he discovered that what he was really teaching these players was to get out of their own way. I’ve heard this advice so many times, but until now, I didn’t know how to do it.

The Inner Game is played between two competitors: you and you. Player 1 is your brain. Methodical, intellectual and downright terrible at action. Your brain may do the thinking, but it doesn’t do any of the doing. That responsibility falls to Player 2, your body (Gallwey calls them Self 1 and Self 2). Your body is great at doing, terrible at thinking. Golf and tennis vary in one aspect and that is that tennis is much more reactionary than golf. You don’t have any time to think in tennis, you only have time to react. For those of you who haven’t played tennis, like me, the average first serve in professional tennis is around 120 miles per hour. No time for your brain to see, calculate and do. It’s just not that fast because it’s not supposed to be. The body however? It can be ridiculously fast. Think about a time where you went to grab a glass out of the cupboard and it slipped out of your hand and you caught it before it shattered. You didn’t think about it, you just did it. That’s how fast your body can be. The eyes did the seeing, the fingers did the feeling and the rest of you responded. For a brief instance, you were in the Zone. That’s what happens when you get out of your own way. You move into an ethereal state that so many strive to get into, yet so few find. Why it is so elusive?

The Zone is this mythical place where incredible feats happen. We hear about it all the time, yet no one can really ever describe it. “I played out of my mind” or “I didn’t do it, it just happened” are phrases that people use when trying to remember what it was like. The reason it’s so hard to put into words is because the one who those tasks normally fall to, Player 1 or your brain, isn’t there. It hasn’t been shut off, it has stepped aside and let the body do it’s thing. Think about your golf swing. When you think about the sequential steps you need to take to hit a certain shot or you have eight swing thoughts floating in your head, your chances for success are pretty close to zero. Even if the ball ends up where you want it to, you will still find fault with the motion somehow. That’s your brain being involved. It is judging the performance and when it finds fault with the body, it decides to help out. But when the brain gets involved in doing, tension gets added to your system, your sequence breaks down and things don’t go as planned. Instead of your brain going “my bad!” and getting out of the way, it blames the body and decides to get more involved. And so the cycle continues until your swing ends up looking like Charles Barkley’s.

So how do we keep Player 1 out of the game? How do we get our brain to trust that the body can handle it? We stop trying. Stop trying to make a certain move happen. The more you think about not early extending, what tends you happen? You keep early extending, sometimes even earlier. Instead, focus on what it feels like. Not how to do it, just what it feels like. Take it slow. Feel and speed have an inverse relationship. To feel more, you have to go slow. Too fast and you feel nothing. The more you just focus on the feel and less on how to make it happen, the sooner changes will start to happen. The faster those changes will start to take hold. Hand in hand with not trying goes not judging. Judgment is the result of Player 1 being involved. If it was bad, do you think your brain is going to let go? Not a shot! If it was wrong, it wants it to be correct so it gets involved. Instead, you have to focus on what is. Be as objective as you can be. Objectiveness removes blame from the situation. And when the brain has no one to blame, it tends to let go. But objectiveness also removes encouragement from the equation and that is equally as important. As soon as you recognize something as good, the brain is going to get involved to make the same thing happen again. Which gets as much, if not more, tension put in the system as when it was wrong! By removing the good and bad and focusing on the here and now, the body is allowed to do. And that’s what it does best! Gallwey says “It is perplexing to wonder why we ever leave the here and now. Here and now are the only place and time when one ever enjoys himself or accomplishes anything.” You can’t get anything done in the past or in the future. By being in the here and now, you give yourself the best change to make the future the best possible present it can be.

This brings us to one final thought which is the purpose of competition. That is what a game is after all. We often think of competition as a way to prove how good we are. The other side of the coin is we use competition to cooperate with others. But Gallwey believes it is only by combining the two can we truly compete. If we view competition as an avenue to show ourselves how good we are, our opponent becomes a necessary part of the process. We can never truly reach our potential if we aren’t challenged. In golf, that opponent may be another person or it could just be par. That opponent represents challenges and obstacles in our way to reaching our potential. Scottie Scheffler recently spoke about how hard he has worked to get where he is: World Number One. But he also talked about how fleeting the exhilaration of winning can be. Why? Because he realizes that the journey, tackling the obstacles in front of him, is truly what matters. He sees that what he has faced has taught him about himself, both his strengths and his weaknesses. I believe he is winning the outer game, because he is winning the Inner Game. He doesn’t see the other players as opponents he has to crush. He sees them as willing participants helping him reach his potential. And they see the same of him. An obstacle to overcome. Without each other, there would be no point in playing the outer game. And so they need each other. They are all cooperating together in the outer game in an effort to win the Inner Game. The one who wins the Inner Game but still loses the outer game doesn’t get discouraged. They see another obstacle to overcome. The losing is part of the process of winning the game that really matters, the Inner Game. Your body and your brain seem like they are at odds when you play poorly. But instead of seeing them as fighting, they need to cooperate. That means your brain focusing on the here and now and then stepping out of the way and letting your body do. I was far from winning the Inner Game when I chucked that club. I may not ever win that game, but at least I have a blueprint to help me get there. Now you do to. Play on!