Holly Walrath

THE PERFORMANCE MINDSET A PROCESS-FOCUSED SYSTEM FOR GOLF EXCELLENCE KEVIN SVERDUK PARAMETER PRESS THE PERFORMANCE MINDSET: A PROCESS-FOCUSED SYSTEM FOR GOLF EXCELLENCE © 2017 Dr. Kevin Sverduk. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. owner. ISBN:- Book Design: Stacy Fujitani Published by Parameter Press To my family, Diane, Emiko, and Kaizo for your boundless inspiration and never ending support. CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction vii ix PART I THE PERFORMANCE PYRAMID The Foundations of Performance Excellence Chapter Summary 2. The Performance Mindset Chapter Summary 1. - PART II PERFORMANCE TOOLS Meditation Chapter Summary 4. Imagination Chapter Summary 5. Narration Chapter Summary 6. Transferable Practice Chapter Summary 7. Goal Planning and Attainment Sample Goal Plan Chapter Summary 3. - PART III THE PERFORMANCE PROGRAM 8. 9. Practice Drills and On-Course Games Data Collection and Tracking Putting Drills Short Game Drills Range Drills Line Drills - Mind/Body Drills Keeping a Performance Journal Goals Creating a Weekly Performance Program Golf Tournament Performance Evaluation Pre-Round Routines Pre-Shot Routines Course Information and Strategy Mental Approach Patience Structured Daily Performance Journal 11. A Seven-Day Performance Program 12. Conclusion: Putting it All Together 10. About the Author - ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is the culmination of a lifetime of experiences trying to understand the pursuit of excellence in sport as an athlete, fan, student, coach, researcher, consultant, teacher, and parent. I’ve been blessed along this journey to have met numerous individuals whose influence towards my understanding of excellence has been both qualitatively and quantitatively significant. A chance meeting with a young professional tennis player, Bill Maze, turned into a lifelong friendship and launching pad for my inquiry into the meaning of sport and life. The countless hours we spent discussing books, coaching side by side, and hanging out certainly shaped my world view. The journey went deeper during my years at the University of the Pacific where I came to understand the true meaning of mentor. Dr. Glen Albaugh showed me what effective teaching and coaching was and our relationship has since grown into a great friendship as well. I never cease to be inspired by Glen’s shared passion for understanding how to make great players into master performers. To the many brilliant professionals within the field of sport psychology who have become colleagues, collaborators, and friends. I cherish those impromptu think tanks we formed at conferences and colleges. To Dr. Ken Ravizza who with his genuine personality and insightful mind has been so willing to share his time and knowledge to help me grow. I fondly remember sitting in your living room working on a book chapter together with my six-month-old daughter sleeping next to me. To all of the students that have passed through my classes at Long Beach State. Teaching and facilitating discussions about sport psychology challenged me to clarify, reorganize, and conceptualize my own knowledge of performance. My applied work has put me in contact with some of the best golfers in the world. Doing this work with masters of their sport has helped me grow in ways only experience provides. While some wish to remain anonymous, many have been kind enough to bring me into their inner circle. To M. L. Juul (my first golf client), K. M. Juul (my first tour player), Jenny Shin, Demi Runas, Cean Geronimo, Ani Gulugian, Stephanie Kono, Anna Rawson, Kenny Kim, and all of the great players at USC men’s and women’s golf. I learned early on that the most abundant source of critical knowledge about excellence in sport are the coaches. Expert coaches in particular understand and can articulate the subtle nuances of performance excellence far greater than any textbook. I have been fortunate to observe and learn from some of best including Bill Walsh, John Dunning, Chris Zambri, Andrea Gaston, and Pete Carroll. To my family and extended family for their support. Diane for keeping me grounded and humble. My daughter Emiko for showing how to parent an aspiring golfer. Kaizo for the omnipresent smile you bring to my face. My niece for creating a world-class cover to the book. INTRODUCTION “I just don’t get it, Kevin,” a college golf coach recently said to me. “My team plays this course twice a week. We record their scores, play from the farthest tees with everyone shooting right at par or better each time, and on our home course in a tournament we throw up scores of 75, 77, 80, and 82.” He continued, explaining how he felt his team was doing all the right things such as working hard on the short game, competing in practice, and playing on the course, yet they just kept underplaying to their potential. As a sport psychologist and golfer, this is a story I hear and experience myself all too often. The masterful golf a tour player displays during Wednesday’s Pro-Am evaporates on Thursday, the purity of ball-striking demonstrated for an entire week of practice gone in the first round, the precisely executed approaches delivered in clutch situations to climb up the leaderboard on day three becoming blown opportunities down the stretch on the closing holes of the tournament, and the personal best front nine performance taking a 180-degree turn on the back. Why these experiences happen is both mysterious and frustrating, yet they are balanced with times when we gather the right resources to maintain our level of play and sometimes elevate it. My response to the x Introduction coach’s exasperation was that his golfers may have been walking on familiar ground, but their minds were playing on a different course altogether. You have probably read or heard many people refer to golf as five percent physical and 95% mental. My belief is slightly different. I see golf as 100% mental, 100% physical, and 100% spiritual. Golf is all of those things at the same time, all of the time. There is no separation and compartmentalization of the mind, body, and spirit. At one point in history the prevailing notion was that mind and body are separate and distinct, that all things are best understood by breaking the whole into individual parts. That paradigm has long since been replaced with a more holistic, interconnected view, where subtle changes in one area create ripples disturbing all other things. This book will emphasize the cultivation of the mind while acknowledging that working on the mental game is also working on the physical and spiritual. My quest to better understand and apply the mind’s influence on the athletic experience has been a lifelong endeavor. First as a competitive athlete, then as a college coach, a professor of sport psychology, and a sport psychologist. I have witnessed in others and experienced myself the range of emotions associated with competition. Through the many years that I have studied, played, and tried to better understand golf performance, I have observed wide disagreements about the proper way to hit the golf ball and even more bewilderment about how to play and perform under pressure. There has never been a shortage of theories and products designed to help golfers hit the ball straighter and longer. The absence that I see is in the area of enhanced golf enjoyment. The mission of this book is to help you to realize the fullest potential playing golf can provide. A potential that includes two important aspects. The first is performance based and includes the attainment of outcomes, to play the game as consistently well as it is possible to play. This consist of sticking approach shots, creating skillful solutions, draining putts, and shooting lower scores. The second is experience-based, such as deriving the greatest Introduction xi amount of joy, engagement, and personal meaning from playing golf. While it may seem obvious that experiencing fun and feeling absorbed while playing golf is a primary reason to play, I have noticed that this does not always occur. In fact, it is often just the opposite, many golfers become increasingly obsessed with obtaining better results as they begin to improve, and the pursuit of outcomes overshadows the pursuit of experience. Increasingly, the lack of direct control they have over the results they desire becomes torturous. The experience of playing golf becomes conditional only to what they shot. The rich experiences of camaraderie with fellow golfers, the excitement of uncertain outcomes, the physical stimulations when hitting pure shots, and one’s complete absorption in present actions become irrelevant. I’ve far too often seen golfers driven to tears and despair when they did not play or finish like they had hoped, viewing these rounds as a meaningless waste of time. For others, as they become more serious; the game becomes a trap. Because they have played for so long and gained respect by others for their accomplishments, much of their identity is wrapped up in not just being a golfer but a “great” golfer. A golfer who “should” shoot low scores and win tournaments, rather than someone who plays golf well. Suddenly one’s scoring average becomes the sole condition under which a round of golf is valued. Expectations, we know, are one of many double-edged swords in regards to competitive drive and enjoyment. Lofty expectations can motivate us to work hard on our game and raise one’s belief in the possibility of success, while they can also place heavy burdens on our shoulders and lead to a preoccupation of trying to avoid failing. We begin to experience more relief of not missing, rather than satisfaction from making a three-foot putt. Certainly, at times, golf can be difficult, discouraging, and seem like a hopeless game. A potential higher experience of playing and practicing golf exists beyond the uncertain and transient scores one shoots. Despite playing sports my whole life, teaching and coaching for two decades, and spending thousands of hours with golfers of all xii Introduction abilities, I’ve always felt there had to be something more important about the game than just posting a score. My life’s work and education has been a constant search and drive for a greater more powerful meaning of playing sports than just winning and losing. As a competitive athlete, my own interest in Buddhism and meditation was initiated when I wanted to make sense of who I was and what the point of my obsession with sport meant. The exhilarating highs I felt when I played well and won were far less common than the depressing lows when I lost. And yet, I persisted in my dogged pursuit of excellence, while rarely feeling anything was truly gained. Friends often commented that I looked like a tortured soul when I played, and I was. Then occasionally, with no expectation, I would encounter special moments when I played. These moments were special not just because I played well, I enjoyed some of those moments as well, but these were special in the sense that I no longer cared about the results or how I was playing. I felt a profound connection to the present moment, my competitors, and my senses. When I began reading about Buddhism, and in particular meditation practice, I saw an association with my experiences. I had it backward. For so long I put winning and the attainment of results as the end point of my pursuit and felt when I achieved that goal I would be happy. It had not occurred to me that if I put the experience of being in the moment, going with the flow of uncertainty, and unconditionally engaging in the challenges presented as the pinnacle of my pursuit, the results I strove for would more readily be attained. Enhanced performance achievements, I discovered, were a byproduct, rather than an end product, of the pursuit of excellence. It was no small task for me to learn how to personally reduce the value I had associated with winning while raising above it the stock of cultivating a mindful experience. In my work with golfers, it is both my primary objective and most challenging accomplishment to help them transform their mindsets in this way. It is often Introduction xiii difficult because the traditional culture of excellence emphasizes the physical over the mental and outcomes above processes. An often-cited and scientifically well-supported explanation about the attainment of excellence in sport, music, and many other domains is the 10,000 hour rule. This theory states that to become an expert in something requires 10,000 hours of engagement in activities specifically designed for improvement. There is no doubting the practical validity of this idea. I think all of us can agree that spending that amount of time and effort will make one better. A major limitation of this theory, however, is that it fails to explain how one moves beyond that “expert” level. There are approximately one hundred and fifty players on the PGA Tour, yet there are many more golfers in the world who have logged at least 10,000 hours of practice. We could propose that the PGA Tour players have logged the most hours, say 20 or 30 thousand hours, but that doesn’t really explain why then a player touring for ten years loses his playing status. There is clearly a gap between the “expert” level of performance (achieved with 10,000 hours) and the tour professional level that hasn’t been clearly accounted for. The science of sport knows more about the mechanisms of athletic skill and physical ability than ever. Yet with all the advances in understanding, innovations in training technologies, and enhanced equipment, what makes golfers perform at or near their full potential in tournament play and under pressure remain a mystery. I am approached regularly by skilled golfers with abundant experience who are frustrated that they cannot play to their ability when it counts. What it takes to close that gap between having put in the 10,000 hours and realizing the pinnacle of performance is much of what the science of sport psychology and this book addresses. The book is divided into three sections. In Part One, I introduce the Performance Pyramid, a conceptual model and framework for understanding the components performance excellence. Chapter One outlines the lower portion of the pyramid, or what I call the foundations of performance excellence. The roles of ability, skill, xiv Introduction game management, experience, and competitive drive are explained. These are the core elements that achieving excellence in golf is built upon. The accumulation of them makes up much of the 10,000 hours required to develop expertise in golf. In Chapter Two, I propose The Performance Mindset. This is a dynamic state of being that includes awareness, optimism, and balance. Bridging the gap between expertise of skill and mastery of performance is accomplished through cultivating a mindset that unlocks potential. In Part Two, I lay out five tools for achieving excellence in golf. The science and application of meditation practice as a tool for heightened experience and performance is discussed in chapter three. In Chapter Four, I describe the powerful influence that imagination has towards improving and playing golf. The next chapter is titled Narration and illuminates how the language we use can powerfully shape the reality we experience. Making the case for an overhaul of commonly held notions of practice is presented in Chapter Six. I close Part Two with a chapter about planning and attaining goals, presenting a comprehensive system that will increase goal achievement. The final section of the book, Part Three, offers a comprehensive, nuts and bolts, performance program that you can follow to cultivate the Performance Mindset and start playing to your potential. Chapter Eight includes several specifically-detailed drills for putting, short game, and the range along with effective mindset building games for on-course practice. Following a scientific approach to improvement, Chapter Nine illustrates the importance of collecting performance data and how to better track your learning. Keeping a regular performance journal has been shown to be very effective in personal and performance growth and in Chapter Ten I offer suggestions for using one. In Chapter Eleven I provide a sample seven-day performance program you can follow and take you through strategies for creating your own program. The book and Part Three come to a close in Chapter Twelve as I summarize and discuss how to put all the information together to create the Performance Mindset. PART I THE PERFORMANCE PYRAMID 1 THE FOUNDATIONS OF PERFORMANCE EXCELLENCE N o one suddenly wakes up with a gold medal around their neck or a major championship trophy wrapped in their arms. When we witness a player walking down the 72nd fairway on his or her way to winning the U.S. Open, it is easy to marvel at how controlled, precise, and effortless they played. Often the question of “What do they have that makes them so good?” comes to mind. Many are quick to identify one attribute or quality that explains excellence in individuals. We hear explanations like that player is great because she has a perfect swing, he wins because he hits it so far, she is just a natural putter, and he just plays so smartly. To simplify the explanation of a person’s excellence like this is similar to watching the trailer for Star Wars instead of the movie. You miss out on the story, which is what gives the film meaning. The story behind the champion golfer’s excellence is where meaningful appreciation of that performance exists. This is also where we can learn how to make ourselves better. Watching a golfer swing with great tempo and precision alone doesn’t help you achieve that in your own swing. Understanding all of the factors that build the foundation for excellence can help you realize what it will take to make meaningful improvements in your game. 4 KEVIN SVERDUK Research has estimated that it takes the engagement of 10,000 hours of practice, specifically designed to improve performance, to become an expert in a domain. That 10,000 hours serve to construct a foundation of competencies required to achieve proficiency in golf. Each hour spent in practice can be regarded as a brick that is mortared into place, forming the foundation of a solidly built structure. Coaches frequently preach the importance of developing strong fundamental skills before moving on to more complex tasks. They understand that when an athlete reacts with habit under pressure, those well-learned basics will keep them in the game. I use the structure of a pyramid to symbolize the qualities necessary to achieve excellence in golf and to realize one’s full potential. The lower portion of the pyramid forms the strong base that keeps the structure grounded and unmovable. A solid foundation for expert golfers consists of five elements: ability, skill, game management, experience, and competitive drive. They are essential to the process of achieving excellence. While every accomplished The Performance Mindset 5 player has developed and enhanced these foundational components, the precise make-up of each may be different. The specific qualities and quantities for each differ according to individual nuances. Two individuals may have vastly different abilities, skills, game management styles, experiences, and competitive natures and yet show amazingly similar golfing prowess. Certainly, they both have put in the hours and built a solid foundation from which to play great golf. Ability Golfers come in all different shapes and sizes. Eighteen inches in height separates the shortest from the tallest players to play on the PGA Tour. Heightened ability is a term that is often used to explain the success of an athlete. “Natalie hits it so far because she is so strong and athletic.” The notion that there exists a general ability allowing individuals who “have it” to more quickly and proficiently learn new sports is a popular belief. We can all think of examples of great performers in others sports taking up golf and in no time shooting par. At one time in the sciences that studied human ability, the theory that a singular, global ability could explain a person’s skill performance was popular. It was similar to the idea that an individual’s intelligence, as measured by an IQ test was a fixed quantity and could be used to explain success in school, business, and military leadership. In the nearly one hundred years since the conception of those ideas, research has all but completely disproved those theories. Abilities are largely inherited traits that tend to remain stable throughout a person’s life. Relative to skills, there a few abilities, only about fifty or so. Height, body type, and length of limbs are among the most noticeable ones. Other, more subtle abilities include reaction time, manual dexterity, aiming, dynamic flexibility, balance, and arm-hand steadiness. It is important to note that while abilities are fairly fixed, most people do not completely maximize the full potential of the abilities they are born with. For exam- 6 KEVIN SVERDUK ple, you were born with a certain level of ability for fast reaction time, and if you have not engaged in many tasks that require you to react quickly you may think you have slow reflexes. The truth is that you just have not practiced exercising that ability enough to approach the full capability of it. Think of how flexible and agile you were are as a toddler. You moved about with great balance and posture. Now you feel inflexible and clumsy. What happened to that ability? It has not disappeared, it just has not been exercised. People often report discovering “hidden talents” when they try new things—abilities they always possessed, yet they never engaged in activities that revealed them. Our understanding of abilities and their influence on athletic performance has grown considerably in recent years. Two areas that are of particular relevance to golf performance are the science behind maximizing the abilities we possess and the understanding of how we group abilities together to perform skills. You may not be able to train yourself to have more ability but you can wake the ones you have up. Serious golfers today dedicate many more hours in the gym working out as a way to enhance their golf games. The training of golfers has become highly specialized with exact exercises used to target precise movement goals. This is ability training. It is not the learning of new abilities rather it is the development of existing ones to their fullest capacity. The best trainer in the world cannot get you to jump higher than your capabilities, but they can move you closer to your goal. A second relevant area of understanding about ability is the individual nature of how golfers use what they have. Elite golfers share common performance standards. With few exceptions and little variance, they all drive the ball about the same distance, hit an equal amount of greens, and make the same number of putts. Yet the individual abilities that they possess widely differ. Some golfers are tall, lanky, and have great flexibility, while others are short, stout, and powerfully-built. The answer to how a shorter golfer can hit her drive as far as a tall golfer rests in how they group their abilities. The taller golfer utilizes her abilities to create a long fluid The Performance Mindset 7 swing that results in a faster club head speed at impact. The shorter golfer achieves this by employing her explosive leg strength and rotational speed into the swing. It is not the abilities that we are born with that ultimately determine what we can or cannot do. It is how those abilities are harnessed and grouped together. Skill Ability can be thought of like hardware in a computer. When you purchase a laptop from the store, it comes equipped with certain components, memory storage, and processing speed. It has the potential to perform many tasks but only after you install the software programs to direct them. The software consists of skills you want the computer to perform. Skills are learned actions, developed and maintained through practice. In our lifetimes we will learn and maintain a countless number of skills from habitually simple to overwhelmingly complex. Skills depend on groups of abilities. We must have the hardware to run the program, yet there exist many variations on how to achieve similar results. Developing skill is a critical element in the building a strong foundation for excellence in golf. Understanding, teaching, learning, and maintaining skills are among the most misunderstood and highly-debated topics in golf. Everyone, it seems, has an idea or theory about what the ideal swing is and how to achieve it. This book is no different. In it, I propose my perspectives of golf performance including ways to practice to build and refine skills. My approach, unlike many, comes from a field of science called “Motor Learning and Control,” which is a sub-discipline of kinesiology. This is a specialty that directs its attention and research to the understanding of skill attainment and development. There are several findings from this area of science that are relevant to the understanding of golf performance. No two golf swings are identical. They may appear similar but when broken down and completely analyzed differences exist. 8 KEVIN SVERDUK Further, it is not just the swings of two different golfers that vary, within a single golfer there are differences in his swing. These variations occur both between clubs (i.e. 9-iron compared to a 5-iron) and within the same club. And even when the golfer is attempting the same shot with the same club, repeatedly the swings are not identical. The explanation for this is that every skill has a cognitive (perceptual) element and a motor (movement) component to it. Thus, there exists a dynamic interaction between the brain and the muscles. More specifically, an interaction exists between the precise triggering of neurons in the brain called synapses and the synchronized activation of muscle fibers. There are approximately 86 billion neurons in the brain and nearly 650 muscles in the body. When hitting a golf ball millions of neurons must pass signals to each other and dozens of muscles need to fire at a specific intensity in a uniquely sequenced fashion. It is highly improbable that even while attempting the exact same shot with the same club in the same environment, a golfer will achieve exactly identical results. Yet players are able to produce consistent shot-to-shot outcomes with a 7-iron. If the swing is different how is this possible? The explanation is that the swing varies to accommodate for changes in the environment. During the swing, the perceptual element of the skill picks up valuable sense information from the muscles including the eyes, which then informs the brain where and how the arc of the swing is going in relation to the objective of hitting the ball. The neurons send signals to the muscles on proper adjustments to be made to deliver the club-to-impact correctly. Consistency in outcomes comes from the skill of making adjustments. The demonstration of consistent performance, a measurement of skill, is achieved through appropriate dynamic adjustments made during the swing, rather than from invariability ranging from one attempt to the next. Strategies for constructing practice regimens to enhance this will be presented in Chapter Six. The foundation for performance excellence in golf requires skill. The skills required to consistently produce low scores are The Performance Mindset 9 abundant and yet not exact. The best players on tour do not occupy the top rankings in every statistical category. Some excel at driving distance and putting, others in the short game. Nevertheless, the aptitude to execute successful shots from dozens of varied circumstances on the golf course is the challenge of the game. There is no doubt that to become proficient in golf requires many hours spent learning and enhancing skills. Game Management Golf is a game that you play. It is not something that you perform or work. It is 9 or 18 holes with rules, scoring, fellow competitors, and uncertain results. There is strategy and skill, but often you are dealt a hand not always of your choosing and decide how to best play your cards. Results can range from exhilaration to virtual despair. The game is hard yet simple. The course itself is not the only thing you must navigate when you play. The real game is played within your mind and body. Learning how to manage all aspects of the game including decision-making and energy optimization are foundational elements of achieving excellence. The ball lies in the first cut of the fairway, 200 yards from a pin that is placed at the back right of the green. Two bunkers protect the front left and back right of the green. Water runs up the right side of the fairway up to about ten yards short of the green. With a very well hit three-wood, you can carry the ball about 170 yards and have it roll out to about 200. Knowing how to consistently make effective choices in situations like these and the many others you encounter when you play is an important aspect of playing better golf. The ability and skill of hitting solid golf shots is helpful in so much as they are managed in a way that produces lower scores. Decision-making in golf is an important element of the game. Situations arise from time to time where the shot selection is not clear-cut. Drivable par fours, reachable par fives, tucked pins, and sharp doglegs are just a few of the temptation-filled aspects that a course can present. We can all remember times when we made 10 KEVIN SVERDUK poor selection choices that resulted in big scores. To better understand how to choose the most effective course management decisions, let us examine what factors influence those choices. There are three elements that can have a persuasive effect on your decisions; emotion, memory, and rationality. Managing your emotions is managing your game. Emotions are a natural reaction to life events. I say natural because based on your personal history, values, and beliefs, which are relatively enduring, stable, and can’t be immediately altered, you will have certain emotional responses to particular things. In many ways, emotions are another of the challenges playing golf presents. The relationship between emotions and temptation-avoidance is very strong. The energy reserves for greater self-control while making critical choices are greatly depleted by strong positive and negative emotions. We do equally stupid things when angry and in love. You three-putted from 20 feet on the previous hole. Naturally upset, you walk to the next tee where you are tempted to crush a driver over a large tree to cut the corner, a shot that you realistically have about a 10% chance of pulling off. The temptation is strong as your anger. How you manage this is golf. If left unaware, your emotions will take over your decision-making, but if you can recognize the anger and what it is potentially doing to this next decision, you may be able to regain your wits and select a more effective shot to attempt. The human brain has a tremendous capacity for memory. Once committed to long-term memory, things remain there permanently. We may have difficulty retrieving them at times but they are there. Decision-making is greatly influenced by memories as we call on past events to help us predict the consequences of present actions. There is a type of mental process called associative memory that researchers explain has a particularly strong influence on how we see and react to the world. If a richly positive event happens—such as successfully hitting a driver over a tall tree to cut the corner and then holing out a wedge for an eagle in a tournament with several people watching—an association between deciding to go for the risky drive is paired with the jubilant emotion experienced. The The Performance Mindset 11 event looms larger in your memory compared to the ten other times you tried to cut the corner and ended up in the trees. As a result, you believe the choice to go for the shot to be less risky than it really is. If you can acknowledge the biased influence of associative memory during the decision-making process, then you can avoid costly strategy errors. By saying to yourself, “I feel that I can cut the corner only because I remember that one time it worked,” you reduce the influence of that memory. Rationality is the third and most effective element that can influence your course management. As we have read, emotions and memories are the basis for many faulty decisions on the golf course. Legendary football coach Bill Walsh was best known for his thoroughness in preparing his teams for competition. He and his coaching staff would create detailed game decisions including scripting the first twenty-five plays for each game. Then he would plan for contingencies within each play in the event of something happening such as the quarterback being flushed out of the pocket. He even prepared contingencies for the contingencies. When he and his teams played there was a palatable sense of calm, confidence, and poise. All decisions were thoroughly thought out, based on the highest probability of success, and unaffected by emotion and bias. This was game management at its best. When you play golf, you play the course, you play your opponents, and you play yourself. You cannot do much about the course and your opponents. There are aspects of yourself that you can influence and manage. Choosing a rational and sound strategy for each hole, managing your decisions and the factors that influence them, and taking proper steps to maintaining your energy are pieces of the game. Experience It is often said and widely acknowledged that there truly is “no substitute for experience.” Golf is unique, compared to other sports in which there is a uniform field of play. The dimensions and 12 KEVIN SVERDUK nuances of golf courses vary widely and when you factor in weather conditions you never really play the game on the same course twice. Playing tournament golf creates even more variation to the experience of playing golf. Tee times range from early morning to late afternoon, the player waits through weather delays, resumes play with no warm-up, endures six-hour rounds, and is paired with all types of personalities. The delicate art of performing golf skills can easily be thrown off with just one added variable to deal with, let alone several all at once. Experts in many professions such as surgeons, pilots, and trial attorneys, go through rigorous education and training to learn the skills necessary for their work. Part of that rigor includes carefullysupervised simulation training where they are exposed to conditions that mimic the real experience. What is often expressed by these specialists is that even with all that high-quality education and training, real experience is a whole other ball game. They graduated school with skills but still lacked the real competence for excellence. The gap between skill and competence is experience. A subtle yet powerful attribute often used to describe some golfers is “She knows how to put up a number.” A player who consistently shoots low scores does so in a way where nothing of note really explains it. She doesn’t drive the ball that far, hits some greens but not all of them, has occasional three-putts but somehow her final score is pretty solid. Taking lessons, hitting ball after ball to develop the swing, devoting meticulous attention to getting putts to roll pure, are all part of the experience accumulated by golfers. But if the scores are not getting better one has to ask if it is the right type of experience? A glaring difference exists between how golfers typically practice and athletes in most other sports play. Tennis, basketball, football, and most others practice on the field and/or court where they play. Golfers often confine themselves to the range, hitting off mats out into an open space littered with just a handful of targets. There is an aspect of skill development that only occurs while playing golf. On the course, the challenges are more unique and sponta- The Performance Mindset 13 neous. To make par you have to figure out how to best apply your skills in ways not always the same. In this way, playing teaches you how to play. Surgeons often reflect that their real education began after medical school when they were faced with novel circumstances and had to make life and death decisions with no playbook. Many golfers take the approach, “I will play tournaments when my game is ready to play,” without considering that playing is what gets their game ready to play. They avoid the experience as a way to prepare for it. If a surgeon or a pilot is thrown into the real thing before they are adequately trained a catastrophic error can occur, but what is the cost for a golfer? So you lose some balls because you are freaking out on the tee. Learning to not freak out in tournaments is not going to be completely resolved by lying on the couch in a strange office with someone asking you how that makes you feel. This is a process called systematic desensitization. With increased exposure, the value of the things that freak you out diminishes and you learn how to direct your focus to things you can control. A necessary component of the experience needed to reach your potential is the experience of failing. The more one opens him or herself up to experiences that are new, intimidating, pressure-packed, and different, the closer they are to achieving excellence. Yes, it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve excellence and it takes 10,000 failed attempts (at least) to succeed. Experience is one of the subtle foundations of the Performance Pyramid. There is no clear amount and type of experience necessary to make the leap from being a good college player to the tour. Some tour rookies play well right away while others struggle. Expanding one’s journey to playing golf in as many different venues and situations as possible is beneficial. While the exact extent of experience required is unclear, the need for it is not. Too little experience can definitely be a liability and too much will never be. 14 KEVIN SVERDUK Competitive Drive A fundamental assumption of psychology is that all human behaviors have a motive driving them. Some are primarily physical drives such as the need for food and water and most others are psychological such as the need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Usually, with a little introspection, we can find the underlying reasons for all behaviors. The behaviors of individuals who excel at things, those who choose actions requiring great time and effort, are initiated and maintained by a motivating force. We can call this power “competitive drive.” Get up at five in the morning, meditate for twenty minutes. Get to the gym by six for a ninety-minute workout, shower, eat, at the course by nine for an hour lesson, work on short game for three hours, eat lunch, play 18 holes, eat dinner, roll-out for thirty minutes, write in journal, asleep by nine. It’s called the grind. It is what you do if you want a chance to be a professional golfer. It is what will constitute about one hundred and fifty to two hundred days of your year. And they are not necessarily the most grueling days you will experience. The life of person dedicated to the pursuit of excellence is loaded with hardship, disappointment, pain, and anguish yet it is also blessed with the potential for incredible self-mastery and joy. Competitive drive is a double-edged sword. It can bring out the absolute best in us and can also bring out the worst. How one conceptualizes and integrates this drive into his or her life is the difference between it becoming a driving force toward personal excellence or a source of destructive harm. Often being competitive is thought as simply hating to lose or wanting to win. These are not the sole mechanisms of striving for excellence. An elite distance runner was once quoted as saying, “the will to win means nothing without the will to prepare.” To assess an athlete’s true competitive drive by only watching his behavior in tournaments is like judging the size of an iceberg by measuring its height from the surface of the ocean. You miss out on the hidden mass that pushes the top The Performance Mindset 15 through the surface. Competitive drive is not something that you have it is something that you do. I often hear stories from parents and coaches about anger issues with junior golfers. They tell me, “Johnny is so competitive, he just hates to lose.” I then ask, “Does Johnny get angry when he doesn’t practice hard or goofs off while he hits balls?” When they almost always say no to this, I question how really competitive Johnny is. Perhaps he gets visibly angry because he wants to show you that he is competitive or is mad because deep down he knows he didn’t work that hard in practice and this is the result. The competitive drive that is most powerful and effective has no reference point. It is a feeling—the honest feeling that you did everything under your control to give you the best chance to accomplish something that is important to you. Competitive drive does not guarantee victory but it can earn you success. By success, I refer to the honest self-assessment that you applied yourself to your fullest capability in the pursuit of a goal. Possessing a great desire to win without having put in the time and complete effort to hone your abilities and develop the necessary skills means nothing nor does having ability without the drive to maximize them. There can be many varied reasons for choosing to compete for a goal. None are more powerful than another. Drive comes from the personal meaning and life-affirming statement it represents. With that drive and attention to all the relevant contributors to improvement, the pursuit of excellence is rewarding. The foundation for performance excellence is not something that is ever completed. While ability, skill, game management, experience, and competitive drive form the foundation for taking performance to a higher level, that base itself must be constantly maintained and built upon. The upkeep of any foundation, whether it be a building, a corporation, or a golf game, is what contributes to its longevity. A complete approach to achieving golf excellence addresses the base levels of the pyramid as well as the apex. CHAPTER SUMMARY The foundation for achieving excellence in golf consists of ability, skill, game management, experience, and competitive drive. Abilities, while largely inherited, can be harnessed to their full potential through training and can be combined in personal ways to maximize performance. Skill proficiency is measured by consistency and adaptability of execution across varied performance conditions. Game management includes building self-awareness, self-control, and unbiased perception. Experience is enriched by playing often and in as many different circumstances as possible. The experience of failing is the gateway to growth. Competitive drive comes from within and is ultimately measured by one’s honest assessment of how completely they did everything under their control to be the best they could be. 2 THE PERFORMANCE MINDSET A t the top of the Performance Pyramid lies the key to excellence, the most challenging qualities to master. Since the dawn of sport, people have tried to understand what separates the great athletes from the rest. A glance down the driving range the morning of a tournament provides little insight on who will put up a good score. So many look fit, have solid swings, and seem to putt the ball well. They have all put in the hours and created strong foundations. Yet time and time again, with only brief exceptions, we see certain players consistently rising above the field. The Performance Mindset is a cultivation of several virtues within an individual that assist in the fulfillment of one’s potential. It is a mindset that reflects perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs consistent with performance at one’s ultimate potential. Consisting of the three interrelated and multi-faceted qualities of awareness, optimism, and balance, the Performance Mindset represents the apex of the pyramid. The cultivation of which completes the structure and describes performance excellence completely. 20 KEVIN SVERDUK Awareness The energy of the mind is like a giant, high-powered spotlight. It ranges from extremely wide to pinpoint narrow, acutely intense to peacefully soft, and may include hundreds of objects at once to none at all. In the performance arena, our senses are bombarded by a myriad of sensations, images, movements, and thoughts, some of which are extremely relevant to what we are trying to achieve while others are irrelevant and potentially destructive to our pursuit of excellence. Awareness is the degree to which one is able to recognize what the spotlight is doing and what is illuminated by it. For a golfer, awareness might be the recognition just before hitting of the approach of a shift in the wind direction or the acknowledgment of a strong urge to try to guide the putt rather than fully release it. Optimal awareness for performance includes being present, separating from harmful thoughts, suspending judgment, and acquiring useful selfknowledge. Where is your body at this very moment? Where is your mind? The mind-body relationship is often not in sync. We usually go about our daily routines with our body attending to whatever task The Performance Mindset 21 we are doing and our mind drifting off to other thoughts. The sensation is similar to driving to a familiar destination and spacing out, driving directly past the exit we were supposed to take, or when we take a shower and fail to remember if we already shampooed our hair. While our bodies are behind the wheel or in the shower, our minds are not present. Even on the golf course players often have their minds on other things than the shot in front of them. The exception to this common disconnect between the mind and body is when people are performing at the top of their potential. In these moments, the mind and body are one and the focus is in the present. By present, I am referring to being attentive to all that is relevant to the task at hand. When a golfer is preparing to hit a shot, being present includes taking information from the external (wind, lie, pin location, etc.) and internal (memories, confidence level, and energy) to determine the best possible strategy for this moment. Being focused on how bad you might feel if you hit the ball in the water is not present but future-oriented. Getting ahead of one’s self is among the most common causes of poor execution and performance. When a golfer facing a fourfoot par putt on the 18th green in front of playing partners, coaches, parents, and spectators begins to think about and focus on how embarrassing it would be to miss and creates unwanted images of the reactions others will have, he or she is not in the present. This leads the golfer to try and avoid having those events occur and thus try harder to make the putt. Trying harder can take the form of over-reading the break, placing more attention on the path of the putter, or being extra cautious with speed. Regardless of the form it takes, trying harder to make a putt rarely produces desired results. Certainly, if trying harder worked consistently, then you would be doing it all the time and have no worries. Peak performance in golf absolutely requires that one’s focus is on the present. This is not to say that have those future-oriented thoughts are wrong and need to be eliminated. Concerns about missing short putts are completely normal and to be expected. The culture 22 KEVIN SVERDUK surrounding golf promotes ideas and values focused on results. For example, the notions that par is good, birdie is better, bogey is bad, and you should make all three- to four-foot putts are securely ingrained in every golfer’s head. They are a set of self-imposed rules or expectations, however unrealistic and illogical they may be, that one subconsciously adopts through the playing of golf. The Performance Mindset needed for peak performance in golf is not absent of these and other distracting, discursive thoughts. The second aspect of awareness is the ability of the mind to gain separation from one’s thoughts. Awareness of the mind, or mindfulness as it is commonly referred to, functions in a similar fashion as each of the other five senses: sight, smell, taste, feel, and hearing. Each specific sense is directed toward particular objects. The eyes pick up shapes and colors, the ears sense tones and pitches, and so on. The contents of the mind are thoughts and images. All sense objects, sounds, odors, thoughts, etc., come from somewhere or something. Thoughts and images emerge from the subconscious mind, which can be thought of as a vast reservoir of our personal history, core beliefs, values, and self-perceptions. Even thoughts that we may interpret as coming from something external are connected to the subconscious. For example, imagine that you are walking along a street in a busy shopping district and you catch a glimpse of someone walking in your direction wearing a bright orange sweater. Almost instantly, upon seeing this external image, a thought pops into your head, what an ugly sweater. Where did that thought come from? Your eyes sensed colors and shapes but your perception became one of judgment. Somewhere in your value system of what looks pretty and what looks ugly is the belief that bright orange sweaters are ugly. It’s not an idea that you were born with but one that is part of your personal history and thus part of your subconscious. In a similar way, when you are faced with that four-foot par putt, anxious thoughts about missing the putt quickly emerge because of your personal history. Somewhere in your experiences messages were sent and received by you that promoted the belief that missing short putts was wrong, embarrassing, and The Performance Mindset 23 beyond you. Often I am asked by golfers, if there is a way to completely eliminate anxious thoughts about missing shots and I tell them yes, just completely erase your personal history. Obviously erasing one’s personal history is not possible or at least practical but there is another option to manage anxious and distracting thoughts from interfering with your golf performance. Learning how to create space or separation from thoughts can extremely minimize and possibly eliminate the effect of thoughts. Thoughts only have the potential to affect our perception and behavior when we think about them. With thinking there is no separation from the thought, we become fused with it and that connection becomes our reality. A golfer’s reaction to the thought of missing a four-foot putt is linked to the degree of distance he or she creates between the thought and themselves. If he or she begins to think about missing the putt, a story in their mind is created. The story is accompanied by images so it very much like becoming engrossed in a movie whose storyline is one of embarrassment, disappointment, and frustration. Scenarios of letting people down and having others think you can’t perform under pressure play out in your mind in just a matter of seconds. Your bodily reactions just before attempting the putt are in response to the movie about missing the putt that plays in your head. But you haven’t attempted and seen the result of the putt yet. What if instead of fusing with the thought you were able to just become aware of it and understand it as a natural sense object originating from the sub-conscious mind? Think of this in the very same way you might simply notice the sound of other people’s voices as you were having lunch with a friend. You notice the sounds of other’s voices but you do not really hear what they are saying because you have kept those sounds separate from listening to your lunch companion. Thoughts, like sounds, are sense phenomena. They are naturally existing objects that sometimes are relevant to our present moment situation and at other times are irrelevant. Another way to approach this method is to question if thoughts 24 KEVIN SVERDUK are reliable predictors of the future. When you have a thought about something happening, does that event usually happen? It may seem so, but would you be willing to go to Las Vegas and put your life savings on what number you thought would come up on the roulette wheel? How many times have you had the thought of missing a putt and made it? The reality is that thoughts are not reliable predictors. They are often natural worries and concerns that one has about uncertain outcomes. It’s not the thought of missing a short putt that causes one to miss, rather it’s the relationship that is formed with the thought. Present-centered focus and separation from thoughts are two qualities of awareness. A third quality is non-judgment. The world most of us are aware of has emotional color. Just to name a few, the phenomena taken in by our senses are good, bad, sweet, sour, happy, sad, kind, and cruel. Experiences on the golf course are tainted by the judgments of the events that happen. When we judge that we have hit a good shot and posted a good score we are happy, and when we judge that we have played bad we are frustrated, maybe sad. Consider the following old parable: A farmer and his wife have a child after years of trying finally have a baby boy. What great fortune the farmer says, to have a son who will grow up to help the family. One day a fierce storm blows down a fence and the farmer’s only horse runs away. What bad fortune to lose my only horse to plow the field, the farmer laments. The farmer’s son, now a teenager, goes looking for the horse and returns with both their old horse and younger wild horse. What great fortune, the farmer rejoices, we can plant crops much easier with two horses. The son falls and badly injures his leg trying to break in the new horse. The doctor says the boy may always walk with a limp. What bad fortune, the saddened farmer utters. The army comes selecting young men to fight in the war but passes on taking the son because of his limp. What great fortune that my son will not die in the terrible war, the farmer expresses. How can you truly know if something is ultimately good or The Performance Mindset 25 bad? The Buddhist like to say that life is an illusion, not true, but a product of our tainted perception and this view keeps us from realizing complete joy. If you want to get better at golf, you are interested in information rather than judgment. How much would you improve if your golf instructor only told you that an attempt was good or bad rather than giving you information about the swing? Further, when you hit a shot and label it as bad then there is an emotional reaction to it that is usually negative. Events tied to an emotion tend to be remembered much more clearly and intensely than events that are free of any reaction. Usually, when you respond to a question about how your day is going, you will quickly recall those events that were associated with the strongest emotions, either positive or negative. When a golfer follows a miss with saying, “that’s such a bad shot” to him or herself, the accompanying negative reaction (anger, frustration, sadness) etches the experience deeply into his or her memory. The next time the golfer may have a similar shot, the memory of the bad shot resonates and the temptation to overcompensate for the previous miss can be strong. The world of excellence exists in the realm of reality rather than illusion. Optimal learning and performance are informed by nonjudgmental awareness. The fourth quality of awareness is self-knowledge. Humans are creatures of habit and tendencies. Psychometricians (the statisticians of psychology) love to measure and predict human behavior and create actuarial tables assessing the odds of various human behaviors. To their credit, the numbers they spew out tend to be fairly accurate. They are accurate because humans spend most of their time unaware of what they are doing and their behavior is largely a product of learned habits. Habits include both physical and psychological actions. An example of a physical habit might be a golfer swaying his or her hips away from the ball as the club goes back. A psychological habit could be when a golfer tries to guide the ball into the hole rather than hit it freely on a putt they perceive as very important. Humans have hundreds, if not thousands, of habits and tenden- 26 KEVIN SVERDUK cies, and the majority of them are very healthy and helpful to living a meaningful life. It is because of these habits that our minds can be free to attend to moment to moment events that are constantly changing. Without these habits, our conscious mind would be overloaded with decisions, choices, and actions. Still, there are some habits that are not helpful towards our pursuit to play great golf consistently. Habits are very difficult to break free from because they reside in the subconscious part of the mind and typically bypass conscious awareness. You simply perform the habit without knowing that you are. While habits and tendencies may have great strength and resilience, they can be weakened and replaced. The process of weakening the strength of one habit and replacing it with a more helpful one starts with self-knowledge. If you noticed you were slicing every shot to the right one of the first things you might do is to go see your instructor to find out why. The first question becomes one of identifying what specific habit is causing you to consistently hit slices. Only once you gain the understanding and awareness of what the faulty habit is can you begin the process of replacing it with a more functional and effective one. Breaking free of an existing habit and replacing it with a new one is a challenging task that requires consistent and persistent focus. If for example, you want to replace the habit of swaying your hips on the takeaway with keeping your hips still, you must take thousands of swings with a conscious focus on the newer feel. If for any of those swings your focus drifts away, you will likely hit those with your older, stronger habit. Self-knowledge and awareness are also critical to making correct moment to moment adjustments. When you are driving a car on the freeway, your awareness of where you are in your lane helps you steer the wheel in such a way that you keep the vehicle in the proper lane. Similarly, although much more subtly, being aware of your tendencies in certain competitive situations is essential for making compensations needed to maintain consistent results. Say, for example, you have a tendency on mid to short putts that break from right to left to miss them on the low side of the cup. Let’s also The Performance Mindset 27 say that this tendency is more likely when it is viewed by you as a very big putt. If before attempting the putt, you have the self-awareness to recognize this situation and the tendency you have, then you create an opportunity to make an adjustment for it and possibly play your putt a little more on the high side. Often, golfers recognize the tendency after the attempt when it is too late to make the adjustment. They miss the putt and then remember that they always seem to miss those putts on the low side. When, where, and how you direct your mental energy is an important aspect of the Performance Mindset. Being completely present to the moment to moment events, separating that energy from thoughts, suspending any judgments about what is happening, and knowing yourself and your tendencies deeply will lead to a mindset that consistently allows your best performances to occur. Optimism A second theme of the Performance Mindset is Optimism. There are various ideas, definitions, and descriptions of optimism. I describe optimism as the acknowledgment of the desired possibilities of all events and things. It is a disposition of the mind that views uncertain outcomes with the belief that in addition to negative and unwanted results, there are possibilities for positive and rewarding endings. Optimism should not be confused with overconfidence. There remains a quality of realistic honesty with optimism, as opposed to an often delusional quality that accompanies a belief in the absolute certainty of positive results. This realistic and honest belief in the potential for positive outcomes is free from unhealthy stress and worry. This type of optimism precisely sets the stage for enhanced levels of performance to occur. Components of the optimistic Performance Mindset include growth storytelling, self-determination, improvisation, and surrender. The Buddhist often express that life is an illusion. The explanation behind this is that our reality lies in the ways we perceive and try to make sense of events. What is real for one person may not 28 KEVIN SVERDUK hold true for another. We explain our world and reality in stories. If you go to the range or putting green before the tournament begins, you hear stories. “I’m not hitting it well, I’m going to play poorly today”; “I can’t putt and these greens are fast, there’s going to be a lot of three putts”; “I never play well on this course.” Follow a golfer during the tournament and after and you will hear more stories. Frequently, the stories we tell both ourselves and others are about outcomes that are not pleasant and overly critical. Typically, our worries become our stories. If we hit a couple of errant shots on the range before playing, we create a scenario in our head about hitting balls out of bounds and shooting a big score. This is what might be called self-defeating storytelling. These are stories that drain energy from us, lead to hopelessness, and can rob us of power. “Growth Storytelling” is an alternate method of describing our reality. In this approach, we explain past, present, and future events in ways that provide hope, opportunity, and growth potential. I remember hearing an interview with Tiger Woods during a time in his career when he was working through a swing change and had recently posted several higher than normal scores, finishing well in tournaments. The reporters continually asked him if he were in a slump and what was wrong with his game. Tiger’s consistent response to these types of questions, the story he created, was: “No, I’m not in a slump. The things I have been working on feel like they are sinking in and becoming more automatic, I am on exactly the track I need to be on and just need to be patient and give it more time. I feel that I am getting closer to where I want my game to be.” It was a perfect example of Growth Storytelling and within just a few months Tiger became dominant again. In what became groundbreaking research and an impetus for the field of positive psychology, Psychologist Martin Seligman conducted an interesting study on storytelling and success in sport. Seligman hypothesized that athletes that were more optimistic in their talk would win more than those whose stories were pessimistic. To test this idea, Seligman collected old newspaper articles on baseball and analyzed quotes given by players and The Performance Mindset 29 coaches on various teams during the entire course of a season. He had independent reviewers rate the optimism/pessimism of each quote and compiled a score for each of the teams. He found that the team that won the World Series was more optimistic in their storytelling than the teams that finished lower in the standings. What was also interesting was that even after losing two or three games in a row, the champion team’s post-game remarks were still judged to be optimistic. In several subsequent studies, Seligman’s finding has been replicated. The growth potential of stories is identified by the words used in the story. Words and statements like “I can’t, this always, I never, I’m unable,” and “it is useless,” are hallmarks of limited growth and change. They offer little hope of future success. A statement “I can’t putt” implies very clearly that one does not feel they have any control. Similarly, “I always mess up on the last couple of holes when I have a good round going,” expresses that the occurrence of these unpleasant events is stable and unchanging, offering almost no prospect for positive change. A statement like “I don’t have a good feeling around the greens,” infers that the problem lies within the golfer and not in outside factors like ineffective or insufficient practice routines. Disempowered stories describe failure and poor performance to personal, unchanging, and uncontrollable factors. How could you feel optimistic about future tournaments when you feel that the reason you struggle is because you lack the ability? You will always make the same mistakes and feel there is no way to correct or change things. Growth Stories carry a different tone altogether. Consider the following response made by a scratch golfer who just shot a 75 and three-putted five times, “I hit the ball very solidly today, the things I have been working on in practice seem to be paying off. On six of my putts, I misread the speed of the putts, I’m not quite as comfortable with the greens yet, although I was rolling the putts on my line very consistently. I have a couple of speed drills that have been effective in helping me get a better feel, if I do that before the round tomorrow, then I will have a great chance to shoot a lower score. I 30 KEVIN SVERDUK am excited to see what happens.” After reading this response, notice the absence of any self-limiting words and statements. Rather than using general (“I putted poorly”) and absolute (“I never got my speed down”) accounts, the golfer’s story was specific (“six putts”) and mutable (“If …, then…”). It is a story full of possibility and hope for future success. It is full of optimism. Creating and maintaining Growth Stories is a learned skill and an essential component of the Performance Mindset. A second dimension of optimism is Self-Determination. If you think about it, most of the things you need to become a better golfer as well as have a more abundant and meaningful life, are widely available to you. If you need information about the golf swing, equipment, physical training, and effective practice drills, a relatively quick search of the internet will yield you with dozens of results. Some may be completely inaccurate and useless but certainly many will have at least some merit. Lack of sufficient information cannot be identified with the reasons golfers and people, in general, fail to completely realize their full potential. The scientific research is more than robust, with studies telling us what will make our lives healthier, more productive, and joyful. Quite simply, we know what choices will lead to better golf, yet we inconsistently or rarely make those choices. Self-Determination is the degree to which an individual feels and believes that his or her life’s future is being driven by themselves rather than outside circumstances and people. As an expression of optimism, Self-Determination is the acknowledgment that regardless of current situations, meaningful and positive change is possible. For example, I could have just played three tournaments in a row in which my strokes gained putting (SGP) was -2.5 (which means that on average I was taking 2.5 more strokes per round than the average for the field). If I felt less self-determined I might quickly jump to the conclusion that I am just not a strong putter, I was born without great vision or feel, and there is not much use in placing more effort into something that is not going to change. This would be The Performance Mindset 31 accepting that circumstances outside of my control are responsible for the level of my putting. On the other hand, if I were more self-determined, I might accept that I might not have made all the right choices with regards to my putting preparation as I could have and be strengthened by the desire to find better ways to practice putting and feel more in control of how my putting will be in the future. I would experience more intrinsic drive because I feel more in control of my outlook and as long as putting better was important to me I would enthusiastically persist in that pursuit. While the immediate question that might come to mind is, how can I become more self-determined? A perhaps more insightful question is, why am I not? Why do I feel like my game is out of my hands? Why do I consistently fail to make the choices in life that I know would help me? Why do so often dread going to practice and doing the drills with no enthusiasm? It was not always this way, in fact, from birth humans are almost completely self-determined and intrinsically motivated. This can be seen in infants through their exploratory behavior, looking around, wanting to touch everything. Their motivation to do things comes from within. A parent more often has to try to get their child to stop playing rather than to begin. Through time, environmental and social experiences acting in consequence to certain behaviors begin to shift the reasons for engaging in actions. Some actions are reinforced through external rewards, such as food, verbal encouragement, hugs, while others may be discouraged through aversive consequences, such as unpleasant physical sensations, verbal scolding, and silence. When they first begin to play golf most kids are exactly like infants. They look at the clubs with astonishment, try hitting the ball in all different types of ways, and have no conception of what is good or bad. When they get to the golf course all they want is to grab a club and start whacking away at the ball. This might be called a “want to” motivation. Often, however, this drive can be replaced by a “have to” motivation, as the golfer begins to feel that he or she must go practice and work on their games for external 32 KEVIN SVERDUK reasons and possibly to satisfy parents and coaches. “Want to” motivation reflects a high degree of self-determination while “have to” motivation echoes low self-determination. Golfers, particularly junior and college-aged players, many times feel pressured by outside sources to play and practice and lose the intrinsic desire to continue. What shifts in these circumstances is the perception of why the golfer feels he or she is playing. The golfer feels that she has to go to practice and do the prescribed drills or face being scolded and punished. Based on this perception, the golfer has very little intrinsic desire to practice and do those drills. Consequently, both the quality and enjoyment of those practices are diminished. Notice though that it is not the overbearing parent and micromanaging coach that zaps the golfer of self-determination, it is the perception formed by the player of why he or she is doing those activities. The perception that I go to practice at this time, practice for this long, and do these drills because I have to and thus am not in control of my actions is a shallow perception. It is shallow because it fails to acknowledge deeper reasons for playing golf and pursuing excellence. Instead, it only focuses on this moment’s experience rather than my life’s involvement. A deeper perception would reflect the intrinsic reasons why I play golf. Reasons such as: to challenge myself with a sport that is often elusive at best, to express my athleticism, to feel the incredible sensations of hitting perfect shots, to feel pride in my accomplishments, and to share experiences with fellow competitors and those close to me. A deeper perception would also recognize that while their methods might feel controlling, my coach and parents ultimately share the same deep reasons I have for playing. In fact, nothing would likely make them happier than if I were successful in realizing those reasons. Finally, a deeper perception would recognize that outside factors, including other people, cannot touch my mind. My mind is mine and mine alone. A team of skilled surgeons can never cut me open, dissect me and lay so much as a finger on my mind. As Victor Frankl wrote in his powerful book, Man’s Search for Meaning, The Performance Mindset 33 describing life in the concentration camps during World War II where the external condition were horrific, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms— to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” The essence of feeling self-determined, and maintaining this feeling, lies not in the outside circumstances of life, not in the behaviors of parents and coaches, but in the recognition that you are in control of your future choices and actions and that those actions will shape your game and you as a person. That outlook has more growth and optimism. Improvisation represents a third dimension of optimism. Golfers spend an enormous amount of practice time trying to master how to hit fairways and greens. Dozens, if not hundreds of practice balls are hit on the range every day with the singular purpose of hitting the ball on line to the target, and yet with all this attention the best players in the world, the ones who practice the most, manage to only hit about 65% of fairways and greens on average. Despite this seemingly low percentage, they manage to shoot on average just below par. How is this possible you might ask? The answer is that they have the great ability to improvise. Improvisation reflects optimism through the attitude that regardless what any given situation presents there may be countless ways to achieve the desired goal. I was watching a golf tournament recently in which going into the last hole, a player hit his approach and instantly reached for his shoulder writhing with pain. He had clearly sustained an injury. His ball ended up in a greenside bunker. As he walked up to the green still obviously in pain, I wondered what he was going to be able to do. Could he still take a swing to get the ball out of the trap, or was he going to have to withdraw? After some period of consideration, he pulled his putter out of his bag and rolled the ball up the slope of the bunker with enough speed to get it out and onto the green leaving himself about 20 feet for par. He proceeded to drain the putt, barely able to raise his left arm in appreciation for the crowd’s applause. 34 KEVIN SVERDUK A round of golf, especially a tournament round, rarely goes as intended. You may have the desire to hit fairways and greens, eliminate three putts, strike the ball solidly, remain calm, focused, and confident, yet the reality is that all of those goals are uncontrollable and often elusive. In fact, going into a round of golf, it is impossible to predict what will happen with ultimate certainty. We are all by nature improvisational, we’ve had to be in order to survive. Often, however, our improvisational abilities go dormant in our quest to learn to control things. Such as when we beat balls at the range with the same club hitting to the same target, searching for machinelike reliability and consistency. The problem with machines is that while they can perform tasks with great precision and certainty, that reliability is contingent on all the working parts remaining steady. If a single unit or piece that is involved in the direct execution of the task breaks down or is even altered, the performance of the machine is compromised. Machines cannot improvise. We, as humans, have a mind and body that dynamically interact. Changes occurring in the mind (thoughts, images, feelings) are always accompanied by changes in the body (heartrate, muscle tension) and vice versa. To hit a one-inch wide ball with a club whose hitting area is barely three times the width of the ball towards a target ranging from 1 inch to 300 plus yards away requires the involvement of almost countless elements in the brain, nervous system, and muscles. The abundance of variables makes this task overwhelmingly daunting. But it is because there are so many pieces dynamically involved that precision and consistency can be obtained. If there is only a single piece involved in performing a task and that piece breaks, the task cannot be completed. With thousands of pieces involved, working in dynamic interaction, if one piece changes, other pieces adjust to that one piece’s changes and the task is still completed. Golfers have that ability, and if we continue to embrace it, train it, and trust it, then even if some part is off (a missed fairway), we can figure how to still get the ball in the hole for par. John Nash was a brilliant mathematician and recipient of the The Performance Mindset 35 Noble Prize. As was chronicled in the motion picture A Beautiful Mind, he also suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, a very debilitating mental illness that caused him to experience delusions in the form of seeing and hearing people who were not really there, although his senses completely made him believe that they were. As bouts of his condition worsened, John spent years in and out of psychiatric hospitals, enduring insulin shock therapy and dozens of powerful medications to help treat his illness often against his wishes. Yet John Nash was a scientist and prodigious thinker, and the side effects of the treatments left him foggy and unable to allow his mind to attend to deep rational contemplation. His illness also prevented him from maintaining a productive and fulfilling existence. Against the wishes of his doctors, friends, and family, John choose to take himself off of all medication and treatment. He decided that he would expand his awareness of all thoughts and discern for himself what was rational thus real and what was irrational and unreal. The delusions he would acknowledge were not rational, they made no sense and therefore he would simply choose to ignore and instead redirect his attention to what made sense. It is important to note that John did not eliminate the delusions, the voices and images remained, he simply choose to no longer acknowledge them as real. John Nash improvised. A final dimension of optimism is surrender. While it might seem confusing to relate to optimism, the willingness to surrender actually reflects the degree of optimism one has. Optimism is a belief in the possibilities of desired outcomes materializing. That belief rests on something that provides hope. It could be on a spiritual or religious doctrine, an identified process and way of doing things, the capabilities of other people, or one’s own abilities and history. The strength of that belief can be seen in the degree one is willing to surrender to that which the belief is founded on. For example, I am optimistic about my chances of winning this tournament because I believe in and trust the hole by hole game plan that my coach and I created and my optimism will persist so long as I remain willing to surrender unconditionally to it. 36 KEVIN SVERDUK The antithesis of surrender is trying harder. When I say that on this putt, because it is a “big putt,” I will try harder to make it, what you are expressing is a lack of willingness to surrender to what you have been doing and trusted on all the previous putts. Trying harder, gritting one’s teeth, bearing down in different ways from how you would normally approach a shot, especially when things may not be going as you would have hoped, does not reflect optimism or even courage. It represents pessimism and a sense of panic. The willingness to completely surrender to a trusted process when the desired outcomes possess little certainty is not only an act of courage, it shows faith. Faith, surrender, and optimism are closely intertwined. Spiritual disciples searching for a meaningful existence for centuries have sought out doctrines and teachers, seeking a way to which they can surrender. In times of desperate hardships, war, famine, illness, and persecution, when optimism might be at its lowest level, those with faith and the willingness to surrender to the way will continue to believe in the possibility of good. Throughout history, we have seen those individuals with this tremendous dedication and willingness to surrender to that which they deeply believe help lead humanity to richer and more meaningful existence. Individuals like Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and The Dalai Lama, just to name a few. Imagine for yourself how it would be if you played golf with this complete willingness to surrender to a way that you fully believe in regardless of the situation. Another word for displaying the unwavering willingness to surrender is confidence. The Latin translation for confidence is fides, meaning faith or trust. To surrender is to move forward with faith. If you desire to have more confidence, as I am often asked by golfers I work with, then be willing to give in to a process completely, increase your faith in that process, and surrender. The Performance Mindset 37 Balance It has been described that the path to excellence is long, steep, and as narrow as a razor’s edge. While many seek the path, only a few manage to stay on it. Every year thousands of golfers register for qualifying events for national championships, professional tournaments, and tour status with just a handful moving on. Many who finally make it on tour often struggle to perform well enough to keep their status. With so many factors influencing performance excellence, finding, maintaining, and regaining the proper ratio of things can be a difficult challenge. The third theme of the Performance Mindset is balance. Three aspects needed to perform consistently at one’s potential are motivational, cognitive, and attentional balance. Lack of sufficient caring is rarely a cause for golfers underperforming to their potential in tournaments, especially big events. Yet caring too much about winning and playing flawlessly also rarely leads to great performance. There is a middle level of caring and motivation that yields the best results. If we were to draw a continuum of the degrees or levels of caring it might look like this: Careless……………..…Carefree……………....Careful Not bringing enough motivation to perform typically results in making strategic errors because you are not placing enough energy in the relevant details such as wind, course conditions, subtle breaks when reading putts, etc. Wanting to win so badly that you become overly concerned with the results only can lead to hesitation in your shots, overanalyzing/thinking, losing patience, and attempting to guide shots rather than swinging freely. In between the extremes of careless and careful is carefree golf. With carefree golf, the attachment to all those factors that are beyond one’s control are nonexistent and instead there is the inspiration to manage, choose, and commit to only those things that can be 38 KEVIN SVERDUK controlled that ultimately provide the best chances to get the desired outcomes. While it may seem that being carefree is not really being competitive because there is little or no concern for winning, I would see it as the opposite. If we define being competitive or competing as doing absolutely everything under one’s control to achieve victory in a contest, then the carefree golfer is the ultimate competitor. Imagine you were playing a match against another golfer and they had a fifteen-foot putt that would likely decide the match. Who would you fear most, a golfer that decided to try extra hard to make the putt, or the golfer that was willing to let go of focusing on winning and instead put all of his or her energy into reading the putt as well as possible, rehearsing the proper feel for the putt, and completely committing to the line, speed, and feel they had rehearsed in their routine? This is not to say that the carefree golfer is not motivated to make the putt and win, rather it is precisely because they are driven to win that they focus solely on what can be controlled and free themselves from what cannot. An important aspect of motivational balance is understanding what to hold onto and what to let go of. If there is a consistent reason that golfers don’t perform in pressure situations as well as they are capable, it would be because they are not letting go of concerns they don’t have the ability to completely dictate. I often joke that you will never see an athlete in the locker room before a big game pacing nervously back a forth muttering to himself, “I hope I play hard today.” The key to proper motivational balance is to maintain the drive to excel while not becoming exceedingly attached to it. Cognitive balance is a second aspect of the ideal balance for the Performance Mindset. The science of psychophysiology, which includes bio and neurofeedback training, provides a glimpse into the delicate workings of the brain as it relates to optimal performance in sport. Mental states ranging from unconscious to highly conscious are distinguished by the amount and location of electrical activity in the brain, and this activity can be detected through The Performance Mindset 39 the placement of small electrodes on the surface of the skull attached to computers. The output of these signals is measured by frequency waves in much the same way as radio waves. Lower wave frequencies are associated with subconscious states while higher frequencies relate to increasingly more conscious states. For example, if you were in a state of deep restful sleep, your brainwave activity would have a lower frequency, compared to when you were alertly focused on a test. By being able to objectively measure brain activity in athletes, researchers have been able to observe correlations between brain wave frequencies and different levels of performance outcomes. What researchers have found, and their studies suggest, is that peak performance typically occurs when the golfer’s mental activity (their brain wave frequency) is at a moderate level. That level can best be described as calmly alert. Higher frequencies would be described as hyper alert or even hypervigilant as one might be in a fight or flight state. Lower frequencies might be described as resting states and range from deep sleep to dreaming. The challenge with creating, maintaining, and regaining the ideal cognitive mental state while performing is the acute reactivity of the brain to thoughts and experiences. Because we are talking about electrical signals, changes in the brain state occur very quickly. We may be in a state of calm alert as we start our backswing, when a thought about water on the left comes in, a memory of hooking it into the water surfaces, electrical activity spikes at the top of our swing signaling the muscles to contract more forcibly, and we block it out to the right at contact. It is a frustrating experience many, if not all, golfers have experienced. Fortunately, there are some techniques that can help train golfers to regulate their brainwave signals more effectively. That will be discussed in the next section of the book. Certainly, cognitive balance and being able to get into the proper mental state is a key aspect of the Performance Mindset. A third aspect of the balance needed to create the Performance Mindset is attentional balance. The execution of all golf shots 40 KEVIN SVERDUK begins in the mind with the intention of the shot we are trying to hit. A sequence of mental and physical events begins, leading to the completed attempt. With our minds, we can aim energy or attention to varying objects and events with different degrees of intensity ranging from wide to narrow. Attentional focus contains dimensions of direction and width. The direction of one’s attention can be internal (assessing how balanced one feels) or external (where to hit the ball). The width of one’s attention can be broad (examining the contours and breaks of a green) to narrow (focusing on a specific landing spot for a chip). From an attentional focus perspective, one can understand the execution of a golf shot by examining the sequence and timing of the golfer’s mental energy from the beginning to completion of the attempt. For example, the ball rests on a clean lie, 175 yards from a left front pin, on a green that mostly slopes from right to left and is guarded by two front bunkers with a 15-mph left to right wind. In order to have a chance to successfully execute the shot, the golfer must attend to at least the following in order: 1. Determine distance to pin including distance to clear bunker. 2. Evaluate the effects of the wind. 3. Calculate and determine to ideal landing spot for the situation. 4. Run through the possible shots to hit. 5. Assess how he or she feels about the possible options. 6. Decide on the specific shot to attempt and club to use. 7. Rehearse the shot to be attempted including simulating a swing feel, regulating mental/physical state, focusing on the target and/or ball flight. 8. Hit the shot. The attention needed to successfully hit the desired shot is sequentially shifting from broad to narrow, internal to external. It requires a delicate balance of attention to provide the best chances The Performance Mindset 41 for success. Disruptions in the sequencing and appropriate dimensions of attention are often the source of execution errors in golf. Golf legend Nancy Lopez described an experience when she had a fifteen-foot putt on the 72nd hole of the U. S. Women’s Open for birdie to tie for the lead and force a playoff. Knowing what was at stake, Lopez and her caddy focused intently on reading the putt so as to find the exact line needed. They took extra time and energy to study the putt from all angles until she felt she had the line. Keeping the line in focus, Lopez readied herself to putt, stood over the ball, and hit the putt. As she stroked the putt the ball started exactly on the line she had read tracking right into the middle of the hole. As the ball approached the hole it started to slow down, rolling perfectly on-line, coming to a rest one inch short of the hole. Almost instantly Lopez remembered, she had forgotten to pay attention to the speed. The balance required to traverse the narrow, often slippery, slope characteristic of the path to performance excellence is everchanging and unrelenting. The challenge is not only to find the proper motivational, cognitive, and attentional balance but learn how to maintain it and regain it when it’s thrown off. Enhanced awareness, unwavering optimism, and proper balance work in harmony to create an internal mind/body state that allows peak experiences and excelled performances to manifest. CHAPTER SUMMARY The performance mindset consists of awareness, optimism, and balance. Awareness is enhanced by learning to stay focused on the present, separating from one’s thoughts, suspending judgement, and acquiring self-knowledge. Reducing the effects of anxiety-inducing thoughts can be achieved by cultivating mindful awareness. Optimism includes growth storytelling, selfdetermination, improvisation, and surrender. Optimism is a learned way of looking at future possibilities. It is a perspective that leads to optimal growth, performance, and happiness. The three types of balance are motivational, cognitive, and attentional. Consistent levels of performance excellence are maintained through insightful awareness, resilient optimism, and meticulous balance. PART II PERFORMANCE TOOLS 3 MEDITATION I t is said that the mind is the forerunner of all things. With the mind, we create our own world, our realities, and our futures. The Performance Mindset possesses expanded awareness, resilient optimism, and delicate balance leading to the consistent experience of excellence. There may be perhaps no more effective and powerful way to cultivate the mind for enhanced performance than the practice of meditation. The scientific community, namely neuropsychologist and sport psychologists, have in recent years accumulated notable research data on the transformative effects of meditation on the brain, our well-being, and sport performance. Essentially, the sustained and regular practice of meditation, as little as twenty minutes a day for eight weeks, results in anatomical changes in the brain along regions that regulate happiness, memory, problem-solving, focus, and empathy. Further, meditation has been shown to enhance performance in academic and athletic tasks. Recently, we have begun to see many athletes, including some of the most accomplished in their sports, share publically their use of meditation practice. While there may be dozens of variations and levels of medita- 48 KEVIN SVERDUK tive practice, at a basic level, meditation is consciously placing one’s attention on the mind and/or sense objects in the present moment without judgment. Often the term meditation conjures up ideas of religious practices, however, we all experience meditation in our daily lives from time to time with no connection to a spiritual discipline. If you have ever stood over a putt, completely absorbed in your process with no thought of results, or sat quietly totally enjoying the first sip of a freshly brewed cup of coffee, or took a moment on a hike to stop and utterly absorb the scenery, you were most likely in a meditative state. A state of enhanced awareness, free of judgment, aversion, and attachment. We all experience however fleeting, these heightened states of awareness and consciousness in our golf games, but few take the steps to practice cultivating the mind so as to intentionally create it more consistently when we play. Competitive athletes, including golfers, are often keen to spend several hours per day working out and grinding away at their games with drills, play, and repetition. There is a certain level of satisfaction to know that you have put hard work into getting better. Yet, there are also lingering doubts with it. “Have I done enough? Is this going to make the difference? Will this transfer into better results? And these are legitimate concerns because many golfers who do put in long hours of intense physical practice and remain frustrated by a lack of significant progress. What’s missing? A complimentary companion to hard work is what might be called soft or quiet work. These are the things one does to develop the mind and imagination that do not produce sweat and are done alone in secluded spaces. Quiet work is the work that all great performers do and virtually no one ever sees. Meditation practice fits precisely into that category of quiet work. While meditating is quiet work, it is by no means subtle. The energy of the mind can be called focus. We all know what focus is and how important it is to performance. Mistakes are often attributed to “a loss of focus” and anxiety linked to focusing on results. Focus is one of those skills we like to think we have control The Performance Mindset 49 over yet rarely find that we exercise it. Everyone stresses how crucial it is to learn how to focus but no one really explains how to. It comes back to the belief that we have control of our focus and just have to choose to focus. The truth is that we don’t choose to lose focus when playing a serious game of golf. The mind wanders, sometimes wildly, other times hardly at all. We can learn to control our focus and turn it into a choice with the practice of meditation. When we are attentive to the present moment and aware of the contents of the mind, choices become conscious actions rather than habitual responses. When we talk of losing focus what does that really mean? Did we blackout and lose consciousness? Sometimes, maybe. What it really means it that we started thinking about something irrelevant to the task at hand. Thinking begins with a thought. However, having a thought is not the same as thinking. You can recognize a thought about something you overheard another person say yesterday without thinking about it. As you are lining up your putt, focused on your process and routine, you notice a thought of blowing this putt way past the hole and missing the comeback. You could recognize the thought, not make a big deal about it and continue being focused on your routine or become absorbed by the fear of three putting as images of missing the putt flood your mind followed immediately by anxiety. The thought came in, your focus jumped on it and thinking ensued. When you find a quiet space where you can sit comfortably, be left undisturbed, and let your focus be directed into your mind while paying attention to whatever thoughts enter, you are practicing meditation. To practice meditation is to practice paying attention to the ever-changing contents of the mind. Not at all unlike performing an assignment of going to a kindergarten classroom and observing the behavior of a child. In meditation, you observe your thoughts. You then cultivate an attitude of not judging what you see leading to an ability to unconditionally accept the thoughts that come in. Thoughts, after all, are just random, often delusional snapshots from your brain. At times you notice that you may have 50 KEVIN SVERDUK stopped observing and started thinking about one of the thoughts. Now you practice the discipline of recognizing the thinking and bring attention back to observing. Finally, through this process of observing and accepting thoughts as they truly are, maintaining the discipline of returning attention when distracted, and remaining patient, your ability to focus on the present moment enhances. While the practice of meditation and the focus on the breath will surely result in deeper states of relaxation and calmness on the golf course, there is an even more profound and powerful outcome that can be attained with practice. Meditation represents a way of being. As you sit quietly, prompting yourself to recognize unconditionally whatever enters the mind, you are creating a metaphor for which to live your life. The relationships you have with all of life’s attachments, the ego, wants, desires, fears, regrets, and uncertainty, expose themselves when meditating. The myriad of emotions that accompany them rise to consciousness as well. This deep experience of the extreme rawness of your inner world, often leaving one to feel vulnerable and embarrassed, is rarely present in our daily lives. Standing over a three-foot, downhill putt with your closest friends, fiercest rivals, and dozens of people you don’t even know watching is one such time. The interference that comes from within is the root source of failing to perform up to one’s full potential under pressure. The practice of meditation is a central discipline in many religious and spiritual doctrines whose chief objectives include cultivating a way of peacefully existing in an uncertain and often harsh world. When playing golf and in particular, tournament golf, the mind is filled with thought after thought. The ego is working extra hard assessing potential threats (embarrassments) while clinging desperately for satisfactory results. The critical voice of the ego is hypervigilant, wanting to micromanage your every action. It’s not enough that you are faced with the challenge of figuring out a twenty-foot, lightningfast, double-breaking putt, on top of this a voice inside keeps telling you not to three-putt. Then if you do wind up three-putting the The Performance Mindset 51 hole, the voices beat you up and try to make you feel ashamed. Without a doubt, the contents that frequently enter the mind can be as painful, threatening, and sad as any real event can be. Meditation practice is less a way of eliminating these discursive thoughts and critical voices and more about how to relate to them. By cultivating unconditional acceptance (it is what it is), patience (nothing lasts forever), nonattachment/non-aversion (letting go) and compassion for one’s self (liberation from the ego) the suffering experienced within the mind ceases. The peace experienced from learning to relate more harmoniously with thoughts and images frees one’s mind and allows the golfer to hit each shot with the full potential available at that moment. In the systematic practice of meditation, a golfer will develop an expanded and insightful awareness leading to more frequent, longer focus in the present moment, more effective management of discursive thoughts and negative emotions, less excess tension and anxiety, and clearer decision-making. Meditation presents a supportive companion to the hard work put in by removing the mental barriers that often prevent the physical potential from materializing. Simply put: hard work + quiet work = complete work. If you are a serious golfer, motivated to become the best you can be, and you are not integrating regular meditation practice into your daily routine, then you are not doing everything you can to improve. How to Meditate Meditation is a practice not at all unlike going out and spending an hour on the putting green. It is structured, requires discipline, and has specific objectives. It is best to approach meditation as an exercise routine, except instead of challenging your body you are stimulating your mind. And as with any practice or exercise, frequency, duration, and intensity are the keys to how much you will get out of the activity. The following are some general guidelines and considerations to creating a meditation practice for yourself: 52 KEVIN SVERDUK 1. Where: You can meditate anywhere but it is best, especially as you start out, to find a place where there is little distraction and is physically comfortable. A private office, a room, or in your parked car are all great places to practice. 2. When: Often, the best time to meditate is during transition periods of your day such as when you wake up, at night before you go to sleep, just before practice, and between classes or meetings. During these periods in the day, there may be less on your mind and that can make it easier to stay present and not get too distracted. Meditation during these times can also help you transition more quickly into the subsequent activity. 3. Length: As you start out your meditation, practice time should be short perhaps three to five minutes. If it starts out too long you may wind up spacing out rather than being present. You can even start with just meditating for one minute, taking a minute break and then doing another for several minutes. Using a watch or phone with a timer can be useful to help keep the structure in place. 4. Posture: In meditation practice, it is important to feel comfortable and alert. Drifting off into sleep may feel relaxing but you lose conscious awareness and the practice is to expand that awareness, not escape from it. The back should be upright, tall without straining, with the head balancing restfully on the shoulders. This posture can be created and maintained by sitting crosslegged on the floor (using cushions or pillows for support is OK) or the front edge of a chair with the feet flat on the ground. As you sit, your eyes should be gazed to an area about four to five feet in front of you either at an object such as a plain wall or just into space. You may close your eyes as well although sometimes this may promote drowsiness. The Performance Mindset 53 5. How: Once you have found a space and time to practice, and situated yourself in an alert and comfortable posture, you are ready to begin. It is often helpful when first starting to meditate to focus your attention on your breathing. The breath is our connection to the present moment. We cannot take tomorrow’s breath today, we can only take this moment’s breath. While we are constantly taking breaths in and out we are usually unaware of it. The type of breathing that we do in meditation is conscious breathing and it has a longer, deeper, and more measured rhythm. Focusing all of your attention and awareness on the breath you first inhale slowly through the nose (taking about two to three seconds) letting yourself feel the air come in, filling up all the space of your lungs particularly the lower sections, then without forcing it you slowly exhale through the mouth (taking about five to six seconds) allowing the air in your lungs to flow out. As the exhalation of the breath comes to the end, let yourself notice the small period of time or gap that exists before you begin the next breath. There is often a sensation of quietness and calmness during this gap. This gap is an important contributor to the powerful effects of meditation. During the first couple of minutes place 100% of your attention on the breath. Then, keep just enough attention there so you can remain aware of the rising and falling (say 15%). With your remaining focus, direct attention to your mind and let yourself observe whatever comes into the mind. If the mind appears free of thoughts, stay with that experience of emptiness. Getting distracted and finding yourself thinking about random things is normal. When you recognize that you are attached to a thought, let it go and come back to your next breath and then return to the mind. Continue to let your awareness flow on your breath and mind for five minutes to start and try to extend your practice time over the course of ten sessions to twenty minutes. Engaging in just a single five-minute meditation liked described 54 KEVIN SVERDUK above will likely leave you feeling a bit more relaxed immediately but just that single episode will have no lasting and meaningful impact on your ability to play better golf. During the period of time in meditation that you were directing and maintaining your complete attention on the breath, the electrical activity in the brain was altered to accompany your shift in focus. This is similar to the physiological shift that were to occur if you jogged for five minutes, your body’s physiology would adjust to meet the demands of running. So, while there are specific changes happening in the brain during that single meditation sitting, no permanent alterations occur. But what would happen if you practiced meditating for 20 minutes each day for eight weeks? Brain scientists like to use the phrase “whatever fires together, wires together” when describing the effects of repeated patterns of mental activity. During meditation, the electrical activity within the brain increases in the front regions associated with executive functioning or more specifically, focus, decision-making, and problemsolving. At the same time, during meditation, there is less electrical activity occurring in the back regions of the brain associated with emotions, fear, and anxiety. As the brain experiences repeated periods of these patterns it becomes more wired to create, maintain, and regain those states of mind. While that single session of meditation produces almost no lasting benefit, regular practice over time will change the brain and contribute to the cultivation of a mindset that is relaxed yet alert, focused, objective, and self-aware. With specific attention and intention, meditation practice will lead to greater patience, selfacceptance, commitment, and mental toughness. Variations of Meditation Practices Breath and mindful meditation is but one variation or type of meditation practice. Without going into too much complexity, the types of meditations might be classified into three categories: Object Meditation, Mindfulness Meditation, and Depth or Insight Medita- The Performance Mindset 55 tion. Object Meditation, for example focusing one’s attention on the breath, is very common and an effective way to get started with meditation. Other objects that can be attended to during meditation include sounds, sensations such as walking, and words or phrases such as mantras. This type of meditation can be very useful during the gaps in time between hitting shots, such as when walking down the fairway. In Mindfulness Meditation, the attention is placed on the mind and paying attention to or observing as it also described, whatever comes into one’s mind including thoughts, images, feelings, etc. It is not that you are thinking, but being aware of thoughts and what the mind is doing. Mindfulness Meditation is an effective practice for learning to create space between unpleasant thoughts and yourself. This can be helpful during situations in which you begin to think about failed results such as short putts and tee shots. Depth or Insight Meditation practices involve expanding one’s awareness and perspective from the conscious mind to subconscious and transcendental phenomena. It is said that this type of meditation helps one lose their sense of self and all the insecurity and fear that often accompanies the ego. Gaining greater insight into your own personal history and how that has shaped you coupled with self-compassion and compassion for others can result is profound personal growth. As your meditation practice grows and matures, you will most likely expand the types of meditation you engage in. If you have not done meditation and have little experience I would recommend starting with meditation on the breath and then beginning to weave in mindfulness practice. In relation to cultivating the Performance Mindset, meditation practice is an essential training component. Through the practice of meditation, your ability to stay focused on the present moment, create separation from discursive thoughts, see things objectively, and increase self-awareness will be enhanced. In meditation practice, you create a template for a way of being not only on the golf course but also in life. Closing the gap between potential and fulfillment requires 56 KEVIN SVERDUK much more than just a solid swing. Hard work is no doubt a contributor and you need to put in the 10,000 hours to have a chance but that is not what bridges the gap. We cannot readily see what it is that make the great golfers great because what we are looking for is often silent and unseen. It is the work done within the hidden confines of the mind that makes the most difference. The development of focus, patience, acceptance, discipline, wisdom and compassion cultivated through meditation practice are performance skills. They represent attributes that allow golfers to express their well-honed skills to their ultimate potential. CHAPTER SUMMARY Meditation is remaining aware, in the present, without judgment. Research has shown that regular meditation practice produces anatomical changes in regions of the brain that regulate attention, problem-solving, and happiness. In addition to creating deeper states of relaxation, meditation cultivates a mental outlook that allows you to let go of undue pressure and better handle adversity on the golf course. Hard Work + Quiet Work = Complete Work Start by meditating for short periods (three to five minutes) and focusing on breathing. Then gradually lengthen the time. 4 IMAGINATION I n 1960 a young twenty-two-year-old distance runner Billy Mills from the United States set his sights on winning the gold medal in the 10,000-meter race at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. At the time his best result in that distance was nearly 2 minutes slower than the world record held by Ron Clarke of New Zealand, who was widely regarded as the greatest distance runner of his era and would be competing at Tokyo. Further, no runner from the United States had ever won an Olympic Gold Medal in that event. Mills trained hard and finished second at the Olympic trials to make the team. Yet, entering the games, he had never run under 29 minutes while Ron Clarke had recently run just over 28. Among the experts, Mills was not considered a threat to win the race. As the race began, Mills fell in behind Ron Clarke and just tried to stay with him. With only two laps to go, Mills found himself still running with Clarke who was leading the race. With 100 yards remaining Mills swung out to an outside lane, started a ferocious sprint and won the race in a time that was 50 seconds faster than he had ever run. Among sport historians, it was considered one of the greatest upsets in Olympic history. While many might have considered Billy Mills’ feat a fluke, as 60 KEVIN SVERDUK he described it the win was a result of a thoughtful and specific plan. Billy Mills understood that in order to run the time he needed to run, he not only had to be physically strong but needed to have a rock solid belief that he could run with the best in the world and beat them. Starting in 1960, he set aside time to visualize himself running in Tokyo, staying with the best runners, and outsprinting them to win the race. He reported using imagery dozens of times a day for four years. In his mind winning the gold medal was no fluke, it was his destiny. If we take a slightly different perspective of Mills’ feat, we might see that it actually makes perfect sense that he won. Putting aside moments to create clear and vivid images of a specific action, and repeating that twelve times per day for four years. That amounts to 17,568 bouts of imagery. Acknowledging, as neuro and cognitive psychologist tell us, that the subconscious mind and body cannot really distinguish between events that actually happen and ones that are imagined, it begins to seem not so unexpected and rather logical. Billy Mills created the greatest upset in Olympic history, first in his mind, then in his life. Human’s capacity for imagination has been a source of both triumph and tragedy. Innovative imagination has helped humans create phenomenal advances in practically every area of our lives including technology, architecture, medicine, and science. On the other hand, our imaginations often serve to limit growth and happiness. We frequently create images in our minds of things gone astray and experiences to avoid. How often on the golf course does the image of a shot finding the water or bunkers enter your mind? I’ve had golfers tell me after playing a tournament that there were certain holes they played in which they felt they could not get the image of hitting a shot into the water out of their minds. The source of most if not all unwanted images is the subconscious mind and thus outside of our conscious control. If it were left entirely to choice, we would simply decide not to have images of missed putts, negative reactions from others, and poor performances enter our awareness. There are, of course, times when The Performance Mindset 61 images emerge that match what we hope to occur such as when we can clearly see the flight or roll of the ball precisely to the target. For most, those occasions are rare and seemingly fleeting. The power of imagination, however, can be harnessed, developed, and more directly controlled. Billy Mills took an active role in the type and frequencies of the images with which his mind was exposed. How did he do this? He practiced dozens of times a day and continuously. Try this exercise. Read the following instructions and then perform them: Close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths to relax and clear your mind. Create the image of a white golf ball suspended in air about two feet in front of you. Take a few moments to take in as many details of the ball as you can including the dimples surrounding the ball, logo and/or markings on the ball. Then, use your imagination to change the color of the ball from white to red. Hold the image in your mind for a moment then change it to blue, then orange, then green, and finally back to white. Now open your eyes. What was that experience like? Two important aspects of the act of imagination or imagery are vividness and control. Vividness refers to the degree of clarity or realness the created image appears. For the exercise you just did, this would be how real it seemed to you that a golf ball was suspended directly in front of your eyes and how clear the properties of the ball appeared. Control signifies the degree to which you were able to manipulate the image as directed. This would describe how proficiently you were able to change the color of the imagined ball on command. If you were to rate the vividness of the image you attempted to create in the above exercise 62 KEVIN SVERDUK on a scale from 1 (not vivid, very unclear) to 5 (extremely vivid, clear, almost seemed real), how would you rank it? How about controllability on a scale from 1 (unable to control, image did not seem to respond at all) to 5 (almost total control, image shifted as I wanted it to)? The dimensions of vividness and controllability represent the skill of imagery and like all skills can be learned, developed, and acutely refined. Imagery can be described as the recruitment of the senses (vision, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) to create and/or recreate an experience in the mind and body. In the exercise that you just performed you used your sense of vision. Regardless of what your ratings were for vividness and controllability were, with practice those dimensions can be improved. When you created the image of the golf ball and attempted to change its color a number of neurological events were triggered. Beginning with the areas of the brain that regulate conscious decision-making, as you created the image millions of neurons fired and signals sent to regions of the brain where memories are stored, allowing you to conger up a visual representation of a golf ball. Similar neuropathways were activated as you visualized the ball changing colors. This was no random pattern of electrical activity but rather a very precise sequence unique to the exact images created. If the images created were of physical movements such as hitting a driver, then the neurological and electrical activity would extend to the cells included in all of the muscles fibers associated with the physical act of driving a ball. While one might not notice any actual physical movement while imagining a driver swing, the strength of the activity produced by the imagery would be potent enough to register recordings of muscle activity using electromyography. This is one of the most powerful explanations as to why imagery has been scientifically proven to help athletes learn and perform motor skills more quickly and efficiently. If this was your first time performing the imagery exercise with the golf ball, then the vividness and controllability may not have been as strong. The neurological connections required were new and needed some trial The Performance Mindset 63 and error to eventually access the precise areas of the circuit needed to create the desired image. Yet, the brain adjusts itself very quickly and each subsequent time you were to perform the imagery again, the brain would improve the process thus allowing you to create clearer images with more direct control. More precisely, the neurological sequence of connections would become wired together. This is a finding that can have profound effects on golf performance. Another interesting aspect of our imagination is what happens when we hit or throw to targets. As I described earlier, when one imagines swinging a golf club a cascade of synapses and muscle fiber activation occurs that is exact to the actual swing. When the imagination shifts from the movement of the swing and is consumed with the target, the brain/body also experience similar activation but with a slight twist. The vivid image of the target and/or shape of the ball flight traveling to the target stimulates the neural and cellular circuitry to mobilize itself to produce that result. During the 1972 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, Jack Nicholas hit what many consider one of the greatest shots in golf history. At the 17th hole on the final round he faced a 218-yard par three to a tucked pin with near gale force winds blowing. He hit a 1-iron that bounced twice on the green, gently hitting the flagstick before resting inches from the cup. When asked about his swing on this tremendous shot, he has commented that on the way down to the ball he felt his club reroute itself from what was expected. Somehow the strength of the image of the desired target superseded the commitment to the intended swing and that target image prompted his body to adjust on the fly to get the ball on line. His ability to retain a strong connection to the target in his imagination no doubt allowed his brain/body to quickly reorganize in response. Jack Nicholas has long been a vocal advocate for the power of the imagination for golf, often writing and talking about its importance to performance. Before you hit any shot, you first imagine the shot in your mind. You stand on the tee box look down the fairway and visualize 64 KEVIN SVERDUK where it is you want to hit the ball, then you begin physically rehearsing the kinesthetic feels you think are appropriate for the shot you have in mind. Next, the execution of the actual shot either completely matches what you imagined or does not. The breakdowns explaining the mismatch between what was imagined and what occurred can be varied. It could be that the motor program needed to hit the shot you wanted is not completely learned and ingrained in your body. If you feel that you do have that shot learned as is evidenced by the fact that you can consistently hit the shot on the range then it could be that you got anxious or distracted and maybe began to overthink the shot thus not allowing the wired sequence of neurological firings to proceed uninterrupted. This is certainly a common source of interference and one that needs to be addressed. A third possible source of the breakdown could be that the image of the desired shot both visually and kinesthetically was not clear enough or was lost as you stood over the ball. When the imagination of the shot you want to hit is not crystal clear, it can sometimes be difficult to fully commit to those sensations in the actual swing. Another word to describe imagery could be rehearsal. Our minds possess a great talent for projecting possible future events. Often these projections are of events we want to avoid. In an effort to protect ourselves from harm, we innately assess the risk consequences of certain actions. When we drive, for example, and want to change lanes, we play out the move first in our minds, imagining the possible scenarios that could occur before moving over. Similarly, in golf we are in the process of deciding shot selection, we mentally see the areas and outcomes we do not want to occur. While the visualization of these adverse outcomes is helpful to filter through the shot choices, they can also bring great tension into the swing as they prompt the golfer to play to avoid danger rather than to execute the desired shot. It is difficult to resist this tendency to form images of adverse consequences as they eminent from a strongly ingrained psychological mechanism for self-protection. What can be strengthened, however, is the conscious creation The Performance Mindset 65 of vivid and powerful images of the outcomes we hope for. We can recognize the risks along with the images associated with them and replace them with rewarding visions of a solidly struck ball arcing directly on line to the hole. Create and Copy Think of a master artist such as a painter. Many painters may create beautiful and powerful pictures in their minds, but it is the masterful artists who can copy their images onto the canvas. We often like to think that great artists, including painters, are somehow born with or simply have an innate talent that others simply do not. Jackson Pollack is generally considered one of the greatest painters of the 20th century. His paintings have been displayed at many of the most renowned art galleries and museums in the world. Yet in his early career, his painting did not stand out. Many critics dismissed his work as undisciplined and messy. Undeterred, Jackson Pollock continued to work at his craft practicing and learning new techniques until he began to more completely capture his creations on canvas. Quite simply, he learned how to copy what he created. A golfer faced with a twenty-foot downhill putt with a three- to four-foot right to left break can approach the attempt in the very same way Jackson Pollock might have painted his masterpieces. Start by creating the clearest, most vivid image of a successful putt, recruiting as many of the senses involved as you can, including seeing the ball rolling along the desired line, feeling the tempo of the swing as well as the feeling of the contact between the ball and putter face, and hearing the sound of the putter strike the ball. Rehearse the images with the movement of your practice swings. Then when you have the clearest, most realistic feeling possible, let yourself completely copy it with your actual putt. This act of creating and copying with practice can be enhanced and controlled. The process of improving the clarity and controllability of one’s 66 KEVIN SVERDUK imagination in golf begins with paying attention to the sensations present while actually golfing. Let’s suppose you wanted to learn to create a crystal clear image of a perfectly struck 7-iron. You could start by hitting a series of shots on the range using your 7-iron. You should have a specific target that you are hitting towards. Continue hitting until you experience a particularly well-struck shot. Immediately after you have identified this shot, take several moments to replay the shot in your mind, allowing yourself to recall precisely what it felt like, sounded like, and looked like. It is as if you just took a bite of a most delicious portion of steak and wanted to savor the taste so that you could remember it forever. If it helps, you could physically replay the movements and actions that felt just right as a way to further cement the sensations into your mind. When you have taken the time to absorb the shot you now have a memory of the experience that you can draw upon to create that same shot. You have within your subconscious mind long-term memories of all the different shots you have hit in your lifetime along with all the ones you have witnessed other golfers hit including those seen on TV or in person. Some of these are images of errant, mishit, and off-line shots while a handful of others are solidly struck, on-line, and precise golf shots that brought you much joy. While most of us have had the experience of hitting those joyous shots, we more often recall the ones we did not like and desperately hope never to repeat. It is the combination of those two reactions, not liking the shot and wanting to avoid it occurring, that further cement those events into our long-term memory. The imagination of those shots uninvitingly appears in our conscious minds far too often when we play. There is a way to use imagination for our benefit rather than agony. With commitment and practice, we can learn to create strong, clear images consistently before every shot and work to improve our ability to copy those sensations in the execution of the attempt. Here’s a putting drill example of how to practice this: The Performance Mindset 67 1. Place a thin ball marker or small coin like a dime on a green approximately 8-10 feet from the hole. 2. Stand behind the marker, look at it, and begin to imagine that instead of the marker a golf ball was there. 3. Now go about reading the putt from where the imagined ball lies. 4. Visually create the image of the desired line and speed the ball will take to the hole. Vividness and control are the keys to enhance here. 5. Go through the routine you normally use when you putt a real ball including taking your rehearsal strokes. 6. Step over the imagined ball keeping the image as clear as you can. 7. Stroke your putt allowing yourself to imagine the feel of striking the ball, the sound of the ball hitting the putter, and visualizing the ball rolling from your putter on your line and dropping into the hole with the speed you desired. This is the first part of the “create and copy” sequence. With practice, the vividness of the images; the ball, the line, the speed, the sound, the feel will become clearer and more real. This will lead to the second part of the sequence, copy. Now add this: 1. Using the same set up as above, place an actual ball three inches next to the marker and away from the side you putt from. 2. Repeat the exact sequence that you used to create the putt. 3. Immediately after hitting the imagined putt, step over the actual ball and attempt to copy sensations created in the imagined putt as exactly as you can. 4. Keep the objective of as closely copying the sensations created in the imaginary putt as you can to the actual putt. 68 KEVIN SVERDUK 5. Just after striking the putt, rate how completely the sensations felt in the actual putt copied the sensations created in the imaginary putt using a percentage ranging from 0% (not at all like the sensations I created) to 100% (exactly identical to the sensations I created) I like to refer to the rating of how well a golfer copies the sensations as the “commitment score,” because it reflects the degree of commitment to the rehearsal. Repeat this drill several times. With practice, your ability to create clear, controlled images and sensations of your desired putt will improve and as you practice copying these sensations to your actual putt you will begin to find yourself experiencing greater commitment in your game. Imagination is an ability and quality we are all born with. While many times our imaginations conger up fears of experiences we hope to avoid, with conscious effort and practice we can turn our imaginations into an incredibly valuable resource that will free us up to play masterful golf. CHAPTER SUMMARY Two important dimensions of imagery are vividness and control. Imagery involves the recruitment of all the senses to create and recreate an experience in the mind. Imagined golf swings produce patterns of electrical activity in the brain and body that are identical to the actual shot. Retaining the image of the target as one swings stimulates the body to self-organize and in many cases make on the fly corrections that will send the ball to the desired goal. Creating vivid sensations in the mind and body of the shot we are attempting provides tangible feelings we can choose to commit to in our swing. 5 NARRATION A popular method used by filmmakers is to open a movie with narration, in which one the main characters provides a voiceover of his or her thoughts, memories, and/or observations. While done mainly during the first minute of the film, some movies also have these narrations interspersed throughout. Narration is designed to set up for the viewer the context and tone of the story that is about to be seen. It draws the viewer deeper into the story, providing a feeling of truth and intimacy. In a similar way, we use language, speech, and thought as a way to narrate our lives and experiences. Further, our narration is colored with rich, extreme, and emotion stained words such as “worst ever,” “no chance,” complete failure,” etc. While narration, for instance, like it is used in films, often provides a sense of reality, it actually contains little truth. The narration is the story of the events, not the actual incidents. The narrative consists of perceptions, judgments, personal values, biases, and projections. The story is consistent with making sense of what happened, what it means, and what might follow. The truth is what actually happened. So often after a tournament round, I will call a golfer 72 KEVIN SVERDUK that I am working with and ask her to tell me about her round. Commonly I get a response that goes like this: “I played so bad, it was the worst day putting EVER. I could not make anything. This always happens on Bermuda greens. I suck at putting. I have no chance in hell of moving on to the next stage.” Often, crying accompanies this description. Having heard these accounts many times before, I usually inject some sort of humor into the exchange by asking if there were any types of awards or recognition for having the worst putting day ever in the history of golf. The point of this is, of course, to try to shake up the negative emotional state she is in and to help her come back to a more objective awareness and perception of her performance. It is not that negative emotions are wrong, in fact, they can be very healthy and constructive. But when you allow the emotions to color your experiences, the story that you develop in your mind loses information and replaces it with judgments. While the golfer’s account of her round might make for a more compelling story filled with anger, sadness, and tragedy, it provides little insight into what really happened and how that experience could provide her with ways to improve. Further, the response from the golfer provides insight into her mindset and what is occupying her focus. Her narration hints at her being overly-concentrated on results rather than her process, on outcomes rather than improvement. What would her response to me have been if her mindset was focused on finding ways to get better? Perhaps she would have responded this way: “I maintained my routines about 80% of the time. As I look back there were a few instances when my focus drifted to my score and I felt myself pressing on about ten-putts. I was hitting my putts with the correct speed consistently, and my reads were accurate. There were five or six putts when as I stood over the ball, my eyes lost connection with my line and I hit those a bit left of what I first read. If I had stayed connected with my line on those, I might have picked up three or four shots. Spending twenty minutes doing my quiet eye-putting drill later today will help me for tomorrow.” This account offers little appeal for a story line of a major The Performance Mindset 73 motion picture, no drama, suspense, or heartbreak. What it does provide is rich insights and information that can direct this golfer to actions that will lead her to improving and maintaining focus on the controllable process rather than dwelling on the uncontrollable results. What underscores every story is an aim to connect it with something of meaning. Writers and moviemakers intend to move the viewer through a rollercoaster of rich emotional experiences and to merge the reader’s sense of being with that of the story. When done well, it is a wonderful experience and escape from reality. The objective of the narration that accompanies golf performance is different. It may still evoke emotion but if it is grounded with the objective of learning, evaluation replaces judgment and the development of the Performance Mindset is strengthened. The Performance Mindset is interested in never-ending improvement and the realization of one’s full potential. What comes first, the story or the mindset? The stories that we generate and tell reflect our mindset. Yet the ways in which we talk to ourselves and others can also shape our mental outlook. At times, the stories reveal healthy mental approaches that assist us in getting better, other times they reflect a doubtful, stuck, and powerless outlook. How we choose to interpret events and experiences and the subsequent words we form to narrate them create our perceived reality. A missed putt is a missed putt. There is no choosing to either make or miss the putt, you do your best and a result occurs. How you respond to the missed putt, the words you select, the story or explanation you tell yourself is up to you, is your choice. Being committed to choosing the words you use to narrate your experiences is a powerful act of self-control. Words have power. The words we use, especially the words we use to describe our experiences have the potential to lift our spirits, generate hope, and lead to transformative discoveries. Unfortunately, words can also have the opposite effect and beat our spirits down, limit our growth, and make us fearful, feeling like we have no control. The mind is a playground for words, thoughts, and images. Imagine yourself in this playground surrounded by dozens 74 KEVIN SVERDUK of twin images of yourself. You are in the sandbox sculpting a castle. You feel really into it and are having a great time. The twin images walk by from time to time and make comments. You hear things like; “That’s too small,” “It looks weird,” “You’re not very artistic are you,” “You can’t sculpt!” Next, imagine your twin images saying things like; “Way to go!” “That looks fun,” “You are so creative,” or “Keep going!” The environment of the mind is shaped by the tone and nature of the elements inside of it. While many of the elements, often the critical and negative ones, appear on their own from time to time, you have the ability to insert words and images as you would like. In a sense, you can choose which twins, and how many, you would like to take to the playground with you. The development of the Performance Mindset is very much shaped by the words you choose to fill it with. Conversely, it is also shaped by the words you choose not to fill it with. Nine Words to Eliminate from Your Vocabulary Words and phrases used to describe events and experiences often provide great insight into a person’s psyche. When I speak with golfers, I listen to their choice of words very intently. From the language that they use I can infer many aspects about their mindset. Words can help me understand their motivation, beliefs, fears, confidence, goals, feelings, and focus. There are certain words that are toxic to achieving excellence and realizing one’s full potential. Unfortunately, they are among the most commonly used words by golfers when explaining their games and performances. Much of the language we use leaves our mouths without the awareness of what we are saying. That is why listening to the words and accounts golfers give provides deep insights into their mindset. In this sense, the mindset produces the words, and those words in turn reinforce a pattern of thinking. This is very beneficial during times when the golfer is in a constructive and performance effective state of mind. What happens when the golfer is struggling to maintain a strong mindset? How does she disrupt the cycle of negative thinking The Performance Mindset 75 creating a negative mindset that further prompts more negative thinking? The answer is to eliminate those toxic words that reinforce an ineffective Performance Mindset. The following are toxic words to completely eliminate from your vocabulary with suggestions on what to replace them with: Can’t “I can’t make any putts today.” The word can’t suggests that you feel you have no influence over whether the putt will go in or not, that you are powerless. Further, the declaration exaggerates the number of missed putts to any and all. Surely you made some putts or you would still be on the first hole. The statement projects that this uncontrollable and unchangeable condition will persist well into the future. This report also hints at where your focus is and more importantly where it is not. Rather than focusing on the processes under your control and influence, your focus is zeroed in to the feelings of missing putts. Can’t is toxic because it contains no useful information you can use to evaluate your performance and thus make adjustments to improve. It is dangerous because it can lead to a feeling of helplessness. “I read too much break in three birdie putts that I missed.” The same experience as a can’t statement expressed in a different way. This account provides specific information without judgment and immediately leads to a focus of adjusting how you will read future putts. The acknowledgment of the objective truth stimulates the mind differently than a judgment. The words chosen in this case assert focus on what is controllable, adjustable, and promote an effective Performance Mindset. Should “This is a very reachable par 5, I should get at least a birdie here.” The use of the word should creates a statement that prejudges the upcoming experience. It primes you to feel angry if you don’t 76 KEVIN SVERDUK get a birdie, which can very often contribute to pressing on your shots. If you put your tee shot in a place that makes going for the green in two riskier, holding onto that “should” tempts you to take the risk. If you end up with a par or worse because of poor course management, the negative emotions felt have more intensity and can stay with you longer. Approaching a shot with should often raises the level of expectation beyond what is optimal and makes acceptance of uncontrollable outcomes non-existent. “I’ve got a reachable par 5 here, there is a strong possibility for birdie as long as I stay focused on my process, let’s play one shot at a time and see what happens.” In this statement, there is the recognition of the possibility of a birdie with the acceptance of the uncertainty of what will happen. In this case, there exists a more healthy eagerness to strive to make eagle or birdie rather than a more tense feeling of obligation. The feeling of an opportunity for the birdie rather than a rigid expectation of one motivates you to stay with your process, which of course, raises your chances of getting a birdie. Never/Always “I just found out that the site of the next tournament has Bermuda greens, crap, I never putt well on Bermuda greens.” Words like never and always are absolute terms implying no exceptions. They are about as certain as you can get. While you might have memories about missed putts you feel you should not have missed on Bermuda greens, exactly how many are we talking about? Let us say the number you estimate is fifty. Now how many of those, if you really evaluate objectively, would have been missed on any green because of some other factor? Now let’s reduce that to twenty-five. It is likely that your estimate, based on your memory is inflated because some of the putts missed invoke greater emotional reaction such as missed par-putts, three-putts, putts to close out a round or tournament. One missed short-putt that you had a strong negative reaction to can be increased by a factor of ten in your memory. The Performance Mindset 77 Instead of twenty-five, maybe the number is ten out of one hundred putts made. Absolute words like never transform low-occurrence events into catastrophic predictions. Ultimately, they changes the optimism of uncertainty into the pessimism of certain failure. “I’ve had some experiences missing putts on Bermuda greens in the past and those few memories are making me think I can’t putt well this week. That was the past, and this tournament is in the future, there is no connection between them.” This statement acknowledges personal history and memories of missed putts without allowing those thoughts to grow bigger than they actually are. The erroneously formed causal connections are broken as one expresses objective reflection. Eliminating never and always maintains the separation between past, present, and future. This account now allows you to approach the tournament with open eyes and a fresh mindset. Easy “That course is so easy, I am going to go low today.” A universal truth in sport is that you must respect your opponent, the failure to do so has led to the upset of many teams and athletes. When you attached the word easy to a shot, hole, or course, you fail to acknowledge what you need to mentally attend to in order to actually make that situation easy. Not committing your complete focus to the relevant needs of makings an easy putt, opens the possibility for the feeling of regret when you miss it. Regret is one of if not the most negative feelings a golfer can have. “The fairways on this course are wide with few areas of trouble and the greens are running slow. It will be a challenge to keep my focus on the execution of each shot and not get caught up in shooting a low score.” This statement creates a perception that is more objective, stating what is there without judgment. The challenges of playing on a course with narrow fairways and slick undulating greens are more obvious to the golfer and help him narrow his focus appropriately. Yet, the challenges of a wide open course or 78 KEVIN SVERDUK a straight forward putt can be just as daunting because they present subtle mental obstacles. One is much more likely to get into a car accident when there is little traffic than when driving on a busy freeway during a storm because you are more aware of the dangers and adjust accordingly. When you treat every shot, hole, and tournament with equal and honest respect for the challenges they present, you will play with positive mental engagement and freedom. Try “I’m three over after nine holes, I’m going to try really hard to bring my score back to even.” With this statement what does try really hard mean? Does it mean you are going to flex your muscles more and grunt loudly when you hit? And when you say you are going to do this on the back nine, what were you doing on the front, purposely shooting three over? The statement reflects panic rather than patience, and panic can lead to things like over-correcting your swing, getting more mechanical, and over-reading putts. The word try implies more motivation, more tension, and increased heart rate. These states rarely result in improved golf performance long term. “No need to panic here, I’ve reassessed my game plan and still believe in it, let’s stay committed to my process, be patient, and let things happen.” With this statement you are firmly focused on the present, making a rational evaluation and formulating any adjustments informed by the evaluation. A measure of an effective Performance Mindset is your ability to replace panic with patience. The opposite of trying is surrendering. Being willing to consistently surrender your desire for a great score to a process of controllable actions is fundamental to excellence. Good/Bad “I’m hitting my irons good, but my driver is really bad.” The The Performance Mindset 79 immediate consequence of this statement is the emotions they provoke. You feel positive about your irons and negative about your driver. The negative most likely feels stronger than the positive as well. We are often more sensitive emotionally to criticism than to praise. Emotions, particularly negative ones, cloud your ability to effectively develop solutions to problems. Judgments turn molehills into mountains that can seem totally insurmountable. Labeling your driving ability as bad creates an inflated perception of possible adjustments. You are tempted to go get a lesson, find a new swing instructor, buy a new driver, and hit a hundred drivers in a row at the range. Basically, you are lost. The words good and bad and similar terms of judgment provide zero information. “I’m consistently getting my clubface square at impact and my club path is slightly inside/out on my irons, with my driver I feel like I am blocking the ball out to the right about half the time.” In this statement, you sound more like a scientist than an emotionallywrecked golfer who is lost. The report itself hints at many possible adjustments and corrections. The statement also prompts further inquiries into what is happening on the solid straight-hit shots that could inform the drives that are going off-line. Remaining objective, discovering information, and formulating honest, insightful selfassessment is a path of improvement. A statement like this given to your grandmother who has never touched a club makes no sense, so in that case, you can just say that you played well, but making this type of account to yourself and coach promotes an effective process. Have to “Coach is tightening up the screws this week, I have to go and work on my short game for a couple of hours today.” This statement reflects a feeling of not being in charge of your life and possibly not bearing the full responsibility for your game. Have to motivation is external, and while the rewards and/or punishments surrounding the have to can appear valuable, they ultimately are 80 KEVIN SVERDUK not personal. Many famous artists have reflected that when they reaped notoriety and fortune for their work, they often went through periods where their love and reason for creating got lost and that until they regained touch with the personal, intrinsic rewards for doing what they did, they were less happy. The prevalence of external reasons to practice make it common from time to time to feel controlled, but when the have to dominates your life you will get burnt out. “My game is really coming around and coach thinks I could use some sharpening with my chipping. I want to work on my short game to solidify it even more.” This statement reflects that you are in charge of your game and where it might go. Underlying every have to is a want to. You feel that you have to go to practice but the truth is you don’t. Sure, you might be disciplined, even dismissed from the team if you choose not to go. Then you may say, I don’t want to get kicked off the team. Being on the team, playing golf, are things you want to do, remember that. Approaching practice with a want to attitude means that you will begin thinking about what you are going to do, imagine some of the things you are going to work on, and have an open mind to learning before you get to the course. In essence, your practice will start before you are physically there. This can only increase the quality and effectiveness of that practice. Maintaining your self-determination by connecting to the intrinsic reasons for practicing and playing golf is a powerful and abundant source of energy. These nine words are among the most commonly used words used by golfers in their self-talk and with others. They are also toxic to the cultivation of the Performance Mindset and the realization of one’s full potential. Just as the voiceover sets the tone and mood of a film, our narration creates the reality of our experiences. When you change the language you change the experience. The Performance Mindset 81 Journaling A powerfully effective method of learning to change the way you talk to yourself and others is to keep a journal. Writing regular accounts of your life, including experiences surrounding golf, is a way to train yourself to use specific words in your narration. Often, psychologist use the term “flip the script” to describe the process of retelling an experience or problem from a different, healthier perspective. In the same way, writing in a journal can provide a practice in creating a healthy, growth-oriented perception and mindset. When journaling you practice replacing the toxic words commonly and habitually used with honest, objective, and optimistic language. Writing things down regularly is extremely effective at changing behavior and attitudes. Think of it this way: If a coach tells you to use more positive and optimistic words, it will have a slight long-term effect on your behavior. If you read an inspiring story about a golfer who uses such language it will have a slightly more effect. If you keep a regular journal and write personal accounts using those words, it will have a great influence on the language you chose when you talk. There is no standard way of keeping a performance journal. It can range from a highly structured habit to having no structure at all. Here are some suggestions and possible guidelines for keeping a journal: Write regularly and develop a routine. Use journaling as part of your pre and/or post-round routine. Set aside a few minutes before you begin your warm up to jot some thoughts about the upcoming round down and find a time after the round to reflect and evaluate. If keeping an unstructured journal seems too vague, add structure to it by addressing specific questions and areas such as: 82 KEVIN SVERDUK Rating scales: Rate the level of your commitment to your pre-shot routine on a scale from 0-5. Listing and describing three things you did well, three areas you would like to improve, and ideas of how to improve them. Performance on goals that you set for the round with an emphasis on controllable process goals. Journal using a notebook that you can keep in your bag. Write in a language of growth and progress by avoiding toxic words. Express your emotions and feelings freely when you make entries in your journal. Approach journaling as having a conversation with a wise, patient, and unconditionally caring twin self. Consider sharing your journal with a trusted helper such as a coach, mentor, or sport psychologist. At first, keeping a journal can seem burdensome, and you may have difficulty figuring out what to write. You can think of the journal as a regular check in with a person who you trust to help you grow as a golfer and person. Often, writing your thoughts down on paper is an effective way to gain separation from them and to neutralize their effect on you. You might feel particularly anxious before a round and have many fearful thoughts and images in your mind. When you take a few moments to write them down on paper it often can reduce the anxiety. The life you experience is not only expressed in your actions, it is explained with the language and images that you create. The body reacts to what the mind sees and hears. The words you choose to describe your reality both reflect and create it. With practice such as journaling, you can learn to use language in a way that will help you play better golf and have more enjoyment with it. The mastery of narration is a powerful attribute of the Performance Mindset. CHAPTER SUMMARY Storytelling generally contains more bias than facts and, as such, offers little information that can lead to improvement. Effective narration is designed to be consistent with the intent of finding ways to improve. Negative and self-critical self-talk may be impossible to completely eliminate. You can choose to introduce positive, growth-leading statements into your mind as often as you decide. The nine toxic, performance limiting words to eliminate are: Can’t, Should, Never, Always, Easy, Try, Good, Bad, Have to Use journaling to “flip the script.” 6 TRANSFERABLE PRACTICE I believe that all of you reading this book can agree that golf is a wonderful sport and provides countless moments of fantastic joy. However, there is one experience that provides among the most frustrating and confusing feelings available. Picture this scenario. You arrive early for your tee time, get a warm-up bucket of balls, go through your usual pre-round or pre-tournament routine and begin hitting. At some point as you are hitting something clicks in. You are stripping the ball, hitting it high, straight, and far. You don’t regard this as a fluke, you truly feel that you have mastery and control over every shot. You feel deserving of this as well, because you have been putting in many hours of hard work and received great instruction. It feels like a validation that you have improved and your game is ready. You cannot wait to play. About two to three hours later out on the course, you are completely perplexed. “Where the heck did my swing go?” By the way, this is not one of those countless moments of fantastic joy. You cannot for the life of you figure out why you are not hitting the ball anywhere near like you were warming up. The qualities and mechanisms of effective preparation and practice for performance is among the most misunderstood concepts within the golf culture. 86 KEVIN SVERDUK When learning has occurred, how do we know it? When can you say that you have completely mastered how to hit your irons for example? How is that learning measured? So often golfers feel that they have figured out their swing one day, only to feel frustrated by it the next. If we were to look at the context of medicine and attempt to determine when a surgeon has mastered his craft, then we might say when he or she can perform a successful operation on a real patient at three in the morning, in the midst of multiple complications. Similarly, when a golfer can hit her approaches consistently close to the pin or her target in varied tournament conditions over the course of several rounds, then a strong case can be made that she has learned how to hit irons. While this may seem obvious, I don’t believe that most golfers and teachers look at learning in this way. In fact, many golfers and teachers firmly believe that because a golfer can hit two dozen 7-irons in a row in practice to within five yards of each other with “a solid swing” that learning has been achieved. When that golfer hits errant 7-irons in tournaments the common explanation given is that it is not a swing issue, it is a mental issue. What is implied in that approach is that there is a separation between the mind and body, and the learning of the swing is primarily physical while performance of that swing in tournaments is largely mental. As a consequence, the methods of golf practice and preparation reflect a paradigm of endless (often mindless) repetition. Hitting twenty perfect drives, fifty pure irons, and making a hundred four-foot putts in a row becomes the benchmark for learning. The golf culture has largely supported this model of learning and performing. At a PGA Tour event, Rory McIlroy was on the practice putting green before the final round hitting consecutive ten-foot putts from the same spot. The TV cameras were filming this as he made fifty-six putts in a row. The golf analyst broadcasting the event made a glowing remark about this amazing demonstration of consistency and that it revealed how good a putter Rory was. He went on to predict that Rory was going to make a lot of putts, shoot a low score, and win the tournament. Five The Performance Mindset 87 hours later Rory walked down the 18th fairway having dropped down to 15th place and experiencing his worst putting round of the tournament. The Body/Mind Approach Just before you take a club out of your bag and as you go through the process of hitting a ball towards an intended target, a myriad of electrical, chemical, and cellular events occur in a highly specialized sequence and pattern. And while this sequence is repeated with each successive attempt it is never completely identical. There are minor variations in the exact dynamics occurring with each swing. An attempt to understand these complex processes requires us to acknowledge the system (us) as a continuous body/mind entity rather than a dual mind, body organism. Practice is therefore not mostly a physical action, nor performance mostly a mental endeavor, they are a body/mind engagements. When you practice golf you are performing, when you are performing in a tournament you are practicing. The closer those two become the less separation will exist. There will be transfer from one to the other and back. Transferable Practice Cast members of a Broadway show attend what they call rehearsal to prepare for the performance. The word practice is not used to describe how they prepare, and I do not see this as a matter of simple semantics. The singular objective of rehearsal is to be prepared to perform an entertaining and compelling show for a live audience. Skits, short and long segments of the show, are repeated over and over again to create the desired feel. Complete engagement and connection with the final goal is always present. The variations in the skills and talents of the actors are more embraced rather than discouraged. The key to the success of the show is the ability of the cast to improvise as needed to maintain the integrity of the performance. 88 KEVIN SVERDUK The traditional concepts of practice in sport and particularly in golf are often reduced to the goals of learning to master every shot. Frequently, the drive to perfect technique dominates the time and focus of practice time. It is an approach that yields inconsistent performance results at best and leads to the recurring experiences described in the example presented in the beginning of this chapter. An alternate approach is what I describe as “transferable practice” and is very similar in nature to rehearsal. The purpose of transferable practice is to learn how to accurately and consistently perform the necessary skills in tournaments under every variation of competitive pressure. The primary objective of this practice is the transfer of learning to the execution of performance. I use the term transferable practice to illustrate a more specifically defined notion of preparation. If every aspect of practice is designed for and approached with the goal of transferring improvement gains into tournament performance, then practice becomes successful rehearsal for optimal performance. Unfortunately, the common ways many golfers practice do not enhance transfer in large part because they are based upon incorrect notions about learning. Among the most common misconceptions about learning is the belief that muscles have memory. “Muscle memory” is a phrase used quite often by coaches and teachers and includes the idea that if a physical action is repeated enough times that the muscles will remember it and be able to reproduce that movement without thought. The execution of all motor skills, including the golf swing, begins in the brain where all of your learned physical movements are stored. The brain sends electrical signals down your spinal cord to the muscle fibers needed to be activated in order to swing the club. The muscles and other sense organs send body position and timing feedback during the swing back to the brain where it quickly assesses them and sends corrective adjustments back to the muscles. It is a highly dynamic and body/mind integrative process. Even a seemingly mundane task of walking, which we do with no thought, requires the brain to use muscle communication. If the The Performance Mindset 89 connection between the brain and the muscles is broken, as in the case of a spinal cord injury, then the muscles will be unable to contract. The belief and use of the idea muscle memory can be detrimental to learning when practices are approached with the notion that repeating a physical action over and over will eventually ingrain the movement into a learned skill that will not breakdown. Unfortunately, there is little support for this. The scenario described to begin this chapter and the story about Rory’s putting are quite common experiences for all golfers. If a golfer has muscle memory in practice but then hits errant shots in tournaments how do we explain that, muscle amnesia? The notion that practice makes perfect is another popular misconception of learning. A common notion about athletic success is that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to gain expertise in a sport. Piggybacking on the muscle memory principle many golfers believe if they just put in the time and hit five hundred balls a day, their tour card will be waiting for them. The quest for perfection is the mission for many aspiring golfers (and teachers). Yet, there is no clear concept of perfection in golf. Perfection is unattainable no matter what the amount of practice as long as it is not clearly defined in realistic terms. Typically, we think of perfection in the case of a golf swing as possessing the following criteria: absolutely identical movements from swing to swing, producing precise and constant results, and requiring little to no thought. While these three attributes are very desirable, they are unrealistic and unattainable. “No man steps in the same river twice.” This well-known quote by Heraclitus represents the ever-changing nature of human behavior and the world around us. Similarly, no golfer ever hits the same shot again. When you practice at the range, hitting twenty consecutive 7-irons, each swing has variation from the others. They may feel the same. The ball flight, direction, and distance may appear identical, but they are not completely alike. Even biomechanical analysis of the gait of people walking on a treadmill, a skill 90 KEVIN SVERDUK they have practiced well over 10,000 hours, reveals stride to stride variations. How then, you may ask, am I able to hit almost identical feeling and looking shots if the swings are not the same? The answer is self-organization. The body-mind possesses a very effective system for adjusting, self-organizing, and correcting movements in extremely short periods of time to produce a consistent outcome. If you were able to maintain the desired ball flight and target in your mind as you were hitting those 7-irons and did not flood your attention with too many mechanical thoughts, your body/mind organized the neural and muscular networks to produce the result. If for example, the position of your club at the top of your swing is not the same as your previous swing, your body/mind will sense this, figure out the adjustments needed, and re-route the club face and path to where they need to be to hit the ball consistent with the previous outcome. Practice does not create perfect swings but can enhance more effective self-organization. A third misconception about learning is the idea that being able to consistently hit precise shots in practice will lead directly to being able to hit precise shots in tournaments. As a consequence of this belief, golfers often construct practice in a way to reduce errors and evaluate the quality of their practices on how consistently they hit the ball. The natural way to achieve this is to begin with a single club and shot, start hitting it repeatedly, make corrections and adjustments as needed until you begin to get a good feel and the shots are solid. Then you move on to the next club and so on through your bag. The same approach is used for chipping and putting. As you leave practice, you feel you have made a lot of repeated quality shots and deem that you had a good practice. Two scientists at the University of Colorado, John Shea and Robyn Morgan, conducted an interesting study examining practice routines, learning, and performance. They wanted to see if how a person practiced affected their learning of a simple motor task. They created three different tasks, let’s call them A, B, and C. One group would practice A repeatedly, then B, and C. This was called “blocked practice” because they practiced each skill in blocks of The Performance Mindset 91 repetitions. A second group would practice the three tasks in a random order. They might practice one repetition of A then one of C, then B and so on, never practicing more than one repetition of a single task twice in a row. This followed what the researchers called the “acquisition stage” in which the participants of both groups completed hundreds of repetitions of practice their ability to perform the tasks was tested. The test consisted of performing a single attempt of each task in the blocked sequence (A, B, C) and a single attempt using a random sequence (B, A, C). The results were enlightening. The group that practiced the three tasks in a random sequence outperformed the group that practiced in a block sequence in both tests, yet during the acquisition stage, the random group made far more errors than the blocked group. One notable finding was that on a test (after the acquisition stage) that required the participant to successfully execute task A first, B second, and C third, the blocked group, the group that practiced performing the tasks in that very order did not do as well as the participants who practiced the task sequence in a completely different order. With blocked practice, there was better performance in the acquisition stage and weaker performance in the tests (low transfer of learning) while the random sequence yielded weaker performance when practicing the tasks and greater performance in tests (high transfer of learning). Dozens of subsequent studies looking at practice sequencing and learning have supported Shea and Morgan’s finding. To put this research into a golf example, suppose that you have a week to prepare for a closest to the pin challenge in which you will hit five balls from 100 yards. The distance for each of the five balls from the pin will be added up to determine your score. What would be the most effective method to practice and prepare for this contest? Muscle memory wisdom might suggest hitting 50 wedges to a target of 100 yards every day. The findings of the research study would refute that approach and advise hitting wedges to varying distances in a random sequence for example 50 yards, followed by 110 yards, then 100 yards, 75 yards and so on every day. A look at the 92 KEVIN SVERDUK inner workings of the body/mind in regards to skill learning and performance provides a clearer explanation why random practice is far more effective than blocked. When you are presented with the task of hitting a wedge to a target 100 yards away, your brain prepares first by accessing the neural networks needed to execute the shot. In coordination with your imagination and long-term memory, your body/mind syncs all the actions that have occurred in the past when you have hit this exact shot. As you address the ball your eyes and body perception link up so that you are aligned to the target. During the swing, feedback from the movement of your muscles and limbs is processed in the brain to evaluate if the body positions match with the predetermined swing path, if not, signals are sent to initiate adjustments. At the moment the ball is hit, feedback about the contact is compared with what the brain expected and this provides a feeling that either validates that the ball is going to its intended target or is off-line. This dynamic and elaborate body/mind process is unique to each different shot you hit. Even hitting a wedge to 95 yards is different. The first repetition of hitting a 100-yard wedge shot requires the complete recall and mobilization of all the processes described above. Like a call in the middle of the night to a fire station, the alarm triggers the sleeping firefighters wake up and go through a specific sequences of movements quickly and get on the road. When you hit additional 100-yard wedges repeatedly after the first, the recall is much easier as the body/mind is primed for that action. Similarly, if the fire station is experiencing frequent alarms in the middle of the night, the execution of movement onto the road becomes more quickly and efficiently performed. If you switch from shot to shot, say 100-yard wedge, 150-yard 7-iron, driver, etc. each separate shot requires almost total recall and mobilization of the process. This is much more demanding and more likely to evoke more errors in the execution of all the pieces. What is enhanced in this sequence of practicing is the ability to accurately recall and mobilize the process to produce the desired outcome. Hitting precise and pure 7-irons repeatedly at the range, each one The Performance Mindset 93 providing incredibly pleasant sensations at contact, is no doubt highly enjoyable yet is neither relevant to performing on the course nor what the sport of golf is about. The challenge of golf is to hit the ball from the tee into the hole in as few strokes as you can. This involves the constant switching of clubs and shots. It requires the ability to efficiently recall and mobilize the body/mind processes involved in hitting the shot on the first attempt. Switching is the key element in playing golf and the recipe to organizing practices that will transfer to better performance. Organizing Transferable Practices Practice often fails to yield improved tournament performance because there is little similarity to the body/mind processes between the way many golfers practice and play. There are several significant differences in the internal and external environments between golf practice and golf performance. Accountable results: When you complete a round you have numbers that are present, your score and finish if you are in a tournament being the most obvious but others include, performance statistics (fairways, greens in regulation, putts, etc.) The amount of time between shots is much greater when playing, which can often challenge your ability to stay in a groove. The mental intensity of tournaments as you respond to competitive pressure is much greater than what is experienced in practice. The visual appearance of targets is profoundly different on the course than on the range and putting greens. A round of golf prompts you to have to react to situations rather than as typical in practice you plan out every minute. 94 KEVIN SVERDUK When playing golf the objectives are clear, hit the ball here, then it here, and putt the ball here. Often the purposes of a golfer’s practice lose clarity. On the course, and especially in tournaments, there are situations arising that will fill you with excess energy (excitement, anxiety, anger) that are rarely experienced in practice. Minimizing the differences between practicing and playing golf is the most effective method for increasing the transfer of practice gains to the course. The following are some strategies and specific techniques for improving the quality of your golf practices. Practice on the Course I can think of no other sport than golf where the athletes typically do not practice on the field or court that the game is played. What you commonly see in the effective practices of other sports is the creation of specific game situations in practice that then allow the teams and athletes opportunities to respond and practice the desired plays. Going out on the course and responding to specific situations is a valuable method of practice. If for example, you have identified a need to improve your performance on 60- to 90-yard shots, go out on the course and drop balls at 62, 75, 81, and 88 yards from the pin and practice executing those. Further, play out each ball completely until it is in the hole to rehearse the entire process of playing. Hitting to a real flag from a real fairway is far more similar and will have far greater transfer than hitting those same shots on the range. Create Performance Tests and Keep Track Tournaments played on tough courses are often referred to as tests or examinations designed to challenge golfers to see what they are made of. In science and research, tests are used for the purpose The Performance Mindset 95 of gaining information, insight, and prediction. The true measure of any test is its relevancy to the real world. Similarly, the truest measure of the value of a practice drill or task is how well it transfers into improved performance. If you are spending thirty minutes doing putting drills, how much are those drills actually making you a better putter? The most accurate way of determining this is to first create a measure for both your putting practice performance and your tournament putting performance. Then, record your data and compare. Here’s an example. Construct a test for putting speed control by placing five tees and balls at 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 feet from a hole. Hit, using the following sequence: 40, 20, 60, 30, 50, one putt from each to the hole and using a tape measure to record how far in inches each putt stopped. Repeat the sequence five times for a total of 25 putts. When you play keep also track and record the distances your putts stop from the hole on all putts of 20-60 feet. Now you have two sets of data, practice putting data and playing putting data. After collecting the results from at least ten practice sessions/rounds you can begin to compare the data and see if improvements in practice yield improvement in tournaments. Understand as well that the putting test is in itself a much more transferable way of practicing. Break Practice into Short Intense Segments Playing tournament golf is an experience that completely engages the golfer, tests his or her skills, and typically leaves them mentally exhausted after the round. The intensity of an 18-hole round of golf is broken up into seventy or so thirty-second intervals spread across a four- to five-hour span. The most draining component is not necessarily the total time on the course, but the constant intermittent requirement to intensely refocus for each shot. It’s similar to an automobile, each time you start the car it puts strain on the engine, if you alternately started your car, then turned it off and then restarted continuously, you would wear down the engine. 96 KEVIN SVERDUK For the golfer, the importance of being able to raise his intensity for each shot throughout and entire round and through multiple days is balanced by his ability to rest and recover during the periods between shots. Finding the right focus and correct intensity for a shot is not the true challenge of playing great tournament golf, getting into that state for every shot is. Practice transfers into better performance when the demands of the drills have strong similarity to the requirements of playing. A common shortfall of the way golfers practice is that the nature of the intensity presented does not match the degree nor the frequency that is required to play. In an effort to maximize time efficiency, many golfers think that if they can be intensely focused for two hours, hitting 200 balls at the range, 100 putts, and 100 pitches, that they will have a great practice. I have no doubt that performing this set of tasks requires effort and will make one tired. The issue for transfer is how similar were those demands to what is needed in tournament play? When you take yourself through a routine of hitting ball after ball with little break, you will set your intensity and effort at a rate that you can sustain. You will pace yourself just as a runner will adjust his speed to the distance of the race. Tournament golf is sprinting intensity, short bursts of complete body/mind absorption in a thirty-second routine and a two-second swing. Pounding balls at the range is marathon intensity. A more transferable way to practice golf is to break up drills and tasks into short five or ten minute segments each with very specific (narrowly focused) objectives. For example, hit twelve wedges to varying target distances (switch wedges with each shot), then walk to the putting green with one ball and putt out five holes from varying distances, then go to the range and hit ten shots alternating driver with various irons to specific targets, and so on. As you do these drills, maintain an awareness of the intensity of the effort you are giving. The goal is to feel as if each attempt has the experience of a tournament shot. While you are not physically hitting as many balls, for each of your attempts the increase in the intensity of the approach results in more mental rehearsal of the shot. The number The Performance Mindset 97 of fully engaged and tournament simulated repetitions performed with this method of practice far outnumber what is obtained by beating ball after ball. When Working on Technique Expand Awareness/ Practice SelfCoaching Nobody knows you better than you, and nobody understands your golf swing better than you do. Sure, you may have an instructor that you have worked with for many years and you feel she has a strong grasp of your tendencies, but she simply cannot know your swing as richly and intimately as you can. Possessing a more robust language to communicate your swing is not a measure of knowing, there are body/mind sensations that often don’t have words to describe such as the feeling of hitting the sweet spot with a 7-iron. The meaningful and profound discoveries that help you play better golf are ultimately made by you. Integrating heightened self-awareness into your golf practices will provide you with the power to more effectively coach yourself. The body/mind has a very efficient capacity for self-organization. When a desired movement, task, and outcome are presented, the system begins to work on creating it. This process begins by observing and paying attention to the desired skill. Watching another golfer with a smooth effortless swing or seeing the trajectory of a high fade trigger the body/mind system to figure out how you could imitate that event. The brain possesses specific neurons that, in response to the observation of another person’s actions fire in an attempt to duplicate that action. These “mirror neurons” demonstrate the powerful learning potential of astute observation. Mirror is an apt term for golfers because of the long-held belief that practicing your swing in front of a mirror is an effective activity for learning. After observing the desired action and then making attempts to imitate it, you begin to experiment with a variety of adjustments and alternative movements that help you turn the movement into your own. What may begin in observa- 98 KEVIN SVERDUK tion as Ben Hogan’s swing ultimately becomes your own unique swing. The following process can help you improve and enhance selfawareness and self-coaching into your practice. Start with the image, memory, and/or experience of a desired outcome and sensation of a swing. This sensation could come from the movement of the club such as tempo, swing path, the relation between the club face and the target, grip pressure, the compression of the ball at impact, a recurring thought, and a specific object that you were focused on. Alternatively, you could begin hitting a particular shot that you are wanting to work on. Continue hitting that shot until you hit one that feels right, one that you would be very happy to repeat consistently when you play. Immediately, take a few moments and let yourself replay the swing in your body/mind being acutely attentive to the sensations that arose and stood out in the swing. Hypothesize the sensations that would be of most help to practice producing in your swing. For example, the sensation of a gentle pause at the top of your swing. Now develop a self-assessment scale for that sensation that involves numbers and/or descriptive (non-judgmental) words. Something like: This rating scale provides you with a method of evaluating the tempo at the top of your swing. Using numbers and descriptive words will provide much more useful information and heighten your awareness. After hitting a shot, rate the sensation you felt at the top of your swing being careful not to let the outcome of the shot influence that sensation that existed. As you hit several shots, you will begin to notice subtle differences in the sensations and often naturally move towards the desired sensation of a gentle pause. The Performance Mindset 99 Often what we feel is happening in our movements is not what is really happening. This disconnect between what a student feels and believes is occurring and what is actually going on is a major impediment to learning. There are a couple of ways that you can examine and correct the similarity between the internal self-assessment (the rating scale for tempo at the top of the swing) and the actual tempo. One way is to take a video of your swing and call out your rating just after hitting. Take a few swings, then look at the video and see how what you rated happening matched what the camera revealed. A second method is to ask someone (coach, fellow golfer) to observe your swing. Show and describe for him what you are rating. For instance, show him what a gentle pause looks like as well as the other extremes of tempo along with the numbers accompanying each. After each swing, tell him the self-rating first, then ask him what he saw. Very importantly, do not ask him for more feedback than this nor allow him to chime in on other aspects of the swing. That is not the goal here. The comparisons between what you felt and what actually happened will help improve the accuracy your self-awareness. It will increase the confidence you have in understanding and self-correcting your swing. Ultimately, when you play you will feel optimistic and more in control of your performance. Practice Compensation and Adjustment Pretend that you are driving a new car. On the dashboard, there is a red button that turns on the turbocharger of the engine that instantly makes the car accelerate. You are driving on a highway at 70 miles per hour, push the turbo booster on and almost immediately speed up to 90. Without turning off the turbo how could you reduce your speed back down to 70? Ease off on the gas pedal, right. What if you wanted to push the turbo on and not have the car accelerate abruptly to 90? Then in anticipation of the boost, you would ease up on the gas pedal just before hitting the turbo. 100 KEVIN SVERDUK Consistency of performance comes from the ability of the performer to anticipate changes and make appropriate compensation and adjustments. While we universally acknowledge that adapting to changes in golf courses, course conditions, and weather are an important part of golf performance, often not considered are the changes occurring within the golfer herself. The internal body/mind chemistry is not the same for the golfer hitting a 100yard approach on the first hole and the same distance shot on the 18th when tied for the lead. On 18 her turbo boost has been activated, heart rate is accelerated, adrenaline released in the blood, neurons in the brain are firing more abundantly. The swing that she took to stick a 100-yard approach on the first hole to three feet will send this shot over the green. What are her options? To take a deep breath, remind herself that she can do this, block out all thoughts, forget about the idea of winning the tournament? NO CHANCE! Turbo boost is stuck on. The answer is to compensate and adjust. Begin by anticipating what the effect of the boost will be. Let’s say she determines that taking the same 100-yard swing and club under this condition will send the ball to 120 yards. So now she might consider what would she could do from 80 yards (accounting for the 20-yard boost). She might choose to hit a full gap wedge or choke down on a pitching wedge. Now she has to consider which of those options feels less likely to be adversely affected by the boost. Is taking a full swing more reliable under these condition than taking a shorter more compact swing? A well-prepared golfer has worked the answer to these questions well out in advance. The boost rarely occurs in practice but frequently arises when you play, especially in tournament play. Because turning off or reducing the strength of the boost is likely not possible, it becomes important to learn how to compensate and adjust to it in practice. There are several strategies and techniques for weaving these skills into your golf practice. Vary the distance you hit each club The Performance Mindset 101 With every club, there is a consistent distance the ball will fly with a full swing unless a rush of adrenaline hits you. An effective adjustment skill is to learn the feel of hitting a club with varying percentages of a full-swing sensation. For example, if a full 9-iron for you carries 120 yards, practice hitting it 100, 110, 120, and 130 yards. For each distance let your body/mind absorb and remember the feel of each different shot. Go through your bag and repeat with each club. As you practice and experiment with this pay attention to the obvious and subtle things you do to create the different shots. With repetition, you will expand the number of shots you can hit and the options available to make compensations and adjustments. It is also important to develop a “go to” list of options for those situations when you may have to choose between two or three choices. Is it, for instance, more reliable for you to hit a 140-yard seven iron (90% feel) or a harder 8-iron (110% feel) when you feel anxious? An important objective of practice is to address these questions. Vary attention and focus The putting green is perhaps the most obvious place where we see the influence of the boost. Slight increases in heart rate, muscle tension, and brain activity can wreak havoc with a golfer’s feel on the greens. On shorter putts the boost is commonly at its greatest, thoughts of missing and the projection of how bad that would be can make executing a smooth and gentle stroke almost impossible. So what are the possible compensations and adjustments? Rather than focusing on what you do not think you can do while experiencing the boost, concentration on what you can do. If you don’t believe you can hit the putt four feet straight into the hole, consider what distance from the hole do you feel you could hit it in from regardless of the severity of the boost. Let say that you feel even in the most anxious of times, that you believe you could hit a putt in from six inches. In response to anxiety, your attentional field will naturally narrow. Focusing on a target six inches away is within this narrow field. After lining up your four-foot putt, fix your focus 102 KEVIN SVERDUK on an imaginary hole, six inches away from your ball on that line you read. Reduce your task now to punching the ball into the back of that imagined hole with enough force for the ball to roll five feet. Practice this by placing two tees the width of a hole apart a ball six inches away. Place ball markers on the other side of the tees at 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13 feet (or whatever variations you’d like). Practice putting through the six-inch gate, hitting with the force to stop the ball at the target distances. Get physical during practice The body/mind effects of the boost are often a hindrance to golf performance but they are predictable. When you get nervous, your heart rate will rise and tension in the muscles will increase in ways not too dissimilar from when you exercise. While simulating the precise experience of the boost in tournaments is not possible, there are ways that you can artificially create similar conditions. Between hitting shots on the range, do a set of exercises such as ten push-ups, twenty jumping jacks, etc. Then immediately walk into the shot and make your attempt. Hitting delicate shots with threequarter swings is even more challenging. Almost immediately your body/mind will be thrown into compensation and adjustment mode, trying to account for the different internal state you just put yourself in. This is precisely the process you will activate on the course when you feel the boost. A great way to integrate this is to take a putter and a ball into the gym with you and take single putts between exercises. Even better, set up a system where if you make the putt you get an extra minute of rest while if you miss it you go right into the next set. Compensating and adjusting are tools for gaining performance consistency in an uncertain competitive environment. Golfers often practice with the hope that things will not drastically change and shift. They go through their bag, hitting full shot after full shot, believing that consistent and precise execution in practice is complete preparation for performance on the course. Two factors The Performance Mindset 103 make this approach ineffective. First, tour professionals have developed precise yardages for full swings with every club and report that when they play more often than not the shot required is at a yardage between clubs. They constantly must compensate and adjust from their full swing to the yardage. It has to be practiced. Second, the internal body/mind environment of the golfer is reliably different on the course than on the range. The calibrations in the swing yardages do not accurately transfer to the course. They are a base from which you must adjust from, and the influence of the boost adds another level of compensation. It is easy to get caught up in the feel-good experience of hitting crisp irons, straight drives, and smooth putts at the range. However, there is a challenge of figuring things out, an experience of spontaneity, exciting uncertainty and embracing pressure that accompanies competitive golf. This feeling is especially enjoyable when you feel that you have adequately prepared for it. Make your golf practice meaningful for improved performance by rehearsing in a manner that allows for the maximum transfer of relevant performance skills such as learning to self-coach, engaging in target focus, staying present, compensating and adjusting. CHAPTER SUMMARY True learning and mastery of skill is measured by consistency of execution in varied competitive environments. The learning and performance of golf skills is a body/mind process. Common misconceptions about practice are: Muscle memory, Practice makes perfect, Reducing errors in practice leads to reduced errors in tournaments A key learning and performance concept is the theory of self-organization. Switching clubs, targets, and shots with each repetition in practice will yield better transfer of learning to the course. To improve the quality of your golf practice: Practice on the course, Create performance tests and keep track, Break practice into short intense segments, Practice selfcoaching, Include compensation and adjustment practice 7 GOAL PLANNING AND ATTAINMENT I n 1972, John Nabor was an ambitious young sixteen-year-old swimmer with Gold Medal dreams. After watching the Olympic Games he determined that if he wanted to win the gold he needed to improve his best time in the 100-meter backstroke by a full four seconds. In an event where one-tenth of a second can determine who wins, four seconds was a practically unimaginable. So he got out a piece of paper and began planning. He calculated that a four-second improvement would require swimming one second faster each year for the four years until the next Olympic Games. He went further and figured that if he trained for ten months each year, that meant improving 1/10th of a second each month. Training practically every day meant he needed to improve his time by 1/300th of a second for each day of practice. His swim practices lasting four hours, he then determined that for each hour that he practiced he needed to improve 1/1200th of a second per hour of training. That’s 1/5th of the time for a blink of the eye. Virtually nothing, but profoundly something that John Nabor could believe in and work for. At the 1976 Olympic Games, John Nabor won the Gold Medal with a time that was exactly four minutes and .01 seconds faster than he swam four years earlier. 108 KEVIN SVERDUK Goal setting is perhaps the most widely practiced and abundantly failed endeavors in which people seeking improvement. The goals themselves have little to do with why so many fail to attain what they set out for. The problem is not what we want but what are we willing to do and commit ourselves to. The difficulty of change is not so much in the setting of the goal. That is relatively easy. We often sit around and readily say or imagine what we want. The challenge lies in the planning of how to reach it. Research has made it clear that the way to enact meaningful and lasting change is through detailed planning, including thorough commitment. I use the term planning rather that setting to emphasize where energy and focus for change must be directed. Goal planning is a thorough, detailed, and dynamic process that provides the goal the maximum chance of being achieved. The effectiveness of a well-planned program on achieving one’s goals is dependent on the ideal management of drive and attention. The diagram above represents an optimal approach to goal energy management (GEM). Goals are grouped into four categories: want, need, how, and when. The GEM approach identifies two important energy streams, motivational energy and focus energy. The model depicts the mobilization of motivation peaking towards “want” goals while absolute focus rests with “when” goals. The maintenance of balanced energy allocation, high motivational energy of want goals, with complete focused energy on the when goals, is required to achieve meaningful change. The Performance Mindset 109 Want Goals Every plan starts with a want. After watching the Olympics, John Nabor clearly felt a strong desire to achieve something. Wants are what our dreams are made of. Watching the Masters, you sit and fantasize about playing at that level, hitting precise approaches, draining putts. It’s OK, dream big and dream often. If the history of civilization has revealed anything it is that dreams do come true. Often, it is helpful to have a time frame for the want you desire. This could be a long one, like John Nabor’s four years, or as short as a few minutes, “I want to birdie this hole.” It is best to state the want in as specific and measurable terms as possible. To say “I just want to putt better” is a noble idea but not very easily assessed. The movement towards feeling better about your putting would be enhanced if you could more specifically define what that means. You might instead phrase it “I want to make every putt inside of four feet when I play.” This is much more specific and leads us to the issue regarding the honest feasibility of the want. Is the want realistically attainable? The want serves to inspire and motivate you to do the things necessary to achieve it. If the want is easily attained (or already attained), a scratch-golfer stating, “I just don’t want to shoot 90 today” there is little challenge to rise to and not much energy and focus will be called upon. If on the other hand, the want is too elusive “I want to hit every shot perfectly forever,” then motivation might wane, especially after experiencing imperfect shots. Understand that I’m not saying striving for perfection is a less than noble want. In fact, if balanced with some reality, it can be a powerful motivator as in a statement, “I will strive to hit every shot perfectly while accepting that occasionally I will not.” Returning to the want of never missing four-foot putts: This can be an extremely motivating want as long as the occasional missed putt is accepted and used to further fuel the want. In general well-stated wants have a time/place component, are realistic yet challenging, specific, and 110 KEVIN SVERDUK able to be assessed and tracked. Some examples of well-stated want goals include: In six months I want to get my handicap down to 10. I want to win a college tournament this season. I want to consistently hit my drives 250 yards. I want to lead the tour in strokes gained putting. I want to break 80 on my home course by the end of summer. Need Goals The very act of writing down want goals stimulates regions of the brain. The statement and the accompanying images set in motion a process of analyzing, calculating, estimating, and hypothesizing. Typically, initial questions the brain might address are: Why can’t I already accomplish this want? What is preventing it? What is needed? A commonly effective tool that is used in many types of businesses and programs wishing to implement positive change is to conduct a needs assessment. The second component of goal planning is to identify the needs to support the attainment of the wants. This requires you to thoughtfully examine each of the goals you want and determine what additional sub-goals will provide you with the best chance to achieve them. If you want to get your handicap down to ten, first ask yourself what is keeping it from being a ten now. There will be layers to this evaluation. The first layer is the statistical explanation such as, I’m only hitting 25% of the fairways. I three-putt four times per round on average, I get up and down less than 10% of the time, etc. Exploring these can be both enlightening and perplexing as you may begin to see clearly why your scores are so high, yet feel so overwhelmed by the causes that you don’t know where to start. While this data provides a general explanation of your scoring average, they are not necessarily specific to your needs. To deter- The Performance Mindset 111 mine the specific goals to provide you with the best and most realistic chances of attainment, you must look deeper. All golfers have different strengths, weaknesses, abilities, skills, personalities, life responsibilities, and learning styles. Shooting a round of par can be achieved many different ways. It can be achieved despite missing over half the fairways, or three-putting four times, and not getting up and down. If you looked at two tour professionals with similar scoring averages, you are likely to see very different course statistics. One might be near the top in greens in regulation yet lower on putting while the other near the top in scrambling but low in driving accuracy. A few years age a player won the Masters tournament with the strategy of laying up on every par 5, a strategy no other player in the field used. The key to formulating an effective plan for attaining your goals is to find what will work for you. As you look over the various statistics that initially explain why you are not achieving your goal, assess each of the areas for yourself and see if you can determine the one or two that you would be most effective at improving. For example, if you spent an equal amount of time per week trying to improve your driving accuracy and short game, which one would improve the most? The improvement of which would have the most impact on lowering your score? Seeking the assistance of a coach or instructor who knows you and your game can be very helpful with these questions. Let’s say that you and your coach determine that working on your short game would give you more bang for your buck. Now you are ready to affirm your need goals. As with the want goals, well-stated need goals are specific enough that you can clearly measure its degree of progress. Examples include: I need bring my fairways hit up to 75%. I need to reduce the number of three-putts per round to one. I need to be fully committed to my routine and my target on 100% of my shots. 112 KEVIN SVERDUK I need to increase my vertical jump to 20 inches. I need to average two birdies per round. How Goals Want and need goals are outcomes. They represent results that we want to achieve and the objectives that need to be met. Outcomes tend to dominate our attention. While watching a television broadcast of a golf tournament, we are constantly presented with results and statistics used to explain why a particular golfer is winning or missing cuts. Lofty results and impressive performance statistics are great reasons to work hard and strive for improvement, yet they are not controllable. You cannot just simply decide to hit more greens in regulation or make more putts. That may be the objective but it must not be your focus. Mental energy directed towards uncontrollable events is wasted energy. How goals represent actions that are controllable and process oriented. After identifying clear need goals to strive for, you now ask yourself how? How can I hit more fairways? How can I get up and down more? Moving from want and need goals to how goals characterizes a transition from outcomes (what we strive for) to process (what we will do). The outcomes provide the motivation to apply one’s focus to controllable and relevant actions. In the pursuit of achieving your goals, actions are the focal point. Actions include routines you engage in, language you use, specific drills you perform, and exercises you choose. You’ve no doubt heard the theory, “for every action there is a reaction.” In the case of working towards the attainment of a goal, for every action there is a consequence. The consequences of your actions relative to the pursuit of a goal is that it will either move you closer to reaching it, move you farther away, or keep you right where you are. Further, there are degrees of that movement, some actions might have the consequences of moving you more rapidly forward than others. As was discussed in the chapter on practice, the way you The Performance Mindset 113 structure and distribute your practice routines influences the rate and effectiveness of learning. Having identified want goals and the accompanying need goals, now it is time to plan your how goals. What specific actions can you do that will assist in the fulfillment of the need goals? Well-stated how goals describe actions that are completely under your control, observable, repeatable, and relevant to the fulfillment of your needs. When stating your how goal, another person should be able to completely replicate that action by following the description. Writing the how goal with this much specificity serves two important functions. First, it provides clear targets for your focus and intensity. When you say that you will hit twenty chips shots from fifteen yards to a pin with the intention of stopping the ball within three feet, there is little or no ambiguity with regards to the purpose and focus of the drill. In contrast, if you were to declare that you were going to work on your short game for thirty minutes, there is a lot less clarity of what exactly you will do. Second, clearly defined actions add an element of accountability to the how goal. It is very clear if you performed the goal or not, no room for interpretation. A coach watching you can unmistakably observe if you completed the task or not. Accountability often helps you in times when your self-control energy is low. You have been at the course for two hours and don’t feel like working on your chipping, but you know it will help so you drag yourself over to the short game area. The honest motivation you have is to “just get it over with.” But you have this very specific drill to hit twenty chips and keep track of how many stop within three feet. The task is narrow enough to focus on and challenging enough to test your pride. The accountability you begin to feel maybe provides the energy to commit to it. How goals clearly describe actions will have the greatest degree of influence on the attainment of need goals and lead to the fulfillment of what you want to achieve. Formulating and executing a specific action plan is a proven method of accomplishment in every 114 KEVIN SVERDUK growth endeavor including golf. Examples of effective how goals include: I will hit a sequence of five putts to a hole as follows: 30 feet, 50 feet, 20 feet, 60 feet, 40 feet, repeating this sequence five times for a total of 25 putts. I will record the number of putts stopping within three feet of the hole. I will take a thirty minute short game lesson once per week. On the range, I will hit ten balls with my driver, using my complete pre-shot routine with the intent of simulating hitting drives on the course. I will spend twenty minutes using the foam roller on the following areas: calf muscles and Achilles, front and back of upper legs, back, side of upper legs and hips, feet. I will meditate for ten minutes. When Goals Scott Adams is a cartoonist famous for his well-known comic strip Dilbert. He has been creating this daily comic strip in newspapers around the world for nearly thirty years. It is no small statement to say this is quite an accomplishment. How goals describe actions leading to the accomplishment of the need and wants. How Adams creates a comic strip is pretty straight forward, he sits down and creates it. But that doesn’t fully embody the accomplishment of creating something of the sustained quality required to appear in newspapers every day for thirty years. As influential to how he accomplishes this is when he achieves it. Adams gets up at 5:00 am every day and begins working on the strip. With virtually no variation, he has maintained this schedule for years. When goals are the schedule that is created for the execution of the how goals. They are similar to tasks that have been put into a The Performance Mindset 115 calendar. Research on goal setting and attainment has identified that people who create a detailed and specific plans such as a meticulous schedule are much more likely to fulfill those tasks. Simply stating that your goal is to improve your putting alone is not likely to help you achieve it. As the degree of detail in the planning rises, so too does the likelihood of accomplishment. Writing down exact times and places to complete tasks is more effective than a task list, which is more effective than just thinking about doing them. When you set a specific time for something you trigger the brain to be better prepared much like when you know you have to get up at a certain time, open your eyes, look at the clock, and see that it is that time without the alarm going off. Creating a precise schedule for the execution of specific actions not only adds to the accountability benefit, it helps manage energy. Worry and uncertainty about when we might fit something in, get it done, and what comes next carries a significant mental energy cost. Seeing the goals written into a daily and weekly schedule planner primes our body/minds to be prepared. We start to get excited in advance for the potential benefits of a full week of quality practice. We can even imagine the feeling of accomplishment from getting these meaningful goals completed. The regular practice of making detailed daily and weekly plans for your goals can eventually lead to those actions becoming routines. Completing your task list requires self-control, falling into a routine does not. Routines just happen and in fact, it actually takes energy to deviate from it. For Adams, rising at 5:00 am, sitting down in front of his computer and working is a routine. I doubt that he writes it down in his planner or certainly needs to. For Adams, it may even be more than a routine, he may look at it as a ritual, not necessarily in the religious context but as an ordered action possessing great personal meaning (his creativity). There are obviously routines that you have fallen into that hamper your choices to get all of your goals accomplished in a quality way. That can and will change by setting up a new plan and sticking to it. By committing to when goals, routines that keep you stuck can be transformed into rituals of success. 116 KEVIN SVERDUK Creating an effective plan and schedule for when you will integrate your how goals is as much about managing energy as it is about managing time. We have twenty-four hours in a day and research in circadian rhythms (sleep cycles), exercise physiology, cognitive psychology, and self-control all suggest that there are fluctuations in our day when we function at potentially higher levels. Times when we have more energy, can process information more quickly, and are more creative. Out of the sixteen or so waking hours of the day, there may be perhaps two to four hours of that day when we have maximum focus and energy. Outside of that, you have sufficient energy to get through your day but you are not as efficient. I would surmise for Scott Adams 5:00 am is the time that he feels he can maximize his creativity and focus. One valuable key to planning your day is to schedule activities that have the highest priority into times when you will have the highest energy to apply to them. If you practice golf during these times you will not only improve your practice quality, you will get more accomplished in less time. As you direct your attention from want goals to need goals to how goals, the intensity of focus narrows and becomes razor sharp. At that tip is the where your total concern engages in the actions of the how goals. If you want to win a tournament, don’t think about winning it, because you need to first figure out how to limit your three-putts to one per round, but don’t concentrate on that either. Instead determine how to reduce your three-putts by performing the 25-putt random distance drill and put your complete focus on doing that drill Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 2:45pm3:15pm for four weeks starting this week. Goals are achieved when you make a detailed plan and stick to it. Suggestions for setting and attaining goals: State all goals (want, need, how, when) very specifically including time frames, measurements, and numbers. Plan it out down to the exact day, time, place, and clear actions that you will do. The Performance Mindset Revisit the plan regularly to make adjustments as needed. Enlist the help of trusted others to plan and keep you accountable. Be determined and remain patient with yourself. When you fall off the plan, get back on. Pat yourself on the back often. Write everything down. 117 Sample Goal Plan Want Goal: I want to reduce my handicap from 10 to 5 within the next 6 months. Need Goal: To reduce my handicap to a 5 I need to increase my greens in regulation from 50% to 66%. How Goals: 1. Variable target drill with irons. 2. On the range starting with your PW select a specific target or line direction. 3. Attempt to land your first attempt five yards left of the target, your second attempt five yards right of the target, and your third attempt directly at the target. 4. Switch to your 9-iron and repeat to a target that is distance appropriate for the club. 5. Continue with every iron in your bag. 6. After going through every iron, repeat the sequence two more times for a total of nine shots (three sets of three swings) with each iron. 7. Record the approximate distance from your intended target (five left, five right, straight at it) for each shot. 8. Take a half hour lesson with your golf professional emphasizing iron play as part of each lesson or alternating lessons. When Goal: 1. How Goal # 1: Tuesday and Thursday from 5:15pm – 5:45pm. 120 Sample Goal Plan 2. How Goal # 2: Friday from 5:00pm – 5:30pm CHAPTER SUMMARY Research has shown that people who create specific and detailed plans to attain their goals are more likely to achieve them. Goal Energy Management (GEM) explains the effective application of motivational energy and focus. Four types of goals are want, need, how, and when goals. As one shifts from want goals toward when goals, focus is more narrowly directed to controllable, process-oriented actions. The repeated pattern of completing when goals eventually turns those actions into effective routines. Find the times in your day when the quality of your energy is at its highest and schedule your when goals during those times. PART III THE PERFORMANCE PROGRAM 8 PRACTICE DRILLS AND ON-COURSE GAMES A s you put together an effective performance program together, much thought must be given to what specific components will be included and the purposes those will meet. As was described in Chapter Six, practices that yield the greatest transfer of learning-to-performance are the priority. The practice drills and on-course games that follow have been structured specifically to enhance learning and transfer those improvements directly to performance. They have well defined parameters for the added effect of enhancing and simulating the pressures of playing golf. Putting Drills I. Quiet Eye: Purpose—target focus and keeping the putt online. Research on proficiency with aiming tasks such as shooting free throws, pitching in baseball, and putting have revealed a strong correlation between performance accuracy and eye movement during the attempt. Results demonstrate that keeping one’s eyes 126 KEVIN SVERDUK quietly focused on the target or some intermediate line to the target for an extended time (1-2 seconds) yields better performance. This drill will improve your ability to get the ball started on-line when you putt. 1. Find a fairly flat area of the green. 2. Place two tees in the green the width of a hole (4 ½ inches) apart and 6 feet from the cup. 3. Take four balls and place them in a line at 2, 4, 6, and 8 feet from the pair of tees such that a putt rolling through the set of tees will travel to the hole. 4. Starting with the two-footer, stand over the ball and set up to putt it. Just before striking the putt, gaze your eyes at a spot between the two tees where you want the ball to roll over and maintain your gaze on it for 2 seconds. 5. While keeping your eyes on the spot between the tees, putt the ball and let your eyes remain on that spot as the ball rolls toward it. (Remember that you will not be looking at the ball as you putt it). 6. Continue repeating this process with the three remaining putts. 7. After retrieving the attempts, set it up again and repeat the sequence 8 times for a total of 32 putts. 8. Record the number of putts cleaning rolling through the tees. II. Variable Speed: Purpose—improved putting distance control. Achieving better and more consistent speed on longer putts is obviously important. This drill will help you fine-tune your distance putting by challenging you with varied distance putts. With each attempt requiring a different distance, your body/mind must quickly adjust and calculate the correct feel to roll the putt close to the hole. The Performance Mindset 127 1. Select a hole with enough green around it to putt from 60 feet. 2. Place five tees at; 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 feet from the hole. 3. Place a ball next to each of the tees. 4. Putt each ball to the hole in the following order: 30 feet, 50 feet, 20 feet, 60 feet, 40 feet 5. Record the distance in inches that each ball stops from the hole. 6. Repeat the sequence five times for a total of 25 putts. III. Imagination putting: Purpose—to strengthen the vividness and control of imagery. Commitment is a phrase often talked about as an important component of making putts. The imagination of the putt prior to hitting it is purpose of the pre-putt routine. In essence, you make the putt in your body/mind before attempting it. The more clear and vivid the image of the putt, the more concrete model you create to commit to. This drill will train you to improve the depth of your imagination and strengthen your chances of maintaining commitment when putting. 1. Select a hole and place five small ball markers or coins at random distances around the hole. 2. Stand a few feet behind one of the markers and take a few deep breaths to clear your mind. 3. Take a look at the place where the marker sits, close your eyes, and create an image of a golf ball resting on that spot (allow a few second for this). 4. Open your eyes attempting to retain the image of a ball resting where the marker lies. 5. Going through your complete putting routine, approach the marker (imaginary ball) as you would a real ball. 6. Standing over the imagined ball, hit your putt allowing your imagination to include the sensations in your 128 KEVIN SVERDUK hands of hitting the ball, the sound of the contact on the blade of your putter and the visual image of the putt rolling on the intended line into the cup. 7. Record a rating from 0 (not clear at all) to 5 (extremely clear and real like) for the imagined putt. 8. Repeat for the remaining four markers for a total of five imagined putts. IV. Blind result: Purpose—to improve ability to commit and let go. A common cause of missed putts is trying too hard or pressing. Rather than putting with a fluid and smooth stroke, the tension from trying too hard to make the putt (or not miss it) results in a quick or decelerating strike through the ball. This drill will help you practice letting go of your unhelpful attention on the result and find a way to focus more completely on staying committed to your process. 1. Place five balls around a hole at various distances between six and twelve feet from the cup. 2. Stuff a rolled up 3-wood head cover into the hole to prevent a ball from rolling into the hole. 3. Prepare to hit each of the balls laid out with your full putting routine. 4. Approximately one second after striking the putt close your eyes and keep them shut for several seconds to prevent you from seeing where the ball rolls. 5. Before opening your eyes rate on a scale from 0 (not at all committed, deviated greatly from my intentions) to 5 (totally committed, 100% feeling that I putted as I intended). 6. Repeat this process for the remaining balls and repeat the set again for a total of ten putts. 7. Record your commitment scores. The Performance Mindset 129 Short Game Drills I. Variable landing spot: Purpose—to sharpen the execution of your intended carry distance. In addition to putting the most varied shots, you will hit with the same club are wedge shots. A necessary feature of a strong shortgame is the ability to land the ball on the exact spots needed for each attempt. This drill will help your body/mind calibrate the feel for varied carry distances when chipping. Varying the distance for each attempt also improves the transfer of the practice to when you play. 1. On a chipping green (can also be on a grass field) spread out a golf towel. 2. Place five balls each at 5, 10, 15 and 20 yards from the towel (20 balls total). 3. Chip one ball from each distance trying to land the attempt on the towel using the following sequence: 15, 5, 20, 10 yards. 4. Repeat the sequence five times and record the number of attempts that land on the towel. II. Create and copy: Purpose—to enhance imagination and trust. Another common source of poor chip shots is a lack of commitment. A golfer will stand next to the ball prior to chipping, taking smooth, accelerating swings, then take a tentative decelerating stroke during execution. This drill emphasizes creating the desired feel and helping you practice staying committed to that feel when hitting. 130 KEVIN SVERDUK 1. Place 10 balls at various distances between 5 and 25 yards from a hole on the chipping green. 2. Prepare to chip each ball using your full routine including walking off the distance. Put emphasis on imagining the look of the intended shot. 3. As you take your rehearsal swings emphasize the kinesthetic feel of the tempo, path, and force of the club while maintaining the visual image of the shot. 4. Once you have created the feel and look you want, make your attempt. 5. Rate the similarity of your actual shot to your imagined shot on a scale from 0% (no similarity) to 100% (completely identical feels). Note that it is important not to let the actual result of your shot influence this rating. You can misread the chip and still hit it with 100% similarity to your rehearsal image. 6. Continue with the remaining balls and record your ratings for the 10 chips. III. One ball up and downs: Purpose—to simulate on-course conditions. Up and downs are one of the key statistics on tour as they have a very direct influence on scoring average. In addition to the challenge of executing the technical aspects of the chip and putt, the pressure when playing of a single attempt to get the ball up and down is present. This pressure can present a strong influence on imprecise chips and missed putts. This drill will add pressure and give you practice in executing up and downs in a more simulated way. 1. Take a single ball and toss it to a random spot off the chipping green. 2. Engaging in your full routines hit the chip and putt the ball until you are in the hole. The Performance Mindset 131 3. Make ten total up and down attempts from random spots and record your score (total strokes). IV. Gradual roll out: Purpose—to develop feel around the green. The reading, calculation, and execution of a chips shot includes controlling how much the ball will release and roll out. Fine tuning your ability to roll the ball to a spot close to the hole is as important as hitting your landing spots. This drill will help you develop more acute touch around the greens. 1. On the chipping green place two ball markers or tees 10 yards apart. 2. Place five balls in a pile so that they are 15 yards from the closest marker and 25 yards from the other. 3. Chip the first ball so that it rolls to a stop just past the first marker. 4. Chip each subsequent ball so that it rolls past the previous ball but remain short of the farthest marker. 5. If any of the five attempts fails to stop past the previous ball and within the two markers start over immediately and try again. 6. After successfully completing the task, attempt it again in reserve (first ball just short of the farthest marker, second ball shorter than the first, etc.). 7. Continue for exactly twenty minutes and record the number of times you accomplish the five ball sequence. Range Drills 132 KEVIN SVERDUK I. Variable distance: Purpose—to enhance the ability to adjust to effects of tournament pressure. Feel is not always real when you play golf, especially tournament golf. Excitement and nerves fill you with energy not always present causing your control of distance to be altered. Often the exact distance needed for a shot lies between to clubs and you have to decide between attempting a softer swing with a longer club or a harder swing with a shorter club. This drill will help you practice making subtle adjustments in your swing tempo to compensate for pressure and in between yardages. 1. Select your driver, any wedge, and five other clubs from your bag. 2. Starting with your wedge set up to a target or line. 3. With the first ball take a full swing and attempt to hit at what is generally your full swing distance with this club. (100% swing). 4. On the second ball attempt to hit the ball 10% less distance from the first (90% swing). 5. Attempt to hit the third ball 10% further (110% swing). 6. Repeat this three ball sequence (100%, 90%, 110%) with each of the seven clubs then again once more for a total of 42 swings. 7. Rate your ability to create the intended swing feel for each swing on a scale from 1 (inexact feel) to 5 (exact feel). II. Line Drill: Purpose—simulate performance and improve accuracy. Often lost in all the golf minutiae of swing planes, the proper grip, lie angles, and equipment is that golf is a target-oriented game. The ability to more closely and consistently hit the ball to intended targets is the key to lowering scores, yet in practice rarely given The Performance Mindset 133 great attention. More often how the swing feels is used as one’s estimate of how they think they will play rather than how good they are getting at hitting to targets. This drill will emphasize target execution in a performance simulated fashion. 1. Set up your hitting area so that you have targets and/or a line that you can easily judge the distance balls land from. If there is a fence you can set up about ten yards away and aim on a line directly 10 yards parallel to it. 2. Select your pitching wedge, driver, and five other clubs from your bag. 3. Organize the seven clubs in a random sequence so that you are not hitting consecutive clubs (i.e. PW, 9-iron, 8-iron). 4. Take the first club in your sequence, set-up to a specific target or line, and attempt to land the ball as close to the target as you can. 5. Record the approximate distance in yards the ball landed from the target. 6. Continue with each club and repeat the sequence two additional times for a total of 21 attempts. 7. Add up the distances from the target for all shots. III. Best Chance Routine: Purpose—to enhance the ability to get into an optimal Performance Mindset over the ball. Competing in a golf tournament is less about executing perfect swings and more about giving yourself the best chance available during each moment to achieve the lowest score you can produce. This requires honest self-assessment and objective awareness. Sometimes, tension and fearful thoughts are present and you must manage them. This drill will help you learn to walk into each shot with a process designed to get the most out of each attempt. 134 KEVIN SVERDUK 1. Select a driver, a short iron, and a long iron or hybrid club. 2. Select a club, a target, and begin your routine to hit the shot as you would in a tournament. 3. Standing behind the ball take a moment to be aware of your body/mind state (physical tension, heart rate, presence of thoughts, images, and where your focus is). 4. As you walk into the shot, attempt to create a body/mind state that you associate with giving yourself the absolute best chance of successfully executing this shot at this moment. 5. Take your swing. 6. Rate the feeling you experienced about the helpfulness of the state you created in increasing your chances for a successful outcome on a scale from 1 (not a helpful body/mind state) to 5 (body/mind state gave me the best possible chance). 7. Remember that your rating is on the feeling of the state in helping your chances and not on the outcome of the shot. 8. Hit a total of nine shots, changing clubs each swing and record your rating for each. IV. Target variation: Purpose —to sharpen accuracy with wedges. Mid-range wedge shots are commonly sources of frustration for golfers. Opportunities to get up and down or at the very least down in three from 58 yards that become bogeys or worse dishearten every golfer. Consistency and accuracy with wedges is enhanced with variable rather than blocked practice. This drill will help you dial in more consistently your wedge game. 1. Select all the clubs you use for 60- to 90-yard shots. 2. Find and/or set up three specific targets (flags on the The Performance Mindset 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 135 range, patches of dirt, alignment sticks placed in the ground) that are between 60 and 90 yards away. Choose one of the targets and an appropriate club for that distance. Take five consecutive shots with that club. Attempt to land your first shot five yards right of the target, your second five yards left, the third five yards short and directly at the target, the fourth five yards beyond, and the fifth directly at the target. Continue on to the other two targets and repeat the sequence two additional times for a total of 45 attempts. Record the number of attempts falling within five yards of the intended landing spot. On-Course Games I. Short Game Challenge: Purpose—to increase simulated practice. Short game, short game, short game is a common and wise mantra uttered by golf professionals when asked what should golfers practice to improve their scores. In practice it is next to impossible to replicate every short game scenario a golfer would encounter when they play not just in the lie and distance but also in the pressure felt. This on-course game will test your short game and build your comfort level around the green. Keeping scores will allow you to track your improvement and if you can do this with others create a competitive environment. 1. Play 9 or 18 holes from tee to green as you normally would. 2. After hitting your approach to the green, pick up your ball and place it off the green. 3. On the odd numbered holes place the ball in the rough 136 KEVIN SVERDUK and on the even numbered holes place the ball in the bunker. 4. Play it out and keep your 9 or 18-hole short-game score. II. Club up or down: Purpose—to enhance the ability to make adjustments. Feeling comfortable on the course when you play is often elusive. While some situations arise that allow you to hit a shot you like, many others present themselves in which the shot called for is not exactly to your liking. Those situations often produce tense and pressing swings that create missed shots. This game will allow you to practice dealing with uncertainty, expanding your adaptability, and feeling comfortable being uncomfortable. 1. Bring a deck of playing cards with you to the course. 2. Hit your tee shot as you normally would. 3. On all shots remaining until you are on the greens select a card from the deck without looking. 4. If you select an even numbered or queen card you must club up one from the club you would normally hit (i.e. if you would hit a 9-iron, club up to an 8). If you select an odd-numbered or jack, king card you must club down and if you select an ace you may hit whatever club you want. 5. Keep score and if possible compete with others. III. Driver second: Purpose—to develop better target focus with the driver. The golf adage, “aim big, miss big, aim small, miss small” reflects the importance of narrowing the width of one’s focus when hitting to targets. Often golfers lament that when they have a wide fairway to hit they miss it, yet when it is narrow they stripe it down the The Performance Mindset 137 center. This game will force you to look at a small target while hitting a driver and help you enhance your driving accuracy. 1. Play 9 or 18 holes on a familiar course. 2. For each par four hole, tee off with the club you normally hit as an approach on that hole (if you typically have 7-iron into the green then tee off with a seven iron). 3. On your second shot, tee the ball up and attempt to hit your driver to the hole. IV. Single, double, triple stroke holes: Purpose—to simulate increased pressure. No matter how determined you might be, you will always have awareness of your score and/or standing when playing tournament golf. As such, there will also be calculations running through your mind on certain holes as you project that you need a birdie here or all you need is a par on this one. This game will help to simulate those pressure-hole scenarios and provide you with the opportunity to practice managing them. 1. Play 9 or 18 holes for score. 2. On your scorecard keep and write the actual score you earned on holes 1, 4, and 7. 3. On holes 2, 5, and 8 double the score (if you got a 4, write down 8). 4. On holes 3, 6, and 9 triple the score (if you got a 4, write down 12). 5. After playing nine holes this will give you an 18-hole score, after playing 18 this will be your 36-hole score. 9 DATA COLLECTION AND TRACKING A common thread running through the practice drills and oncourse games is objective measurement. Every drill is designed in a way that it will provide a numerical score as are the on-course games. There are several compelling and beneficial consequences of constructing a performance program in this way. A scientific approach to gaining improvement feeds off of informative data. One cannot clearly know if changes are occurring if one cannot objectively compare results. Subjective perceptions of changes and improvements may at times infer proof but can also be false. Simply feeling that you are putting better can be strongly influenced by a scattering of positive emotional experiences such as you making a couple of long birdie putts. Those putts have greater presence in your memory than putts you missed, therefore it seems to you that you are making more putts than you actually might be. So to when you get frustrated after missing a couple of putts and then conclude that your putting stroke needs an overhaul. Too often golfers have told me how badly they putted during a particular round when, in fact, their putting stats were better than average. In addition to tracking changes, recording outcomes of practice 140 KEVIN SVERDUK drills increases the quality of the practice itself. Knowing beforehand that a score or rating of performance will be kept creates an element of pressure not unlike what exists when you play. It has the potential to generate some anxiety and nervousness that may also add to the challenge of performing those tasks. In that way, the drill then provides the opportunity to learn to manage and play with the boost of anxiety that often accompanies tournament play. The transfer of skills is greatly enhanced when there is similarity between the internal (nerves and pressure) and external (targets, type of grass) environments of practice to competition. Keeping score of your practice drill performances provides the chance to turn every drill into competitive games. You can compete to better previous scores or compete with teammates and other golfers. What people like to refer to as the “competitive edge” is sharpened by the frequency of engaging in demanding games. Rising to competitive challenges is not something champions turn on or off, it is something they keep present every moment. Biographies of great athletes often reflect stories of how intensely competitive their lives were both on and off the field. For many, the pressure to perform becomes too much to handle and they become paralyzed by it. So they seek ways to escape from the pressure and reduce it. In truth, however, competition doesn’t create anxiety, lack of competition does. We struggle with those moments of pressure because they arise so infrequently. It is nearly impossible to mimic the pressure of needing a two putt from 60 feet to close out a tournament or getting up and down on the last hole to break 80 for the first time. Performing structured practice drills with constant objective evaluation introduces into the practice environment similarities in the competitive pressure that exists while playing. The more frequent this exposure becomes the more adapted you will be to the pressures that you will face on the course. Another benefit of measuring practice drill performance is that it adds purpose. I’ve often countered the notion of “practice makes perfect” with the view that “purpose make practice perfect.” So often I see golfers of all levels raking and hitting ball after ball with The Performance Mindset 141 seemingly no greater reason than to just get the reps in. When you play golf there is a specific purpose for each shot. There is a target and outcome in mind with each attempt. Even if you are working on swing adjustments, you can do it towards a target. I doubt that you’d ever see a basketball player in a gym shooting jump shots out into open air rather than at the basket. Practice for the sake of practice is not only wasteful, it can lead to bad habits and can fail to prepare you adequately for the purposeful demands of competition. Recording and tracking takes more work to implement. A little more planning and attention to detail is required. It can be very helpful to keep a notebook with you when you do the drills so that you can record your outcomes. You may choose also to use your phone. The following are some charts and tables that you can use to record and track practice performance. Putting Drills 144 Putting Drills Short Game Drills 146 Short Game Drills Range Drills 10 KEEPING A PERFORMANCE JOURNAL G o into the lab or office of any scientist and you are not sure what you will discover. You may see the clutter of open laptops, coffee cups, notes, and various measuring devices. One object that you will most certainly find every researcher possessing is a journal. Scientist keep meticulous notes of ideas, theories, results, and data. As a golfer seeking to improve, you are a scientist and your research demands countless experiments and the collecting of data. You will also be acquiring deeper self-knowledge as you systematically direct your attention within. Identifying tendencies and sources of tension that may be holding you back are a first step to engaging in a process to improving. Keeping a performance journal is a very effective tool for improvement and growth. The many benefits of journal writing include: Helping you sort out difficult problems and conflict both personal and interpersonal. Changing your perceptions of events. Creating affirmative, optimistic stories about future possibilities. 154 KEVIN SVERDUK Replacing the habit of using “toxic” (can’t, should, never …) words with healthy ones. Making powerful discoveries about your game and yourself. Recharging your energy and commitment towards your goals. Finding a place and time where you can be mindful and unrushed to write thoughts down in a journal is often a powerful experience. In these moments there is an atmosphere of honesty and truth that rarely exists in most others times of our day. We are alone with ourselves and it is both comforting and tortuous. A long distance runner once wrote about the experience of long solo training runs, the gamut of thoughts both supportive and critical streaming through his mind and how he learned to become friends with himself. The practice of journal writing possesses the same potential. A golf performance journal will serve as your scientific notebook where you will plan changes, evaluate results, express your reactions, and affirm your commitment to excellence. A journal may range from being highly structured with specific questions and items to address to having no structure other than just writing what comes to mind. I prefer something in between, a semi-structured performance journal with sections requiring specific entries and others far less regulated. The goal-setting plan, for example, will be a highly structured element of your journal. This section will be attended to each week as you develop and maintain your performance program. A performance evaluation section will consist of specific items to assess relative to how you played in a round and/or tournament. That will be completed after every round. A third section provides you the opportunity and space to express whatever you wish such as thoughts you are having, worries, hopes, and affirmations for the future. Here you can move ideas from the mind to the paper. Keeping and maintaining a journal is not something many The Performance Mindset 155 people fully commit to. It is what I like to categorize as soft invisible work. Effort that nobody notices but has enormous transformational potential. Sometimes even just a single entry into a journal can help clear your thoughts and provide insight and hope for the future. It is no small coincidence that many of the greatest scientific discoverers shared the habit of regular journal writing. I highly recommend sharing parts if not all of your journal with a trusted helper like a coach or sport psychologist. Your journey towards excellence is never a completely solo undertaking. Finding and surrounding yourself with knowledgeable and supportive people is very important. Bring them into your inner circle by including them with your journaling. I have provided examples of different sections of a Golf Performance Journal. These examples could be used as they are or modified to fit your game. Any type of notebook can work as a journal or if you like making multiple copies of the sections and using a threeringed binder is effective as well. You can even go paperless and create your journal as a word document on your computer. The key is to find what will work to help you make consistent journal entries. Goals Date: _____________ What specific results do you want to achieve and when do you want to accomplish them by? List specific performance standards (i.e. 75% GIR) that you need to meet in order to accomplish the above goals. Describe detailed drills and actions that will effectively help you attain the above performance standards. Create next week’s performance program and specify the days/times when you will perform the above drills. Golf Tournament Performance Evaluation Name: Tournament: Preparation: Rate your level of preparation during the seven days leading up to the tournament. What factors best explain how you felt about your preparation for the tournament? What adjustments in your preparation could you have made during the seven days leading up to the tournament that would have improved how prepared you felt? Pre-Round Routines: Rate how effective what you did prior to the rounds were in getting you ready to play. What did you do prior to your round that helped you feel ready? What do you wish you would have done before the round to feel more ready? Pre-shot Routines: Rate how effective what you did prior to each shot was in helping you feel ready to give yourself the best chance to make the shot. What elements in your routine seemed to help you feel ready? Course Information and Strategy: Rate how clear and comfortable you were with obtaining information during the round. What adjustments to the process of getting yardages and making decisions might be helpful to you? Mental Approach: Rate how effective your mental approach was in helping you maintain a workable feeling during the tournament. What aspects of your mental approach helped you feel able to handle and deal with things in a workable way? Patience: Rate how patient you were with your play. When you are patient, how is your play affected? What types of things sometimes lead to you becoming impatient? What adjustments would help you stay patient? What adjustments might have helped you handle and deal with things in a more workable way? Structured Daily Performance Journal Date: Use the following as a guideline to make a journal entry: 1. Describe your current mood, notable thoughts and or concerns. 2. Reflect on significant events that occurred today and your perceptions of them. 3. List and/or describe three things that you consider positive aspects of the day. 4. Describe some areas of growth and/or maintenance that come to mind. 5. Close with a statement or affirmation to move forward with. 11 A SEVEN-DAY PERFORMANCE PROGRAM A lchemy is a word that describes the often mystical process of purifying and transforming ordinary objects into treasured creations. Personal transformation and change are always occurring. From the cellular level to behaviors, we are generating and regenerating new patterns of life. While our life experiences frequently seem to be stuck in an endless repetitive loop, such as “I just keep missing fairways,” change and the potential for change are always present. A scientific approach to preparing and playing golf embraces change because change represent opportunities for discovery. Manipulating a person’s environment in a purposeful and measured way, followed by acute observation of changes, is how science teaches us to gain significant influence over our lives. If you were to go to the doctor complaining of gastro-intestinal discomfort she is likely to ask you if you had any recent changes in your diet. She might prescribe that you change your diet in a specific way for a period of time and schedule a follow-up to see if there are any improvements. The more adherence and commitment to eating the foods advised allows the doctor to develop a clearer assessment of the new diet’s effect. A golf performance 176 KEVIN SVERDUK program should operate in precisely the same way if one wishes to learn what truly works. Below I outline a seven-day performance program using the tools and strategies presented in this book. This program is a sample, not to be taken as a rigid template designed for every golfer. An effective program must include considerations for individual differences between golfers and their circumstances. This example simply provides a framework to build your own program from. It is roughly structured for golfers who can commit approximately twenty hours and six days a week to their games such as a college player or serious amateur. From this outline there is ample room to adjust down or up the hours and days while still maintaining the integrity of the program. The Seven Day Performance Plan Monday Before you begin the week, plan and write out your specific schedule and the exact drills you will perform on Sunday night (I’ll discuss this when I get to Sunday). Monday is a lighter day of practice because you played on Sunday. An objective for Monday is to get into your routine and set a positive tone for the rest of the week. The components are: Meditate for ten or twenty minutes first thing in the The Performance Mindset 177 morning. The morning is preferred because your mind will be fresher and clearer just after getting up then later in the day when many things will be running through your mind. The workout today will emphasize active recovery from the weekend rather than heavy resistance. Extra focus should be on stretching and rolling-out. Today is the shortest practice of the week. You may feel mentally tired from playing the day before and rather than force yourself to get through a long practice, shorten it and give you full attention to just three drills: Quiet Eye Putting Variable Landing Spot Target Variation Tuesday The emphasis for this day is to create situations on the course that will challenge you to handle, make adjustments for, and execute under pressure. It is helpful to approach the day with a theme such as short-game Tuesday or improvisation Wednesday. This helps set your mind on the goals of the day. The components are: Play 18-holes on course with the Short Game Challenge remembering to keep score. Journaling. Set aside a period of time later in the day when you are alert and free of distraction to write in your journal. You hit a lot of shots today. The journal is where you evaluate your performance and reset your motivations for the next day. Wednesday 178 KEVIN SVERDUK Today is a full day of work on your game. The emphasis on quality is high as is attention to detail. Component are: Meditate for ten to twenty minutes in the morning. The most intense workout of the week is today. You have recovered from last weekend’s performance and will recover in time to be fresh for the next. Practice for two hours today. The practice should be comprehensive addressing chipping, putting, and hitting. Line Drill Variable Distance Create and Copy Gradual Roll Out Variable Speed Quiet Eye Blind Result Thursday No golf today. Take a break and use the time for completing tasks, socializing, sleeping, etc. Friday Another full day with an emphasis of sharpening your game for the weekend. Components include: Meditate for ten to twenty minutes in the morning. Today’s workout is not as intense as Wednesday. The goal is to maintain strength and fitness levels rather than to breakdown and build. Practice for two hours with the emphasis of getting prepared to perform. Components are: Target Variation The Performance Mindset 179 Imagination Putting Variable Landing Spot Variable Distance Variable Speed One Ball Up and Downs Best Chance Routine Saturday The emphasis today is much less on developing new skills and more on learning to trust the skills you have. Beginning to find your performance rhythm and mindset is stressed today. Components are: Play 9-holes on-course with the Single, Double, and Triple game. Practice for thirty minutes: Best Chance Routine Create and Copy Blind Result Journaling. Use the journal to separate your mind from your thoughts, worries, and concerns. Write down controllable objectives for tomorrow’s round and calming mantras. Sunday Today is the day that you get to play and discover. Approach it with balanced importance. It’s a big deal but ultimately it is not. The warm up for the round is not the time for building skills. Rounds of golf, particularly tournament rounds rarely go as you have planned. The keys of the warm up are to focus on the things you can control and to prepare to make adjustments. Drills that are effective elements of the warm up are: 180 KEVIN SVERDUK Imagination Putting Blind Result Create and Copy Variable Distance Best Chance Routine Following the round, find a time when you can quietly reflect on that day’s round. In your journal complete an evaluation of your performance. Next, write down your planned schedule for the next week. Additional Suggestions and Modifications An effective golf performance program must be your plan. You have to take ownership of it. While the various components and drills may come from others, the level of commitment to and motivation for are your contributions to the process. Without that willingness, the plan has little chance for success. The sample program provides a prototype for you to create your own from. Clearly, the exact days and number of hours must be adjusted to fit your life and circumstances, however, the quality of the approach should remain. That means keeping a balance with drills, exercises, and activities that address all of the relevant performance dimensions. It is also important to be adaptable. Events often happen during the week that were unforeseen when you created the plan. Access to the course may be hindered or your schedule changes. That does not automatically mean that your week will be shot. Take those hits one by one and find creative solutions and adjustments. This is a useful skill to learn in and of itself. The following are a few added recommendations for creating your program: Schedule a weekly lesson with your swing instructor. Work together with your coach to create the program and plan. The Performance Mindset Find a partner to do the program together with. If you have an important multi-day tournament approaching expand the plan to ten to fourteen days. Dedicate specific days and times for meditation and journaling so they don’t get forgotten. 181 12 CONCLUSION: PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER A five-year old girl began accompanying her dad to the driving range on Saturday mornings mostly to just hang out with her father and to eat the gummy worms he would buy for her. She would occasionally hit a ball or two but then find another activity to do. Before not too long she was hitting more balls, eating less gummy worms, and getting better. It felt fun to hit the ball no matter where and see it fly up in the air. Lessons started soon after, her game improved, Dad was encouraging her, and she could now go out on the course. The early experiences of playing on the course were naïve yet pure. There was no good or bad, no expectations, and nothing to fear. Every shot was hit to her absolute potential. Soon, the parameters of play appeared and the shift to performance ensued. The experience of fun evolved to include getting better and shooting lower scores. Fast forward several years, this five-year old neophyte is now a twenty-year-old college golfer with LPGA dreams. 10,000 hours of instruction, practice, training, and tournaments have since passed. Amassing greater skill than ever, yet only intermittently feeling that she plays up to that potential when it counts, she desperately longs for two things. To play fearlessly in tournaments 184 KEVIN SVERDUK and to experience that purity and freshness that she remembers having at five. Can she have both? Coaches, parents, golfers, and anyone who enjoys watching sport often wonder about the mechanisms of elite performance under pressure. What is it that makes the great champions play so well when the game is on the line? What do they have that others do not? The ability to play to one’s full capability, without fear, selfconsciousness, and doubt has always been within us. No one person or small group of elite athletes have entitlement to being able to play and experience golf in this fashion. The experience of playing golf consistently to one’s full potential and to experience the best time doing it is available to everyone and not limited to a few. The pursuit of golf excellence is more about the re-cultivation of a mindset we all possessed as kids than the development of physical and mental skills for peak performance. The Performance Mindset is not something to be acquired, rather it is something that needs to be awakened. The process of that awakening is something that can be guided and helped along. Buddhist philosophy uses the image of an endless knot to represent the truth that there is no beginning nor end. No absolute outcomes, all process. Playing this wonderful game of golf is no different. The ball flies about, rolls for a bit, rests in the hole momentarily and begins again. Golfers work tirelessly learning to master how to better guide the ball around the course. That endeavor challenges the seamless mind, body, and soul. The mission of this book has been to provide a blueprint if you will for rediscovering the playful freedom we all once enjoyed and awaken your mind to experience the full potential the game can offer. I’ve had the great fortune to work with golfers of all levels from tour professionals to 20 handicap amateurs. They have each been my students and teachers. One thing my students have taught me is that everyone is different. What works for one person does not always work with another. Each golfer has a unique history, physiology, culture, and personality that shapes his or her ways of interacting with the world. Different individuals may share the same The Performance Mindset 185 desire to hit straight drives, stick approaches at the pins, and drain putts yet the path that takes them there must be their own. While I sincerely hope that the information and structure of this book alone will help you play and enjoy golf more, I also support the importance of self-discovery. The tools and strategies described here are merely suggestions for success. How you include and weave them into your quest is uniquely personal. While remaining individual in nature, an effective program for improved golf should follow a few of the common principles outlined. First, your program must be based from valid knowledge of what has been demonstrated to be effective. Meditation, imagery, quiet eye training, for example, have all been supported by scientific research. Second, having structure increases the likelihood for effective change. Having the thought and will to change alone rarely leads to significant progress. Third, the program must be allotted sufficient time for any potential benefits to develop. There must be a commitment to the program for it to have a chance. Finally, there must exist an objective method for determining the consequences of the program. Growth and knowledge are attained when can clearly see cause and effect. Gaining greater personal insight and uncovering what best works for you is not a task that you have to tackle alone. I am a firm believer in the benefit of having an enlightened coach or mentor— a trusted figure that will help you find a more effective process. This person can form a partnership with in your pursuit of excellence. Whether they are a swing coach, sport psychologist, a college coach, or agent, it does not matter. The primary requirement is not the specific expertise in one domain but a proficiency in helping. A skilled helper knows how to truly listen, understand, and empathize with you and has the ability to accurately reflect that awareness back to you in a way that gives you powerful insights. Many golfers who have felt that I was able to help them relate that just being able to debrief and talk about their experiences was the greatest benefit. Others appreciated the structured practices such 186 KEVIN SVERDUK as meditation and imagery with me and felt that was most helpful. Even Buddhist monks on their solitary journey to find enlightenment, spending hours each day in isolation and contemplation, seek the guidance of spiritual teachers to aid their quest. How to Best Use this Book In addition to sharing my insights into the pursuit of excellence in golf, my goal for this book was to provide a system for golfers to follow that would allow them to cultivate the Performance Mindset. Most aspiring golfers can clearly tell me what their goals are yet fail to describe with any detail what the process will be to achieve those goals. These are the golfers I see at the range aimlessly beating balls. Hitting ten 7-irons, then checking their phone, hitting ten more with little simulation to how they play on the course. Decisions on what to practice typically arise from intuitive judgments of what they did not do well the last round they played or upon seeing a drill performed on the golf channel. The plans often consists of bits and pieces randomly arranged from day to day with no formal method of gauging how effective they are to helping shoot lower scores. In this book, I proposed a systematic program that could be followed. You can think of it as the hypotheses in an experiment. The research question for example being, would following The Seven Day Program (Chapter Eleven) for eight weeks result in improved scores? As with any experiment, there are no good or bad results, just data. If after following the program for eight weeks your scores have improved, then you have identified a system that helps. If your scores remain the same, maybe not. In any case, you now have supported information to make decisions about adjustments to the next iteration of your program. Here are some additional suggestions for implementing a systematic program (including the introduction of a swing change) for yourself: Understand the philosophy behind the program. The Performance Mindset 187 Thoroughly understanding the rationale behind the content and methods of a program will help you buy into it more fully. Conduct an honest self-assessment before starting a program. Obtaining baseline evaluations of your game will help you more accurately gauge how effective the program is working for you. Create a plan. Taking thoughtful time at the start to map out precisely what, how, when, and where you will implement all the pieces of the program provides you direction and increase your adherence to it. Take ownership of your program. Shifting your motivation from external (my coach wants me to do this) to internal (I’m in control of my golf development and this is the path I want to take) will increase your energy to stick with it. Track commitment rather than progress, especially early on. Maintaining dedicated adherence early on as improvement seems absent is essential to set the base from which meaningful outcomes will emerge. Increase your willingness to let it develop. Patience is the most important ingredient to success. Give the program time to have an effect. Pause to evaluate every six to eight weeks. Gaining knowledge is progress and through insightful periodic assessments of the effects of the program, you will acquire information to be used to move more efficiently towards your goals. In the classic novel Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba encounters an old man in his seventies planting a tiny young olive tree in his yard. Zorba comments that it takes twenty years for an 188 KEVIN SVERDUK olive tree to mature before bearing fruit, “why at your age do you take this project on?” The old man replies “I live my life as if I will live forever,” and Zorba counters “Yes, and I live mine as if I will die tomorrow.” These two perspective are not as dissimilar as they may appear. They complement each other and describe the balanced approach to the pursuit of excellence. To tackle each day with a sense of urgency towards one’s goals can make for effective progress yet without the patience to stay with it one loses confidence in the approach. Patience is obviously a virtue yet must be structured with the urgency of purpose to create effective growth. Patient urgency is a temperament well suited for a journey towards excellence in golf and life. As this book comes to a close I sincerely wish you the very best in your life’s pursuits. For myself and many, the game of golf has been a gift. The opportunities to express my athleticism, connect with others, become engrossed in learning, lose myself as I play, and even the times when I feel like a tortured soul have enriched my life as it has for many others. May all your drives, chips, and putts be masterful. Thank You. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Kevin Sverduk is a Sport Psychologist at Long Beach State and a golf performance coach who has worked with dozens of PGA, LPGA touring professionals, collegiate golf programs, and elite junior golfers. He earned his Ph.D. in Sport and Exercise Science with a specialization in Sport Psychology from the University of Northern Colorado. His innovative approach to helping golfers maximize their performance draws from scientifically-supported techniques rooted in applied sport psychology, motor learning, biomechanics, cognitive psychology, and Buddhism. In addition to providing individual performance coaching, Kevin provides workshops for parents, teachers, and players, and creates mental skills programs for collegiate teams. He is committed to teaching players how to play golf in the present moment, free from excessive tension, and with unwavering fearlessness. Dr. Sverduk lives with his wife Diane, his daughter Emiko, and son Kaizo in Long Beach, California. He can be reached through his website: www.thepracticefix.com or by email:-