Speaker 1: Stay tuned to the end of the episode for an
important update. This is Dennis for no in Australia.
Speaker 2: I'll play at Long Island Golf Club here in Melbourne
and welcome to golf sad not eight one. I think
another way to understand mindfulness, especially with respect to sports,
is a soft openness. You don't want to be focused
tightly on any particular thing because then you're oblivious to
everything else around it. So let me give a different
sport as an example. I'm on horseback and I'm racing
through the woods. If I say to myself, watch out
for the branches so I don't get knocked off the horse.
So I'm vigilant. I'm focusing on those branches. Now as
I ride through the woods, I may stumble over a
boulder because I was not paying attention to anything but
the branches. So mindfulness is different from vigilance. When you're vigilant,
you have a particular stimulus in mind. When you're mindful,
you're just there.
Speaker 1: A mindful golfer needs a mindful body, as explained by
the mother of mindfulness, doctor Ellen Langer.
Speaker 2: This is Golf Smarter, sharing stories, tips and insights from
great Golf minds to help you lower your score and
raise your golf IQ. Here's your host, Fred Green.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Golf Smarter podcast.
Speaker 2: Ellen, Hi, Fred, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: It's great to have you on the show. You know,
Golf Smarter clearly now that we're in our twentieth year
of doing this podcast, the intention always was about mindfulness
in golf, and you know, I've always felt that if
you understand strategy and you understand how to control your
emotions on the golf course, you can be a better
player than just working on your swing mechanics. And a
lot of golf instructors have agreed with that. And as
someone who's more of a student than an instructor, I'm
not an instructor. I'm here to learn from everybody. I'm
really excited to have you on the show today.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: So your work in mindfulness goes back decades and I'm
just curious how it ended up with.
Speaker 2: Golf because people like you have called me. You know
that you can do anything you're doing playing golf, eating
a sandwich, doing a podcast mindfully or mindlessly, and the
consequences of doing it mindfully as opposed to mindlessly are enormous.
And so it's relevant to virtually everything. There are things
about golf, you know. I use it as an example
when I'm teaching often because when students or anybody doesn't
successfully complete whatever they're trying to do, they often become frustrated.
And so I raise the simple question of if you
got a hole in one every time you swung the club,
would that be fun? And just think about it for
a second, people would realize, well, there's no game anymore.
So that when you recognize you can either do things
perfectly mindfully mindlessly or imperfectly mindlessly, I think then you
go a little easier on yourself. It's also you know
that I've done a lot of some writing and a
lot of talking about all sorts of sports, not just golf.
And the thing that people don't realize is there are
two general aspects to what you need to do. One
is off the course, the other is on the course.
You know, so that if you didn't sleep well, if
you had a fight with your spouse, all of those
things are going to clearly affect your golf. And learning
what mindfulness is all about will help you enormously off
the court, and then of course, and then on the course,
there are particular things one should be doing. You know,
with any sport, people tend to think they should do
it over and over and over again until they can
do it perfectly and make it second nature. And whenever
you hear yourself saying anything about second nature, recognize that
means you're being mindless. And so I was on this
television show decades ago with Tiger Wood's father, and so
when he was asked how did Tiger Woods get so
good that his father's practice practice practice, And then I
get on, I say, well, you know, practice often makes imperfect,
not perfect. If you're practicing to achieve the end of
not having to think about what you're doing, you're going
to lock yourself in and not be as good as
you can be. If when you practice, your intention is
each time to notice subtle difference is in what you're doing,
the outcome and so on, then the practice will help.
But sadly, when most of us are taught sports instruments
had to study for a test, you know that what
people think they should do is repeat it, repeat it,
repeat it as is so that they don't have to
think about it. And also, you know, why would you
want to do anything if you don't show up for it.
I gave a talk the other day. Then something occurred
to me that after doing this for so long, it
would surprise me that it took so long for me
to come to this. But it was a talk on happiness,
and what I realized was that can robots be happy?
And of course not well when we're being mindless. We're
no different from robots. So the answer to improved game,
the answer to improved health and increased happiness is to
be mindful. Now you should, now, Fred, ask me the question,
so what do you mean by mindfulness?
Speaker 1: Actually I just wrote that down.
Speaker 2: Okay, that was my next question. When people think of
mindfulness too often, they just think of meditation, and meditation
is not mindfulness. Meditation is a practice you undergo in
order to result in post meditative mindfulness. Mindfulness as we
study it is very different. It's not a practice. Essentially,
it's a way of being that follows almost directly from
the realization that uncertainty is the rule, not the exception.
Everything is always changing, Everything looks different from different perspectives,
So you can't know now. Parents, teachers, golf instructors tend
to speak in absolutes. Hold the club this way, do X,
Y or Z, and that's fine in certain circumstances, but
not in others. So one of the things the way
I try to bring this home to people is the
one thing I think everybody thinks they know is how
much is one plus one? So Fred, how much is
one plus one two? No, not always. If you add
one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry, one
plus one is one. You add one cloud plus one
cloud one plus one is one. The other day, somebody
sent me something where if you have one pizza and
you add one pizza, you have two pizzas. However, if
you have one lasagna and you add one lasagna, one
plus one is one. It's just a bigger lasagna. Now
beyond me that when you add one plus one to
get two, you're using a base ten number system. If
you were using a base two number now you don't
really have to understand anything deep about this, But if
you're using a base two number system, one plus one
would be written as ten. And what I'm fond of
saying now is the next time somebody asks you how
much is one plus one, you're going to know it depends.
And now you have choices. When you're mindful, you have choices.
When you're mindless, you don't. Again, you're responding more like
a rather robot. So you know you could say one, ten, two,
and probably other things as well. All right, So what
I found over decades now, forty five years of research,
sadly is that virtually all of us are mindless almost
all the time. We're not there. But when you're not there,
you're not there to know you're not there. But it's
clear to me that this is sadly true, and the
way to be there is very simple. So let's say
you are going to visit me at my house right now.
I'm in Dartmouth, mass You'd walk in, you wouldn't have
to practice anything. You've never been here before, so you
would notice things, right. You might notice a painting and
wonder if I did it in some books, see some
things that seem strange to you, say, you would be
being mindful, right, So when you're mindful, you're actively noticing
new things. Now when you think you know, So when
I asked you how much was one plus one? You
didn't do anything but just mindlessly answer to And now,
knowing that things change, you take a little more time
with it, only a few seconds more, and have a
choice in what you're doing. So all of his research
has shown me that by increasing our mindfulness, which means
essentially becoming more and more aware that we just don't know,
we don't have to feel bad about not knowing. Nobody
knows because things are always changing. That when we increase
this act of noticing, the neurons are firing, and it's
literally and figuratively enlivening very early research, we make elderly
people more mindfully, live longer. Everything is better. You know.
We have people performing symphonies, whether they're mindless or mindful,
record the piece, play it back for people who know
nothing about the study. Everybody, not everybody, but over ninety
percent of the people prefer the mindfully played piece. But
I'll go back to what I said to you before,
which is, if you're gonna be there, show up for it.
And especially when we're talking about a sport that you're
doing basically as recreation. You know, I don't think either
of us right now we're speaking to the tiger woods
of the world, and so if you're not going to
play golf mindfully, why be there? Now?
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be careful. Every time you ask me a question,
you already nailed me twice. So on the golf course,
when we're talking about mindfulness and being aware.
Speaker 2: Of what, well several things. So when you hold that
golf club, if you hold it exactly the way you
did the last time, you're not taking advantage of the
way your body has changed. You know, so that let's
say you slept a little funny in your right shoulder
hurts a tiny bit, but you're aware of it, then
you should change the way you're standing, the way you're swinging,
and so on. If you've played the course many times before,
you may attempt to play it the same way you
had the last you know, the last few times, but
now you're different. The weather is different, the course is
different because they're you know, even if they've just mowed
it the last time you played it probably wasn't exactly
the same. So you want to be present and notice
these subtle differences. I think that you know, and then
the game will of course be more fun. And when
you hit that golf ball and it's not a perfect shot,
so what you know that if it were perfect again
each time, there'd be no game. There a way I
explained this to people also. So remember you were a
little kid and you get in an elevator and you
try to press that button, you can't reach it, and
then a parent or some adult picks you up and
you press the button, and then the next time you're
a little old that you still can. Eventually you're in
the elevator, you press the button and you can reach it.
That's the end, right, When was the last time you
were excited about pressing a button in an elevator? All right?
So you know, that's another example of how we should
not be so frustrated with imperfection. And when you miss
a shot, there's more in a stroke. There's more information
there than if you hit it correctly. You know you
hit it correctly, you don't know where You're just lucky
that were you were aware of why you did what
you did. But if you screw up in some way,
there's lots to pay attention to, and that when you've
screwed up and you're now going to try to improve
the next stroke, you can't be sure why you screwed up,
but it doesn't matter. You can still make corrections. So
I'm not really a golfer I'm a tennis player, and
so I hit the ball, and let's say that it's
not a good it was a fine performance. Now, if
I say to myself, remember to bend your legs, even
if that bad stroke had nothing to do with whether
or not my legs were ben I'm still going to
set myself up to be better. And it's the same
for all sports.
Speaker 1: Sure. Sure, And you kind of dropped the word in
there in the last part of our conversation where you
said intention and where does that fall?
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, that's interesting. You know that when I say
be there for the event. You know, when you're mindful,
you are doing everything intentionally. You know, when you're a robot,
the past is determining what your present performance is going
to be. But I think you know, and I think
another way to understand mindfulness, especially with respect to sports,
is a soft openness. You know that you don't want
to be focused tightly on any particular thing because then
you're oblivious to everything else around it. So let me
give a different sport as an example. I'm on horseback
and I'm racing through the woods. If I say to myself,
watch out for the branch, the branches you know, so
I don't get knocked off the horse. So I'm vigilant.
I'm focusing on those branches. Now as I ride through
the woods, I may stumble over a boulder because I
was not paying attention to anything but the branches. So
my fullness is different from vigilance. When you're vigilant, you
have a particular stimulus in mind. When you're mindful, you're
just you know there in some sense.
Speaker 1: You've been doing this work for so many years, for decades.
Speaker 2: Since I was five, since five.
Speaker 1: It's actually when I started the podcast when I was fine,
and you've earned the name of the Mother of Mindfulness,
meaning I'm inferring that you were the first one to
start talking about mindfulness.
Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty much. What brought you to that point, Well,
it's a funny story. Actually when I before I moved
up to Cambridge to teach at Harvard, this was in
its nineteen seventy seven, I had the stereotype that everybody
in Cambridge was super smart if they were all at Harvard,
and as if everybody at Harvard was smart. And I
was coming from New York, where lots of people are
street smart, and I would notice things that in New York,
they just never happen. You know, how could these smart
people do these things? So this was a time where
banks closed at three o'clock and there were no cash machines. Okay,
so here you have parking at the bank. Now at
three o'clock, the bank isn't open, so it's okay to
park there. In New York at three zho one, the
spaces would be gone, but in Cambridge they were just open.
I mean, it was, you know, silly things of this
sort that said to me, this was something that was
different from intelligence. And as I'm fond of saying, my
first work in all this was studying mindlessness. And then somebody,
and I keep trying to remember who it was, but
I can I don't remember, said you know you are
what you study, You're something mean of that sort. So
then I said, okay, and I turned it around and
started studying mindfulness. And it was at that time that
I became more aware of Buddhism and the Eastern use
of the term. And it was actually very exciting that
through this Western scientific perspective I was coming to many
of the same conclusions as the Eastern work would suggest.
But again, most of that is based on meditation. And
even though I studied meditation beginning and it's great practice,
it's just different. The work that I do is mindfulness
without meditation, just active noticing. When you're active, you know,
it's very nice people say be in the present, it's
meaningless because when you're not there, you don't know you're
not there, so how can you call up the instruction?
But when you know you don't know, then you naturally
there to find out. And when you're noticing new things,
that puts you in the present, which I agree is
a good place to be. So it's easy to get there,
but not get there by just deciding I'm going to
be in the present.
Speaker 1: So I guess in the seventies that time was ripe
for that. But being in an academic environment, especially when
like Harvard, did you get pushback from this concept?
Speaker 2: Not really. I mean I started studying it at the
Graduate Center City University of New York when I was
there for a few years after I got my PhD.
And at that time it was mindlessness, so there was
no pushback. When I went up to Harvard, I was
doing a meditation study and this was massive. I was
doing it with Skip Alexander when he was alive. He
brought me into the study, and basically it was the
they believed that if you have people all over the
world or meditating, that that would result in peace. You know,
so meditators over there are going to influence people over
here to be less aggressive. I said, okay, fine, you
know I'm in Why not? I was pleased with myself, Fred,
because this was the first time I was involved in
something where if it worked, wouldn't you know, give me
any applause? It was theirs. But what happened was at
one point, so we're all over the Middle East, and
a research assistant to a researchers system, to a research
you know, did something that they shouldn't do. I don't
remember what it was. It was minor, but that came
back to me and I said, all right, this is
is too complicated. I can how can I have control
over all of this? So I slowly backed out. You know,
when you ask about pushback, I don't read my own reviews,
you know, I don't look I don't look at my
own TV shows or podcasts. That way, I can remain
a legend in my own mind. So there could be
pushback out there. There probably is.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I'm a legend in my own room and
a rumor in my own mind. How much of this
came after the Summer of Love? I mean, you know,
we're talking mid seventies here, and I remember that time
and the other peace, love everybody. Then the meditation was
starting to happen, the people were looking into Buddhism and
all that. Was there anything about timing of it?
Speaker 2: No, I don't think so, because remember I was studying
mindlessness and.
Speaker 1: Which was the Summer of Love was?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well maybe, but it wasn't appreciated that way at
the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So what are the components of mindfulness? Again, it
can be used by golfers.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, it's not a matter of components. Mindfulness
is the process of noticing, okay, And so you're going
to notice when you don't know, right and you're in
a situation, you're naturally going to sit up and take notice.
And in addition to that, so that's top down. If
you know you don't know, and how ubiquitous uncertainty is,
then you naturally tune in when you think you know,
and then all you need to do is notice three
or four new things about this thing you think you know,
and you come to see you didn't know it as
well as you thought you did, so your attention that
naturally goes to it. I mean you can do that,
you know, with your spouse, a friend, Notice three new
things about them. There's there are always new things, and
then that's exciting. You know. This act of noticing is
the essence of enjoyment. It's the essence of engagement. So
we have a study we ran a long time ago.
We'd have people doing they'd be listening to classical music,
listening to loud music, which kind, looking at paintings, watching football,
you know, all sorts of activities in one of three
ways that we would tell them, just do it. So
they just watching the football. These are women who hate football.
Notice two new things about it, Notice four new things
about it, Notice six new things. And it turns out
the more you notice, the more you like the thing
you're noticing. You know. So anybody can enjoy golf, anybody
can enjoy anything by just doing this active noticing. And
too many of us, you know, wait for something to
grab us rather than actively. But you know, so we
don't have nuggets of mindfulness or it's all just this
process of noticing. One of the important ways I think
that people can be more effective and happy in whatever
they're doing is to reduce the stress they experience. And
stress is mindless. And whether you're on the golf course
or you're at a cocktail party, stress is not doing
you a good service. So I just say to people quickly,
you know, just ask yourself, is it a tragedy or
an inconvenience because almost never, you know, I missed, you know,
I hit the bowl in the sand. You know, so what,
it's not a tragedy, and so you recover quickly, more quickly.
But stress is mindless because stress is the view that
something terrible is going to something's going to happen, and
when it happens, it's going to be terrible. Now, it
turns out that we can't predict what's going to happen.
So if you just said to yourself, we give yourself
three reasons why this thing probably won't happen. So you
went from thinking it's definitely going to happen, you're going
to miss the shot, you're going to make a fool
of yourself, you're going to get fired from work, whatever
it is, three or four reasons why it's not going
to happen. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. But now's
the fun part. Turn it around, and let's say it
does happen. How is that actually an advantage? People don't
realize events themselves are neither good nor bad. It's our
views of the events that make them good or bad. Now,
the more mindful you are, the more choices you have
for how to view situations. And if some of these
views feel better, clearly those are the ones you're going
to gravitate too. But when you think X is awful
and you're about to experience it, you know you're setting
yourself up. It's interesting. I think it was Mark Twain
who said, you know, most of the things we worry
about never happen, which is also true. So if you
just thought about the last three times you were stressed
and did the event happen, chances are not. But even
if it did, then you see you got through it,
so it all becomes less scary. And so once we're
not and people in this world, I think, or at
least in this country, believe that life is stressful. I
don't think so, you know, I don't think it has
to be, but certainly everybody if they employ the sorts
of things that I talk about in The Mindful Body
can reduce the amount of stress that they're experiencing.
Speaker 1: Amazing, amazing. I definitely need to thank Carl Morris for
introducing us. This is a remarkable conversation. Your first book
came out in the eighties, Problems in the seventies.
Speaker 2: Well, no, I wrote a book when I was in
graduate school. But the book you're referring to is Mindfulness,
which it came out nearly Yeah, that started the whole game.
Speaker 1: But you are still writing and you're still publishing books.
Tell me about your latest book, please.
Speaker 2: Well, the latest book. I think the title says it all.
It's called The Mindful Body, Thinking our way to chronic health.
And what people don't understand, it's not just as we
were just saying. I was just saying that stress is
under our control. We don't have to experience stress. The
more mindful we are of a less stressful experience. It
turns out, for most of the disorders we experience, there
are mindful solutions to it, and our thinking leads to
very different health effects than most of us assume. I mean,
and I'm not even suggesting which we have data that
I told you, you make people more mindful, they live longer.
But let me give you an example. So this work.
A lot of the book, but not all of it,
for sure, is about mind body unity. You know, I
thought about it. I felt a mind body they're just words.
And if you have a mind and a body, then
you have to figure out how do you get from
a thought to the body doesn't follow naturally and put
them back together, and then it's one thing. Then wherever
you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. So
we have lots of I think, interesting studies testing this.
The first one was the counterclockwise study. So we took
old men and we had them live in a retreat
that we retrofitted to twenty years earlier, and we had
them live there as if they were the younger selves.
So they would be talking about past events as if
they were just unfolding and so on. And in a
week these old men their hearing improved, their vision, their memory,
their strength, and they look noticeably younger. Now in the book,
I have many men these studies. I'm just let's see,
I don't know trying to think of any particularly relevant
to golf. But people can deduce whatever they want. The
next study in the series with Ali Crumb was we
took chamber maids and first asked them how much exercise
do you get? Oh, it is relevant to golf, how much?
And they said they don't get any exercise because they
thought exercise is what they do after work, because that's
what the surgeon general says, who sits behind a desk
all day. So we simply had them change their minds.
We taught them that work was exercise. That's all, just
changing their minds. So working on at the gym making
a bed is like working on this machine at the gym,
and so on. So now we have two groups. One
group that realizes they work is exercise, the other group
that doesn't. We find the groups are not eating any differently,
they're not working any harder. You know, either group is
not spending more effort than the other. However, the group
that now sees their work is exercise lost weight. There
was a change in body mass index, wasted hip ratio,
and their blood pressure came down just by changing their minds.
So if you are a golfer, you know, I think
that you should pay some attention to all the exercise
you're getting, rather than assume because you're driving in the
cart there's no exercise. There's still exercises. Can only take
the cart so far, and there may be benefits to that.
And another study, we had people in a sleep lab
and they wake up. We have, without them knowing, change
the clock. So one group thinks they got two hours
more sleep than they got, one group thinks they got
two hours fewer than they got, and one group the
amount of sleep they got turns out on the measures
we took, biological and cont a function follow perceived amount
of sleep. The last most recent study with Peter Ungle,
we inflict a wound minor wound, but a wound, and
we put people in front of a clock and big
on clocks. I guess and unbeknownst to them the clock
is rigged. So for a third of the people, the
clock is going twice as fast as real time, for
a third of the people, half as fast as real
time for a third of the people real time. Now,
most people would assume that that wound is going to heal.
When that wound heals, what's the difference with the clocks is.
But it turns out that the clock time that your
perceptions of perception of how much time has passed actually
determines healing time. So so many of these sorts of
studies that are fun and suggest the amount of control
we have over our health is enormous. And in addition
to that, we have a part of the book that
deals with chronic illness. And most people, when they are
diagnosed with a chronic illness, assume their symptoms are going
to stay the same or get worse. They assume that
there's nothing they can do about it. They feel helpless. Okay,
so what we do is we have a treatment for
people where basically what you're going to do is we're
going to call you periodically and ask you how is
a symptom now, is it better or worse than the
last time? And why several things happen now? The first,
because you're engaged in this, you don't feel helpless. Second,
by us asking you to compare how it is now
with before, you're going to recognize that it's not stable
and sometimes you actually feel better, so that then you're going,
in a larger sense, feel better. Third, and most important
is that when we tell you ask you is it
better or worse, we ask you why, and that instigates
a mindful searche for why, and mindfulness itself is good
for your health. And then, finally, I believe you're more
likely to find a cure if you're looking for it.
So make this simpler. Fred. Let's say you're lets you stress.
Since we talked about it, you think you're always stressed.
Nobody is always anything, okay, because when you're not stressed,
you're not thinking about being stressed, okay, and then you're
stressed again. So it seems like this is the way
you willway. So we call you periodically and Fred, how
are you now? Is it better or worse than before?
And why we do this over time? It doesn't have
to be very long, two weeks a week. And then
what we find out is, and you're saying why now
are you stress? You discover you're stressed when you're talking
to Ellen Langer. Well, then the cure is easy, right,
stop talking to me or talk to me differently, right.
And this has been phenomenally effective. We've got positive of
results using this attention to symptom variability with people at
Parkinson's stroke, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, chronic pain, big things that
were psychologically under their control. And then of course you
have the thought part of this, that our thoughts, because
mind and body is won that when we keep ourselves
stress free and we keep ourselves happy, we're healing our bodies.
So the book really is about how to tap into
all of the control we have over our health and
well being to which most people are oblivious.
Speaker 1: So much to process on this one. I'm just curious
if there again, And I hate using the word pushback,
but a lot of what you're talking about seems to
go against Western medicine. That well, not if you're not there,
then you got to take a pill for it.
Speaker 2: And you're saying, yeah, now, I think you know. I
gave a talk a few years ago, about five years
ago or so, and there were five thousand people. I
thought I was talking to all people who are dealing
with cancer, and only afterwards I found out there were
lots of physicians in the room, and oh my goodness,
because I wasn't paying attention whether I was sounding anti
medical or what have you. But I spoke to many
of them afterwards, and you know, they were very supportive
because they know they don't know, and you know, and
these are very smart, well meaning people. I'm not diminishing
the effectiveness of medical intervention. What I'm saying is there's
still a great deal we can do for ourselves, and
even at the least, you know, if we go back
to this attention to symptom variability. While you're waiting to
find out the results for the biopsy, you know, you're
waiting the three weeks to see the doctor, you certainly
don't have to sit there being stressed. There are things
you can do for yourself. You know. I think that
the medical world, and for many of whom in it,
I have an enormous respect. But I think that on occasion,
maybe more of an occasion, not infrequently, they say things
that they shouldn't say. You know, they might tell you
have six months to live. There's no way they can
know this. See. A piece of all of this that
helps people understand the uncertainty that should be part and
parcel of their existence in some sense is science doesn't
give us absolutes. Science gives us probabilities that say, if
we were to study this again in the same way,
we're likely to still get an effect where most people
respond in a particular way, not everybody. Okay, so let
me go back half a step. It was a straight
A student. I was the one. You hate it, okay,
And I was at this horse event and this man
asked me, can I watch his horse because he wants
to get his horse a hot dog. Horses don't eat meat, right,
I say sure. He came back with the hot dog
and the horse ate it. And that's when I realized
everything I thought I know could be wrong. You can't
do an experiment that's going to prove horses don't eat
meat because you're only going to be able to use
so many horses, so much meat mixed with so much
grain that can vary, how hungry the horse is, how big.
All of this will determine, and so what you end
up getting in such a study is most of the
horses like this being fed in this way don't eat meat.
That's very complicated. So it's just easier to say horses
don't eat meat. It's like one in one is two, Yeah, right, Matt.
What we're taught is an easy way of giving us
science most of the time. But you know, I think
that we would be better off if we were told
most horses don't eat meat, or it seems that horses
don't eat me, or one in one could be two
rather than is. As soon as we have the is,
we mindlessly accept it as true. We don't pay any
attention to the times that it's not true.
Speaker 1: Well, it confirms the story for me of when the
time I was at a ballgame with my friend and
I said, I'm gonna go get something to you. Do
you want anything? Goes yeah, get me a hot dog.
And I said, wait, I thought you were a vegetarian.
He goes, there's no meat and hot dogs.
Speaker 2: It's good.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to off the course, on the course
and what we can do.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, it should be reasonably clear from all we've
said so far. Off the course, if you exploit the
power and uncertainty, if you are noticing, if you don't
take single answers as the only way to answer whatever
the question is, if you deal with all your you
don't allow yourself to become stressed because you're aware, then
stne cause stress. Yourself are causing the stress by the
view you're taking. You do all of this, then when
you're you know, on the knife hole, you're as good
as you can possibly be at that time. And if you,
in being mindful now are also paying attention to how
you feel. The example I gave before, you're you know,
you didn't sleep that well, so your shoulder hurts a little,
so you change the way you're standing slightly. You make
adjustments to take advantage of who you are right at
this moment. So off the course is basically too. You know,
if one reads the mindful body, they'll have a good
sense of how to become more mindful off the course.
And then you're on the course and the mindfulness is
the same, but the things you're mindful of very slightly.
You know, off the course you're not paying attention to
the wind, you know, unless you're asking yourself should you
put on a heavier sweater or jacket. But on the
course you want to be actively noticing things about the
course itself, things about your body itself, ways that you
could vary the way you hold the club. You know,
the five iron was good the last time, but now
the seven iron might be a better choice for you
because of whatever things have changed. So, you know, we
want to understand that we should be guided by our
rules and routines the way we've done things before, but
they shouldn't govern how we do things, because right now
is different from yesterday and we'll be different again tomorrow.
Speaker 1: And to me, there is no history in golf. The
next shot has nothing to do with what your history
is on the on the course.
Speaker 2: It should be that way, but typically not right, yeah,
because it takes a lot for people that you're in
the sand, you know, and how do you get out
of that? Why'd you get yourself into that?
Speaker 1: Or I never hit that, I can never get out
of the sand yet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but to also recognize, you know, I mean
you're in the sand. Is this a tragedy? Are inconvenience?
You know? It'd be great to be able to get
out of the sand more easily. The only way you
can get out of the sand more easily is if
you get in the sand on occasion, you know, So
there are opportunities to improve. Oh yeah. The main thing
is that this act of noticing is what makes it fun.
And even if you were a professional golfer. Look, I'm
a professional psychologist and I still do my psychology mindfully.
I enjoy it and if you're not enjoying it, then
you're being mindless. So and if you're enjoying it, then
the outcome will typically be better. But even if not,
it doesn't matter that much, you know, so to do
it tense and follow all those rules that you mindlessly
learned and then screw up. God, it's terrible. But if
you're enjoying yourself and you screw up, at least you
had a good day.
Speaker 1: And I've always felt like when I walk up to
if this ball goes in the sand, when I walk
up to it with the attitude of oh I love
this shot, yeah so much, it's always I always seem
to have a better result.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I think that people, you know, should pay
attention to what we said. Where if you did get
that hole in one every time you swung the club,
there'd be no game there. So that needs that the
shots that are harder provide an opportunity to learn something
and also to test yourself. I mean, it's important for
people to come to learn that they should take what
they do seriously, but not take themselves so seriously. And
you have these duffers who hit a bad shot and
then they're destroyed by it. Why, I mean, it's kind
of crazy. Why expect perfection.
Speaker 1: Right, because it doesn't exist, especially in golf and everywhere else, right,
perfection does not exist. Well, again. The new book is
called The Mindful Body by doctor Ellen Langer. And this
has been so enlightening and so worthy of golf content.
Whether you believe it or not, I firmly do and
I just think this was phenomenal. I appreciate your.
Speaker 2: Time so much. Thank you, Fred, it was fun.
Speaker 1: Happy New Year. I hope you're doing well this winter,
staying warm and healthy. It's been a few weeks since
I've spoken to you, and i'd love your feedback on
whether you prefer these little updates or would rather I
just end the episode after the interview. Now. The reason
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