Speaker 1: Hi, This is Ed Mumford from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I
play at historic Ellis Park golf course here in Cedar Rapids.
This is golf Smarter number nine sixty nine.
Speaker 2: You must know this, and I'm sure your listeners know
this from their own experience. When somebody takes a practice swing,
it can be beautiful, effortless, fluid, perfectly balanced, lovely follow through,
and literally seconds later when they step up to the
ball for real to hit the shot, everything goes wrong.
And of course the mainstream industry wants to fix that
from the outside in saying, oh, you didn't do this,
and you didn't do that, and all about technique. But
if you take notice of yourself in your practice swing,
maybe you're breathing deeply, maybe you're balanced properly, Maybe your
shoulders are empty and relaxed. Maybe you're not clenching your jaw,
maybe you're not gripping that four iron two tight, And
then what changes in you? What changes in the golfer
when you step up to hit the ball for real.
Because the golf swing is only ever an outward manifestation
of whatever's going on in the golfer.
Speaker 3: Lack of awareness leads to increased tension which leads to
poor results. With Jane's story, this.
Speaker 1: Is Golf Smurder, sharing stories, tips and insights from great
golf mindes to help you lower your score and raise
your golf IQ.
Speaker 3: Here's your host, Fred Green. Welcome back to the Golf
Smurder Podcast.
Speaker 2: Jane, Hello, Fred, it's great to see you again, and
thank you very much for asking me back.
Speaker 3: Absolutely in your book came out, I've got to have
you back on because we always like to go deep
into this conversation that we've had multiple times, but it
continues to develop as your writings continue to develop. Tell
us about the new book.
Speaker 2: Well, just to put what you've said in context, I
was looking at a book that I wrote in twenty eighteen,
twenty nineteen, which is Breathe Golf, and I was reading
a chapter trying to put together a newsletter, and I thought, well, actually,
if I wrote this chapter again now, I would approach
it slightly differently because, yeah, my understanding and my insights
I suppose from my own daily practice, they continue to develop.
So it's a journey that doesn't stop. And I have
students and readers who've told me that they've read my
previous books maybe six times, and that they understand and
more about what I'm trying to convey with my message,
the more they commit to their own daily performance practice.
So it's quite interesting. This new book. He asked me
to hold it up, So here it is. It's called
The athletes Ascent, and it's all about the relationship between
deep practice and high performance.
Speaker 3: And it's available now.
Speaker 2: It is available now. It's on audio Kindle and also
on paperback.
Speaker 3: Did you read the audio book?
Speaker 2: I did. I read everything.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, oh great, great. Now you mentioned you mentioned
the journey a moment ago. Yes, what's the destination?
Speaker 2: I think it's greater self awareness and self understand And
I don't mean that on an ego level or a
personality level, but I mean something deeper than that. And
it is a journey that doesn't stop, but a more
self awareness. And I think this is so important because
we're so caught up in technology and devices and this
AI which I don't use on my zoom calls. I
think there's a whole danger of going down human intelligence
rather than allowing us to expand our intelligence and our
gifts and our potential. But there's a there's a lack
of self awareness. For instance, I had to go to
the bank earlier. There is one surviving bank in the
town al because they all the others close. But when
I walked back, I was behind a lady, a young
young woman, and she had a baby, a tiny baby
in a like a cot that she was carrying in
one arm, but she had her phone in the other hand,
so she was paying more attention to the phone, and
the baby was kind of dangling, and the angle at
which she was holding it, you know, I was looking
the baby had like a strap across it, but she
has She had no awareness of the baby. It was
all in the phone.
Speaker 3: Hmmm.
Speaker 2: And this is the sort of narrowing and dumbing down
of the human condition and the journey the destination is
to reclaim one's attention and to develop greater self awareness.
Speaker 3: I may push back on dumbing down. I put it
more of a distraction, yeah, than dumbing down, because the
amount of information that's at our fingertips at any given
moment is far superior than we've ever had in history.
So I'm not sure if I would use dumbing down
in that sense, But correct me if you see it
a different way.
Speaker 2: I suppose it depends on what arena. I mean, information, yes,
is great. Information for its own sake is not so good.
And communication yeah. But let's say for golfers and this new,
but the athletes are centers. For tennis players, skiers, swim
as all sports. Knowing more and more about technique, having
more information does not enable one to be a greater athlete.
In fact, that is a hindrance. So it really depends
on the area that we're speaking about. Having. You know,
my speciality, I guess my obsession through my life has
been the performance of complex movement like the golf swing
or the tennis serve. And it's only when the mind
is quiet that the body can perform in the way
that it really wants to naturally.
Speaker 3: And the phone is definitely not helping your mind get quiet.
Speaker 2: No, not at all. I think it's doctor Izzy Justice.
I think it's him. He's a neuroscientist.
Speaker 3: I believe we've had him on the show.
Speaker 2: Have you. Yes, A lot of students am interested in
his work. I'm more about the practice of meditation than
studying the neuroscience of it. But anyway, I think it's easy.
Who said that the mind of teenagers and young people
now would be considered a schizophrenic mind back in the
nineteen fifties and sixties. Yeah, yeah, interesting scrolling through and
having more and more bite sized chunks of information. But anyway,
maybe are we getting we.
Speaker 3: Go ahead?
Speaker 2: It is something to consider when people come to read
my books. So we've got Breathe Golf Connected Golf, and
now the athletes are sent and many people wish to
be quieter inside, and they wish to quiet in the
mind and take up this journey of self awareness and
self exploration. And the way they come to it often
is that they've used a fullness app. But I do
try to wean people off that and put the phone away,
put the device away, and just sit quietly with yourself.
So maybe it's that that's that's kind of missing, you know,
from human society.
Speaker 3: It's interesting. I've recently been using an electric caddy during
my rounds of golf, and I've been testing two different
units out and one of them has a screen on
it that gives me relevant information to my golf game.
But also it's Bluetooth enabled, so my messages and emails
and phone calls pop up on the screen, and I've
had to turn that off. I just found it too
distracting to be able to focus on my game. And
it's like, I don't I don't want to. I mean, like,
if it's something from my wife or my children, sure
I want to know about it right now, but they'll
get in touch with me. But all the other stuff
was just noise and I really was not thrilled with it.
Speaker 2: Well, it's interesting you say that because I was talking
to a PGA pro at one of the local clubs
here and he said that as pros now they're advised
to put their scores they're around on an app on
the phone. Yeah, And he said every time he takes
his phone out of his pocket there's a work email
or something from his wife and the children or you know,
it's distracting, and he didn't want to do it. He
wanted to have a card and a pencil and write
his scores down.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: You get into your own habits too, You get into
the way you do things and you're comfortable with them,
and again it's a distraction.
Speaker 2: Yeah for sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So.
Speaker 3: This book, athletes Assent, goes beyond just your first two
books were golf related, and now you're taking it out
of a broader scope to athletes. That's right, I've been
is that because you're working with a more diverse group
of athletes just golfers.
Speaker 2: Yes, I've always worked with athletes from many different sports
right from the beginning, but it seemed that it was,
you know, eighty percent of or seventy or eighty percent
of those students or clients were golfers. So I decided
to concentrate on Breathe golf and connected golf to start with.
So breathe golf is really about quietening the mind with
formal traditional meditation practice, because when the mind is quiet,
the body can move more freely, and there is a
connection between the meditative state and getting in flow. And
then Connected golf was about my lifelong experience in the
martial arts, particularly tai Chi, which I've practiced since nineteen
eighty seven, and it was about certain principles of movement,
fundamental movement principles from tai chi that apply to golf,
but exploring that for other athletes. It was quite a
natural jump because a lot of people think when they
take up golf they have to learn a whole new
set of movements, and I think that can be I
do think that's quite true. I think a lot of
people over complicate golf. In fact, I've heard of some
experts who divide the golf swing, which is one point
eight seconds of movement, they divide that into a hundred
different moves. So here we're back to, you know, too
much information. But it's interesting the timing of the book
because we've seen tennis players who retire and take up
golf and they're brilliant at it. I mean, if you
ever seen Martina and Nevratlova's golf swing, I mean, it's fantastic.
Roughly on Nadal now Andy Murray. You know. So there
are fundamental movement skills which are common across all sports,
and of course we can train those movements in the
martial arts particularly, and then apply those movements that we've
learned to whatever sport we're doing. And in fact, never
at a lovers. She said at one point that an athlete,
a true athlete, should be able to turn their hand
to any sport. So you can ski, you can swim,
you can play tennis, you can shoot or whatever. It
seems quite right to me, wouldn't you say.
Speaker 3: There are some athletes that do pick up golf quite
naturally and they're incredible at it. And then there are
some like we've had this Charles Barkley, you know, fiasco
watching him play golf and how difficult it is, and
it's like, why is this not a coordinated movement? You
would think that athletes can just transition into golf as
a life sport that they can continue playing and as
social as well as just being a sport, but also
the social element to it. You'd see that it's an
easy transition for them.
Speaker 2: To Michael Jordan take up golf as well.
Speaker 3: Oh, Michael Jordan is an incredible golfer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: And Steph Curry is you know, yeah, Steph Curry has
tried to play on the minor circuit. He played in
the web dot com. But you know, he talks about
once he's finished playing golf playing basketball professionally, the golf
is his next step. Yeah, yeah, Michael Jordan. But Michael
Jordan is a serious gambler, so like he'll he'll play
rounds of golf for one hundred thousand dollars and probably more.
We've heard rumors as such.
Speaker 2: Didn't Phil Michelson go down that route at one time
as well?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Well golf's a gambling game. I mean, yeah,
for many people, that's the start. Yeah, very funny. How
was the response to your first two books? And is
that what motivates you to continue to write and write
a new book?
Speaker 2: The response is, I suppose it's a bit like well,
I was trying to think of a comparison, like say
Joni Mitchell, she sort of complained early in her career
that her records weren't selling and she wasn't mainstream, But
then on reflection she's like, well, actually I didn't want
to be a human jukebox, you know. And her stuff
is positioned slightly outside of the mainstream. Absolutely, And I
would say my work is the same. It's always very
well received, but it's not why I do what I do.
I do what I do because it's been a lifelong
fascination of mine. I was very shy, very introverted when
I was a child and a young woman. In fact,
even until I was in my mid thirties, I was
very shy, very introverted, and I you know, I've spent
a long time overcoming that. So I understand when people
are nervous. I understand what performance anxiety is all about
and I've been trying to write about that from my
experience of meditation and the martial arts and going beyond
this psychological approach, the mental game approach, which has been
around for the last fifty years. So I'm trying to
bring something new. But yeah, my books are very well received.
I mean, they've got four and a half stars and
new one's got five stars on Amazon. Curcula. Well, yeah,
but you know it's not it's not it's not everybody's
cup of tea because not everybody can do what I'm
what I'm suggesting they do, or I would.
Speaker 3: Want to, right, right, But we want to make this
relevant to golfers today. But I'm now I'm curious to
ask you about your shyness and introversion. How you how
you feel like you did come out. I consider myself
an outgoing introvert, okay, right, so that if you put
me in a situation where I know people, you know,
in a group situation and I know the people, I'm
I'm quite outgoing. But if you put me in a
group situation where I don't know people but maybe my
wife knows everybody there, but I you know, which is
regularly the case that she knows a lot more people
that I do. But I'll find myself just being to
my myself. If I don't walk up to people and
start chatting and things.
Speaker 2: It's you know, I suppose the teaching is what brought
me out of myself. Yeah, I was asked, you know,
around I don't know, maybe nineteen ninety five, ninety seven.
I was asked by some of my friends if I
show them some tai chi moves. So I hired a
little hall and I started showing them a bit of
tai chi. And yeah, I can remember so many times
in my life where things were difficult or I had
to move house, or relationship broke up, or even you know,
when I when I would lose people. I've lost my
mom and dad, I've lost my best friend, another friend.
But driving to a class, this is all pre COVID
days because now everything's on zoom. But driving to a class,
even if I was felt worried or anxious about something
in myself or upset, it was all about teaching, you know.
It was all for that. So that's really what's brought
me out of myself. But I have a practice, and
that is what I'm trying to bring to people as
a daily performance practice based on traditional ways and traditional
methods of seated meditation, standing meditation, slow motion exercises, breeding exercises,
self awareness, self observation, all of these things. So I
practice what I preach, and all of that helps. I
can still be introverted, but I can speak about my
subject right right.
Speaker 3: Interesting the slow motion, especially in golf. I was introduced
to it early in the podcast series and found it
incredibly difficult to do a practice golf swing, not when
I'm on the golf course, but just when I'm practicing,
to try to slow the swing down, to break it
down to you know, a slow motion golf swing. I
found it to be so challenging.
Speaker 2: It is very challenging. And I ask people to take
thirty seconds and I time them, and they'll start off
quite slowly, and then they kind of whizz through it,
and maybe they've taken eight or twelve seconds in thirty seconds.
Speaker 3: I can imagine.
Speaker 2: But what's It's the approach that needs to be slightly
different with a slow motion golf swing, so you're not
necessarily you don't necessarily have to look at the swing.
What's interesting about the slow motion swing is to find
where is movement initiated from? How does this movement begin?
Not what I've been told, but in my own body,
in my own intention. How does this movement begin? And
what continues that movement? If I turn too far? Do
I lose the structure in my lower body? If I
don't separate my upper body from my lower body? I e.
If I turn my hips too far? When does my
knee start to buckle and my legs start to collapse inwards?
Am I gripping the club too tightly? Do I pause
at the top? Do I compress? Do I empty my
body at the top? Do I see that my thoughts
are going all over the place. So there's so much
to learn by observing oneself, because you must know this,
and I'm sure your listeners know this from their own experience.
And I've stood behind golfers watched them. When somebody takes
a practice swing, it can be beautiful, effortless, fluid, perfectly balanced,
lovely follow through, and literally twenty seconds later, when they
step up to the ball for real to hit the shot,
everything goes wrong. And of course the mainstream industry wants
to fix that from the outside in saying, oh, you
didn't do this, and you didn't do that, and blah
blah blah, all about technique. But if you, if you
take notice of yourself in your practice swing, maybe you're
breathing deeply, maybe you're balanced properly, Maybe your shoulders are
empty and relaxed. Maybe you're not clenching your jaw, maybe
you're not gripping that you know, four iron two tight
or whatever it is. And then what changes in you?
What changes in the golfer when you step up to
hit the ball for real? Because the swing, the golf
swing is only ever an outward manifestation of whatever's going
on in the golfer. Surely you don't suddenly forget everything
you know about technique. Do you two great practice swings,
step up to the ball. Oh god, it all goes wrong?
Why is that? You know? And that's really what I'm
when I'm trying to answer in my books.
Speaker 3: So I do want to talk about this book because
I've been enjoying reading it and there's some things that
jumped out to me that I wanted to pursue with
you even deeper. And that's even early on in the book.
You say, the harder you try, and the more act
of your mind, the more disjointed or disconnected your movements become.
Speaker 2: Yes, I do say that you did.
Speaker 3: I want you to talk about that.
Speaker 2: About that, I think when people have had a wonderful
experience of being in the flow state, and I know
that I've had that experience in meditation, in running when
I was a bit younger, in swimming, walking through the park,
and people I'm sure listening have had that experience in golf.
When that experience arises, the mind is invariably quiet and
there's a beautiful connection between the mind and the body,
which is what these Eastern practices that I'm encouraging people
to develop in a daily performance practice is what they're
all about. For instance, when you sit in meditation, you
are aware of your breathing, but that subtly changes your
posture and it quietens the mind. So in the East,
they don't have the mind in one camp and the
body in another camp as we do here. There's your psychologist,
your mentor game coach, there's your technical coach. In the East,
in karate, in kung fu, in swordsmanship, in calligraphy, in
the tea ceremony in Japan, in archery, they would think
that's absolutely ludicrous. So if we wish to bring the
mind and the body together, we need to quieten the
mind because it wants to take over. It just wants.
It thinks it's playing golf, and really it isn't. So
the mind has one job and the body has a
different job. The mind is for the thinking mind. The
analytical mind is for thinking, organizing, processing, ticking things off
your to do list, analyzing your swing when you're on
the range perfect. But when you want to release your
swing in an effortless way in the middle of a game,
that analytical mind must be subdued so that the signal
about or the intention that you have for the shot,
the signal is not captured by the pre front to
a cortex which wants to analyze and get it right
and have this list of things that you need. You
need to accomplish in order to get that shot, because
in the flow state, it's just going to happen. You
balance perfectly, you're moving perfectly. Lower body is nice and stable,
the upper body is fluid, You hit perfectly, you accelerate
through the shot. Everything's great. So it's all about My
work is all about creating that ideal performance state before
you start moving, and part of that is to quieteren
the mind.
Speaker 3: And I'm curious because you even mentioned before that, you know,
the golf swing is one point eight seconds. In the mind,
there's there's during that time, there's a lot of we
put a lot of pressure on ourselves. We tighten our bodies.
We're not as loose as we should be because we're
because you only get this one shot to you know,
to hit this ball the way you want, you know
to hopefully you have intention in this shot and you
follow through on that intention. But then afterwards, so quieting
the mind there is one point. But the other part
is afterwards, as you're going to the shot is complete
and you're going to your ball for the next one,
there's a lot of noise in your mind then too,
and that's minutes worth. It creates more tension and more
pressure on you for the next shot.
Speaker 2: That's how the majority of people approach golf. But there
is a different way to approach it.
Speaker 3: Awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So if you have a daily performance practice, let's
say you develop a performance practice of fifteen to twenty minutes.
Can be longer, but let's say let's say fifteen to
twenty minutes to start with where you sit quietly and
you follow your breathing, just like the Buddhist monks do,
quietly aware of the center of the body, aware of
your posture, seeing the thoughts come coming back to your breathing.
No gimmicks, no gadgets, no aps, just you and your breathing.
Or you practice standing meditation, so you become keenly aware
of your body and your posture, your balance. Maybe you
practice slow walking, maybe you do breathing exercises, Maybe you
practice intentional self awareness. Maybe you build up a practice
which contains some of all of these things, and then
maybe you go on to develop a specific organization of
these practice. Before tournaments, you might have rest days, like
when I've worked with tour players, they'll have seated meditation
on days that they're traveling, but days that they're competing
they'll ramp up their practice and do maybe standing like
chigun training. So therefore, instead of your mind, you know,
deconstructing the shot and thinking of all the things that
went wrong and all the things that you can fix.
When you're walking down the fairway, you can open yourself
to nature, be aware of your surroundings, have some kind
of joy and gratitude, for being out there, become more
self aware. Reflect. Okay, so my shoulders were a bit
tight last time I rushed. I need to slow down.
My mind was too busy. So rather than criticizing the
golf swing and saying this was wrong, that was wrong.
I've got to fix that. Rather become intentionally self aware,
curious about your own self. Did I rush? Was I
balanced properly? Was I in my center? Because there's all
there's There's a beautiful quote that I've put in the
athletes's ascent, which is from a tai Chi master Master
Kai spelled c Ai master Kai, and it's about when
we are aware, we are relaxed. As soon as I've
become self aware, I tend to I relax and maybe
you have to practice that for some time. But awareness
is I'm aware of my body. I'm comfortably in my body,
and my body is relaxed. And if I stay with that,
then my chest empties, the shoulders relax. Now I'm breathing
down into my lower abdomen, and so it goes. Lack
of awareness leads to tension. Lack of awareness is my
thoughts are now taking over. I'm thinking about what I'm
going to do. When I get up to this ball,
all the things that my coach told me, all the
things that I've got to fix. I've got to keep
my head down, I've got to turn more through the ball.
I've got to shift my weight, I've got to do this,
I've got to do that. So really, what I'm advocating
is a different game. It's the same game, but it's
a different approach to the game.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, it's the same game, but it's a very different
approach because then it's not just when you're on the
practice range and not when you're just on the golf course.
It's a life practice exactly exactly.
Speaker 2: And this is what makes it so seamless, because you're
doing the same practices in the morning in your lounge
or your office or wherever, drive into the golf club,
standing over the ball, walking down the fairway at home
with your partner. In the evening. It's the same thing.
And this is what makes it so powerful, because you're
building up reserves of attention, of awareness, of inner relaxation,
of calm. It's a lifetime deal. Yes, for sure.
Speaker 3: There's so many professional athletes. We'll talk about professional athletes
that you've worked with, are young people. I mean, at
most they're in their early thirties, right, and with the
success that they've had throughout their lives to get them
to a point of being a professional athlete, which is
elite status right there, they're pretty I don't want to
say cocky or arrogant about what they do and how
they do it, but they probably think they have all
the answers. So I'm just curious as to the resistance
that you get from them for trying to do a
life practice on something that will slow their energy down
and you know, center.
Speaker 2: It that well, yeah, it is. It is tricky because
the ego often gets in the way. Yeah, yeah, it
really does. And I'm not going to give any names,
of course, but I have worked people and taken them
from Q school, you know, right up to winning majors
and being part of elite teams in the space of
two or three seasons. And then of course they think,
oh I've got that, now I know everything, and you know,
they decide that they can carry on on their own,
and in the last season, their whole game's just you know,
gone south. So we do have to be very careful.
And I mean I've had a lot of teachers in
my life. I have been practicing for a very long time,
and I practice every day, and I think it's important
for people, you know, if they're going to talk about
meditation in any way, shape or form, that they have
a practice other why and most people don't, you know,
Otherwise it becomes a psychological approach, which is as I
said a bit earlier, this is, you know, people have
approached the flow state or the zone as a psychological state.
Mostly people talk about a focused you know, a focused
mental state, and it really isn't a focused mental state.
We need to find different words for it. A student
of mine earlier today he coined a term. He said
it was a mixture of awareness and intuition. Other people
talk about a sense of knowing and knowing, and another
person recently has talked about a faith and a belief
that they can make that shot. So it is not
a mental focus. But unless one has a performance as
a daily practice of quieting the mind, it's very difficult
to understand that, which is why I said at the beginning.
You know, if I wrote my Breathe golf again, I'd
write it differently because I've had, you know, another eight
years of practice on top of that, not to say
that it's not totally valid still, because it is and
why people read the books again and again and again, which.
Speaker 3: Is a beautiful thing. Congratulations, Oh, thank you.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of works gone into it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. I mean, my wife wrote
a book and everyone keeps saying so when you're writing
your next one, she's like, I can't do another one.
So the fact that you've done three now is on
this topic is pretty remarkable, Pretty remarkable, indeed. Congratulations. Yeah,
let's talk about stillness. And I'm just going to open
the door like that, because you know, I've had other
golf instructors talk about stillness in the body, in the
mind and the swing, you know, leading up to the swing.
But I want to I want to get your take
on stillness, especially your line about stillness is the master
of motion. It's so powerful.
Speaker 2: That's a line from the tai Chi classics where they
say stillness is the master of motion, and it is
if you apply it to golf. As I've said and
I've written about most golf coaches, most people deconstruct the
golf swing after the golfer has performed the golf swing.
So all the coaches will say, oh, you didn't do this,
or you didn't do that properly, or you forgot that,
or this wasn't right or that wasn't right, and they
try to tinker with the swing as if it was
a machine with so many moving parts. Well, fiddle with this,
we'll tighten that screw, we'll loosen that, will change that.
And as I've said many times, it's the quality of
the setup, the quality of this relaxed readiness that I
talk about. Like a kung fu warrior would have a
sense of relaxed readiness in the body before they deliver
a puncture fight or whatever. The same in archery, a
relaxed readiness in golf up tightness and a checklist, you know,
which is where where most people approach it from. But stillness,
like everything else. I mean, people can talk about it,
but to train it, to practice it, or to actually
find it in oneself, you may need to go through
a period of weeks or months or longer to quiet
and down all the stuff that goes on, all the noise,
as you've mentioned noise before, all that chatter. You know,
it's behind underneath all that chatter. It's not in the chatter.
Speaker 3: It's interesting because I loved how you use the word
you find it. It's not like a manifestation or you
cannot create it. You have to find it.
Speaker 2: Yes, and you do. And also when is very very subtle,
because if somebody says I'm going to quiet in my mind,
I'm going to sit in meditation, I'm going to quiet
in my mind, it's not quite the right way of
articulating what actually happens I sit in meditation. If I
bring my awareness continually back to my breathing, my mind
will quiet and down. There's a completely different way of
expressing it based on having a practice, rather than people
saying it's a highly focused mental you know, form of
mental attention or mental focus. So in my books and
with my students and clients, I really try to get
people to express what is it that you mean? What
do you mean? What is the right word to use
for this? Because it makes a big difference.
Speaker 3: It really does. And I can imagine there's people listeners
who are like, yeah, this that's not for me, you know,
but it might be it could be for you. But
you gotta try it. You gotta start with the first step.
Speaker 2: I think in years to come, maybe long after I'm
dead and gone, I think it will be where athletes are.
It has to be because if everybody in the Eastern world,
that all the taie chee guys, all the kung fu guys,
all the karate guys, all the samurai warriors, all the
archers on horseback, all of these traditions, Zen, Buddhism, calorie,
the amazing Indian martial art, they're all based on intention.
And the body trained in this a way that's relaxed
but ready, so it can respond to intention. But in
sport it's here's the psychologist, a mental going to go,
here's the technical coach. These guys don't talk to each other.
So in the golfer, the mine is doing one thing
and the book the mind's trying to direct, and the
body cannot follow because it's not meant to the mind
is not meant to direct movement. Which is not to
say that we cannot have an intention for movement. But
intent is not the same as thinking. In fact, her
type Grandmaster, a woman in this country and a Chinese
lady who lives in the north of England. She at
once explained it as having for intent. Pure intent must
have the mind must be so quiet to have a
very clear intention to which the body can then respond.
So it's definitely a journey, and it definitely isn't for
everybody right now, but maybe in the future it will
be just the way things will develop. I hope so,
because so many of my students and clients get that
tremendous amount of joy from their golf and their sport,
but also from their practice. People who resist and resist,
and then after a few weeks or months, they're like,
I can't wait to sit in meditation because it's the
only silence that they have in the whole day.
Speaker 3: Oh, wouldn't it be wonderful if joy was a major
part of our golf life, because so much of it
is frustration and anger and intention. If we can just
introduce and keep joy in our game, Oh, that would
be wonderful. Tell us one more time the name of
the book and where we can find it, and your website.
Speaker 2: The book is The Athletes Are Cent, and you can
get it online or you can order it from your
favorite bookstore. My website is chi Dash Performance. I'm sure
you're going to put a link there.
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I've now been in my business for twenty years
and I've put together all the material I've ever written,
recorded and filmed for golfers, so there's a whole package there,
a golf performance program, and I've also put together a
performance practice guide for golf and sports. So if you
want to dip your toe in the water and learn
a little bit and build up a daily practice, then
there's also something there for you. And I have a
blog on there that goes back I don't know, fifteen
years or something, so there's tons of material on there.
Speaker 3: Jane, it's always a joy education when we get a
chance to speak. It's so great to see you again.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me back, grat.
Speaker 3: I want you to stay tuned over the next few
weeks because we're getting ready to announce the details of
our five round Golf Smarter adventure to the Robert Trent
Jones Trail in Alabama, coming up during the last weekend
of March twenty twenty five. So make sure your calendars
are free now because we'll only have space for three foursomes.
Details on that will be coming up soon. I'm not
sure you'll agree with me on this one, but I'm
a firm believer that golf doesn't need to be made
any harder than it already is, and that, like guys
on the tour, most of our second shots should be
with an eight iron or less. Well, I look at
the rating and slope to determine which tease I'm going
to play. I generally don't pay attention to the total yardage,
so I usually play from the white tees. I probably
picked that up from one of my many conversations with
Terry Kaylor, and this Friday on Golf Smarter Mulligans, we'll
go back to a full episode from our Short Game
Academy series with the Wedge Guy.
Speaker 4: If you're playing the right tees for your skill level
and your distance, you're gonna hit seventy to seventy five
percent of your shots inside nine nine range. Do you
give that seventy five percent of your practice time? If not,
that's one part of your problem now. Nineteen forty nine,
Ben Hogan in his book said the maximum distance of
a sand wedge is forty yards. I was with a
group of golfers last night that ranged from seven to
eighteen handicap, and the average person there said they hit
their sand wedge routinely eighty and eighty five yards. I said, really, well,
then you must be twice as good as Ben Hogan
hit his over forty. What we have in our bag
that we call wedges are very short range golf clubs
twenty to twenty five yard golf clubs, but we use
them in a full swing environment today. So the fact
that you have distance control issues may not really be
your fault. It may be the tools. I suspect because
you're a new golfer. There's also some technique and probably
some time issues there, but the third element of that
is the tools, and if you don't have the right
tools in your bag, you're not going to have good
distance control.
Speaker 3: Episode three hundred and fifty eight was originally for members only,
so it's the first time we've ever shared it publicly.
You'll definitely want to check this one out. In this
episode from November twenty twelve, Terry answers more listener questions
about their short game. I want to thank this week's
Golf Smarter Ambassador, Ed Mumford from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who
chose to receive Tony Manzoni's Lost Fundamental video just for
opening today's episode. Ed plays at the historic Ellis Park
golf course in Cedar Rapids, which is nearly one hundred
years old. Now you have multiple ways to become a
golf Smarter ambassad You can record a show opening on
your phone like Ed did, or record it on our
toll free Golf Smarter listener line and choose one of
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