8 minute read
Mind/Body
TAMING THE TRASH TALKER IN YOUR HEAD
Get out of your own way and into the game.
Advertisement
By Kate Meyers
Tim Gallwey wrote The Inner Game of Tennis in 1974. The book, considered revolutionary at the time, dealt almost exclusively with the mental and emotional side of the game.
Five years later, Gallwey penned the The Inner Game of Golf. The resonance of its 213 pages is profound to anyone who has attempted hitting the dimpled ball with a big stick. How well we all know the many ways in which we are capable of mentally sabotaging our precious time on the golf course.
When I asked Tim to if he’d be willing to sit down with In Play and share some thoughts, he sent an email that said: “Maybe the hardest thing about golf is to truly enjoy the game and not measure yourself by your score or quality of play. A round of golf can be enjoyable regardless of performance. It can also be a valuable learning experience in self-awareness. The key skill to master is nonjudgmental attention. This skill can minimize the spoilers of enjoyment and learning as well as performance. The biggest obstacles are not sand traps, lakes or woods but the ones in your own head. This applies to all levels.”
Well said, sir! Here, in his words, are a few tidbits to help you clean the mental slate for the season ahead.
SELF 1, SELF 2 AND SELF-DOUBT
Most golfers have a conversation with themselves as they play—before or after they hit a shot. Who is talking to whom?
I call one part Self 1; that’s the controller/critic that tells you how to play golf and gives you feedback. And depending on how conscious of a game you’re playing, it is calling you names. Self 2 is the one that’s hitting the ball.
But which one is smarter? The one that says keep your left arm stiff or the one that’s issuing hundreds of instructions to diff erent muscle groups to even move your club back, keep it on plane, connect with the ball, follow through?
This is a very complex, coordinated system. The only problem is, it doesn’t speak English, or whatever your language is.
Golfers have very little idea of how they got their best shots. They’ll say, “It felt smooth, in balance, in rhythm.” Over-instructing the body is ego’s attempt to control you. What you have, in my understanding, is a 10-cent computer telling a billion-dollar computer how to play golf.
The value I fi nd in recognizing this internal dialogue is that it allows a person to separate himself or herself from the undermining voice of self-doubt. Most of us would not put up with someone speaking to us the way Self 1 does, but for some reason when the voice of self-doubt is coming from our own head, we fi nd it harder to ignore.
I’m not going to try to quiet that voice because I’ll lose that battle, but I am going to focus my attention away from it and onto the dimple of the ball, for example. That draws my attention away from the voice. With practice, the voice gives up.
Relaxed concentration is the key to excellence in all things. You ask an Olympic champion what they were thinking about when they had that goldmedal performance, and they’ll say they weren’t thinking at all. They were too focused. Make practice of focus priority over results.
NONJUDGMENTAL OBSERVATION
The next question COMPUTER HOW becomes: What do you TO PLAY GOLF.” do with the multiplicity of swing thoughts that you bring to the course with you? You translate them from behavioral instructions—what your body should do—to awareness instructions. Imagine the person thinking about putting: “I’ve got to take my club back and follow through the same amount.”
Instead try to feel the length of your back stroke; know where your club is at the moment it stops going back and starts going forward. Be aware of that moment. Be aware of where your clubface fi nishes. Be aware of the angle, rather than trying to keep it fl at.
Observe yourself without judgment. If you observe, “I took my club too far,” it’s not going to help you. If you observe, “I took my club 15° past parallel, so next time I’ll take it 10°,” that will help you. Go for an
observation that’s as exact as possible and trust your body to make the change. If you judge, then you will try to correct … and you’ll be back in the same Self 1 control loop with a little voice telling you how to fi x everything. Why predict that you’re going to do whatever is bad again after one time and try to correct it? It’s like micromanaging an employee or a parent with their kid, correcting every little detail—not fun. But it’s a thrill to see the body correct itself. It gives you the kind of confi dence that is real, not another magical secret to the perfect golf game.
PUTTING AWARENESS DRILL
There’s a practical game you can play when you practice putting. You hit the ball without looking where it goes. Before you look, you IF YOU JUDGE, THEN guess: Will it go right or left of the hole, YOU WILL TRY TO CORRECT … AND short or long, and by how much? At fi rst you’ll fi nd YOU’LL BE BACK IN THE SAME SELF you’re not very accurate. But in this game, the goal is not to sink 1 CONTROL LOOP WITH A LITTLE VOICE the putt. The goal is to be accurate in knowing where the ball went. TELLING YOU HOW TO The main way to do that is by feel. You feel FIX EVERYTHING.” for distance and feel for direction. Once you can be accurate and guess more or less correctly, you then say, “How did I guess that? How did I know? What was the clue that told me it went right?” It had something to do with the way the ball came off the club. It had something to do with the direction, etc. That’s where you put your attention. I could feel the ball spinning right when it came off my clubface. Do it again to see if there’s more spin, the same or less. Within a minute, you’ll be consistently hitting with less side spin. The body makes the correction.
SWINGING AWARENESS DRILL
I did a segment for 60 Minutes in which I taught a woman to play tennis in just 20 minutes. I had her just play and say “bounce” out loud whenever the ball bounced and “hit” whenever it hit her racket.
We would have such long rallies that I’d have to hit harder. She never retreated. She attacked the ball; her form was great. So what started as an exposé became a discovery. If you get rid of the tension and ego of Self 1, then Self 2—the great computerized body—will do better.
The golf equivalent of “bounce-hit” is “back-hitstop.” Say “back” the moment you can feel the club head at the back of the swing; “hit” the moment it makes contact; and “stop” the moment the followthrough is complete.
Keep in mind that “back,” “hit” and “stop” are nouns, not verbs, in this exercise. It doesn’t mean take your club back or hit the ball. “Hit” is a moment of observation in which your club is making contact with the ball. It’s not a command; it’s an observation.
The “stop” is especially useful. It keeps you from looking up, from staying in the swing until it’s fi nished. Mainly, it puts you in the observation mode rather than the “try to do it right” mode.
DON’T PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN THE PERFORMANCE BASKET
It’s also important to remember or rethink the reason why you play golf in the fi rst place. It is easy to say, “I’m going out to enjoy a day on the golf course,” yet relatively few people actually do. Their enjoyment level is totally hooked into their results—hole to hole, shot to shot and certainly the score at the end.
My mother used to be able to tell my dad what he shot within fi ve seconds of him walking into the living room from having played. It was all over his face.
Performance is not the only game in town. Why not learn consciously while you perform? What was your enjoyment level today and where do you want it? What’s getting in the way of it?
There are three components with three results: performance, enjoyment and learning. It’s not all three eggs in the same performance basket, which makes you feel bad when you do badly and not interested in learning.
If you spread your eggs around, you’re more likely to have a better performance because you’re putting less pressure on yourself. You’ll also have more awareness because you’ll be in a learning mode. You’ll feel things that you don’t feel when you’re in a judgmental frame of mind.
Another good question to ask in preparation for the season is: What can I learn playing golf that would be valuable to me, besides golf? Focusing my attention, trusting myself, not reacting to every mistake, not judging myself, becoming more aware of what I’m doing. All those are inner skills that, unlike golf skills, relate to almost anything you do.
That’s the purpose of the game: Take something that doesn’t really count where you can practice things that really do.
