Speaker 1: Hi, This is Jeff Williams from Fernie, British Columbia, Canada,
and I play at the Fernie Golf Club.
Speaker 2: This is Golf Smarter number one thousand and one and golf.
Speaker 3: You aim at a spot, but you play to an area.
You have your aim line, a target that you want
the ball to start on where you hope it ends up,
so you have a clear picture of the whole trajectory
and shape of the shot. The better picture you have,
the better your body will respond to it. But it's
best to do that within an area because we all
have a dispersion pattern. You want to give yourself the
most room to play and that takes outcome out of
the situation. Give yourself the best chance for your fewest
strokes without taking an unnecessary risk. And that's the game
plan you have on every hole and every shot, regardless
of your score. And this makes a huge difference to
take worry about results out of the picture.
Speaker 1: Every round has its own psychological Amen corner with doctor
Joe Parrin of Zengolf, this is Golf Smarter, sharing stories,
tips and insights from great golf minds to help you
lower your score and raise your golf IQ.
Speaker 3: Here's your host, Fred Green.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Golf Smarter Podcast. Doctor Joe. Hey, Fred,
you know I had to take a long deep breath
before I said that because episode.
Speaker 2: One thousand and one.
Speaker 1: Is your appearance, because you were episode one, so I
thought it was the perfect time to have you come back.
And it's not like you've only been on episode one
in one thousand and one. I went through my database
today and this is your eighteenth appearance.
Speaker 2: How appropriate is that.
Speaker 1: That it's your eighteenth appearance right on the final Green
here finish, we've finished, and I hope not, I hope not.
Speaker 3: The first day finished, the first day. We have three
more rounds to go.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, four thousand episodes in twenty years, and
see a thousand episodes in twenty years. They don't May
may not be around for even for the fourth round.
Absolutely not. But I really have loved having you on
the show. I mean from the very beginning, the name
Golf Smarter has meant how do we as amateur and
recreational golfers, And to quote you in episode one, how
do we get out of our own way?
Speaker 2: And there are.
Speaker 1: So many quotes that you've given me over the years
that I continue to repeat on the golf course and
people are like, how do you keep your mind straight
with all the stuff that you have in your head?
Speaker 2: I said, I can't. There's just after this many interviews.
Speaker 3: Right, you pick and choose, and you write a couple
of them down for the day.
Speaker 1: Get out of your own way is way up on
the list, including great putt.
Speaker 2: You didn't make it, but you made the putt. It
just didn't hole.
Speaker 3: It, hold it. That's right. We change change the definition
of making a putt. If you love the way it
left the putter, you made your putt, yep, and then
you see if it goes in or not. And even
you know, I had a player who said, yeah, I
missed that one, just slipped out. I said, see, the
thing is, it's not a perfect surface, and the golf
balls aren't perfectly manufactured to the add it to the
atomic level. So when you roll, you could roll ten
beautiful twelve foot putts and only seven would go in.
There was a study done that rolling them down a ramp,
so they rolled exactly the same each time, only seven
out of ten minute And so if it was really
really close, you say, you know, I wouldn't have put
it at any That's just the rub of the green.
That's why we have that phrase, the rub of the green. Now,
if it didn't come close, then you have an opportunity
to learn from it. But you can only learn from
it if you felt like you rolled the putt that
you wanted to, and if you rolled the putt that
you wanted to, you made your putt, and then not
all of them are going to go in, but you
can make every put.
Speaker 1: It shocks people when you tell them that you know
on the tour from ten feet they're at fifty percent.
Speaker 2: So don't beat yourself up.
Speaker 3: And that's the thing do you want because because of
that percentage, do you want your confidence based on whether
it goes in or not? Or do you want your
confidence based on your execution? And that needs to go
through your whole game because after the ball leaves the
club face, all you can do is root for it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so your confidence based on execution, not on the results.
Speaker 2: Wow, Okay, I love that.
Speaker 3: Again.
Speaker 2: Taking notes.
Speaker 1: I always take a lot of notes when our conversations.
And in the another line that you've had over the
years that I've just repeated again and again when especially
when I see people getting frustrated and getting angry with themselves,
it's like, remember.
Speaker 2: The etche of sketch.
Speaker 1: Just take your etche of sketch, flip it over, shake it,
erase it, start again, start from zero.
Speaker 3: You know. That's the that's the challenge with the the
new generation. Etch you sketch was a toy that our
generation had, Yeah, generations ago. So now it's just select
all delete mm hmm.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's command a command delete select.
Speaker 2: Yep, a new way of doing it.
Speaker 1: Well, your books have been an amazing success, and I'd
like to go over each one if at all possible,
we can do this today, but we have to start
with Zen Golf. And I had read Zen Golf when
I was new to the game. And when I thought
about doing the podcast and asked a friend of mine
who had already started podcasting back in two thousand and five,
I said, how do I get started? He goes find
somebody with a name, and so it was like, well,
I just read this amazing book about golf.
Speaker 2: I'll reach out.
Speaker 1: And I reached out to doctor Joseph Parent And there
you were saying sure, sure, but what you didn't say was,
what's a podcast? And what's iTunes? Which I received that
answer so many times in those first couple of years.
Speaker 2: But you were game for it. You loved the idea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's why you've been on so many times.
Speaker 3: Well, Zen Golf was written. Well, you know, somebody said,
how long did it take to write Zen Golf? Well,
it took the forty years of my work, but then
sitting down and writing was a couple of years. And
it got published in May ironically almost almost exactly twenty
three years ago, two thousand and two, and it's it's
gotten around the world. One of my favorite stories is
when you took a group on into Japan and went
to a remote monastery that you couldn't you couldn't actually
use motorized transportation to get to. It was like like
boats that had to be pushed along a river and Kyoto.
Speaker 2: I was in Kyoto up to.
Speaker 3: This monastery where the the zen master was talking about
applying Zen to life, and he said, well, you guys
do that, and this isn't there this book Zen Golf.
Speaker 1: The Golf of Zen, he said, the Zen of golf
is what he called it. And I'm like, wait a minute,
that's one of my teachers he goes, what I say,
you read that book?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that book.
Speaker 3: Isn't that funny that it was? It's gotten to those
remote corners of the world, so it's really it's really gratifying.
I don't I don't want to toot my own horns.
Speaker 2: I want you to it's toot.
Speaker 3: You know. The key thing is I tried to make
it very accessible when I when we were doing the editing,
it was like, can I say that in a word
with less syllables and and make it real lessons. There's
no theory in it. It all comes out of lessons
that I've taught. So I love it when somebody says,
you know, I read Zen Golf, and I think you
were hiding in the bushes watching me when you were
getting ready to read. Because it has a lot of
universals in it, and that's that's why it has it
has lasted this long.
Speaker 2: Well, let's talk about the book.
Speaker 1: Let's pretend like this is the first time we're doing this,
and please introduce because you know, there's a lot of
listeners who've been here for a long time and have
heard you many times, and hopefully there's some new ones
as well. But I think this is a really important
book to introduce people to.
Speaker 3: Well, I'll just present a couple of different It's in
five sections, and the first section is taking a different perspective,
and that's basically fakesed, you know, focusing on what's right
with us rather than what's wrong with us. So with
the intention of building unconditional confidence, not confidence based on
how you've done recently, but based on your underlying abilities
and underlying character. So that the focus is to say, Okay,
it's not that I need something that I'm missing. There's
I've added more on, so I need to clear it away.
And as you said, your favorite expression is get out
of your own way. And so lately what I've been
telling and I love I love doing this. When I
do a talk to a group of juniors, they really
get a kick out of it. I said, well, you know,
you feel like something's missing, so you add this technique on,
and then you add this idea on, and then this
swing thought on, and you keep adding more on and
I call that more on golf want to you want
to clear away the extra stuff, clear away the interference
that and let yourself swing the way you're capable of.
So that's the first section taking a different perspective, and
the second section is actually the second, third and fourth
sections are the power approach. So there's preparation action response
to results. And preparation is making a plan that you
can commit to and feeling a sense of trust so
you can settle in and swing without worry. Then the
action is actually doing that and being aware and going
through your routine and focusing not so much on the
outcome but on the process, as they say across the
pond when we're working with a lot of European golfers.
So the process, the process of preparing to hit the
best shot you can possibly hit, and the focus there
is love the way it leaves. After it leaves, all
you can do is root for it. But if you
do everything you can in your preshot routine and your
practice swing, in your addressing the ball, and you're set
up and commit to the plan that you made, trust
the swing feel you have, and you're going and you're
gonna hit your best shot and focus only on that.
That's the action part. And one thing I wanted to
mention on the preparation part is you take the challenges.
I don't even want to call them hazards. You take
the challenges of the shot into account and then give
yourself the most room to play, because in golf, you
aim at a spot, but you play to an area.
So if you give yourself room to play, that allows
you to commit to the shot without feeling like you
have to help it or protect or prevent it from
going somewhere. So you have a positive picture, a clear
positive picture. You have a commitment to the plan you
made and a plan you can commit to. And then
you take a good, good settling bread and get yourself settered,
settled and ready to act. So that's preparation, action and
a response to results. This was what is it twenty
three years ago, and still most people don't have a
post shot routine. I introduced the post shot routine, and
that is, after you hit the shot, don't leave that
spot with a bad swing, erase and replace, make the
swing you wish you'd made, and then use that feel
as preparation for your next shot. Then, but if you
hit a really good shot, don't just go, oh, thank you,
I'll take any more of those. Give yourself some reinforcement
and say that's how I always hit it, and then
it brings it back to your preparation when I prepare
for the shot really well and commit. So in Japanese
that's called kai zen, which means the path of continuous improvement.
So if you do these three things, the preparation, the action,
and then the response to results, that makes your preparation
better next time, you actually get better as you play.
Speaker 2: But we're not done.
Speaker 1: There's a third part we have to get to, and
I want to go to it. There's so many things
that you said in the last section that I need
to go back to, but I want to continue on
where we were with zen goolf okay.
Speaker 3: So we have five different sections. The middle is the
three parts of the par approach, and the fifth and
last section is called a game of honor, and that's
more about the spirit of golf. I introduce the principles
of something called Shambala golf are my Buddhist teachers talked
about an ideal society called Shambala, which is interesting. It's
an ancient Asian legend and when the British came to Tibet,
they heard about it, but they mispronounced it. Instead of Shambhlad,
they called it shangri law. So it's an Eden an
ideal society. And the principles that we talked about in
relation to golf are virtue, discipline, humor, and friendship. And
that is the essence of the game is good. It
takes discipline to get the most out of your game.
A sense of humor is essential given the vagaries of golf,
and the key to engaging in the game is that
we do it with others with a spirit of friendship
and mutual support important. So we talk about that and
talk about the attitude, and I introduced the attitude of
some great professionals in the past and how they exemplify
the best qualities that golf can bring out the best
qualities of us as human beings. And on the flip side,
it can bring out the frustrations and the negative emotions.
So we have to make a choice as we play,
which one we want to move towards the light or
the dark?
Speaker 2: Do I have to flip a coin on that one.
Speaker 3: It's pretty easy.
Speaker 1: It's pretty easy, and probably you've mentioned it many times.
I know about focus on the process, not the results.
Speaker 2: I mean, you're not.
Speaker 1: You may be of the first one to tell me that,
but it's been repeated by many mental.
Speaker 2: Coaches that we featured on the show.
Speaker 1: And again you may have said this before, but it's
jumping out to me now, and that's you play to
a spot, but.
Speaker 2: You hit to an area.
Speaker 3: You aim at a spot, aim at a spot, but
you play to an area. Okay, good, You aim at
a spot. So you have a you have and sometimes
it's too You have your aim line, a target that
you want the ball to start on and if you're
going to shape it at all, where you where you
hope it ends up. So you have a clear picture
of the whole trajectory and shape of the shot. The
better picture you have, the better your body will respond
to it. But you have to do that. It's best
to do that within an area because we all have
a dispersion pattern. Even the robots that they use to
test golf balls and golf clubs on the ball doesn't
land in exactly the same spot. It's an area. It's
a very small area compared to our amateur area, but
it is an area. So you want to give yourself
the most room to play. And that fits with the
game plan that I have introduced that takes outcome out
of the situation, and that is give yourself the best
chance for your fewest strokes on the whole without taking
an unnecessary risk. Usually we talk about that as birdie.
For amateurs, it's net birdie. Give yourself the best chance
for net birdie without taking an unnecessary risk. And that's
the game plan you have on every hole and every shot,
regardless of your score. And this makes a huge difference
to take worry about results as far as score goes
out of the picture. If you watch golf tournaments, as
the players are coming down the back nine, if they
have a lead, they start worrying about giving any back
and it changes their game plan from how do I
play my best shots to how do I not make
a mistake, and that inevitably leads to stumbles.
Speaker 1: I want to go back for a moment to the
twenty twenty five Masters and Rory's phenomenal final round that
had a lot of ups and downs in the round.
Speaker 2: Did you get a chance to watch.
Speaker 3: Any of it? Yeah? And you know Amen corner at
the Masters is eleven, twelve, and thirteen. And what I
say every closing round has a psychological Amen corner is
right at that point in the round, you're running out
of holes. You can see the finish line, but it's
a little early for the adrenaline to kick in for
your final kick. And so it's a place where Rory
in the twenty twenty five Masters had just buried number ten,
had a four shot lead, and you could tell his
thinking started going to how do I bring it home
rather than how do I keep playing well? And he
had striped little baby draws huge, not little huge baby huge,
little draw with a little draw on it down the fairway,
shot after shot after shot on number eleven, a very
tentative push into the trees. And we don't know what
was going on with that little wed shot on thirteen
that he jumped in the creek, but clearly it was
a lack of focus and a lack of positive intention,
and that brings in deceleration, it brings in guiding, and
it brings in poor results. So all of that happens
during that section of a final round for almost everybody.
And it's also you're tired. If you're running out of
mental gas, you're physically tired. If you haven't eaten or
drunk properly, you're dehydrated or your blood sugar is off. Now,
the pros are pretty good about eating and drinking. So
it's really more the physical and even more so the
mental fatigue of being in those pressure situations. And then
you have excuse expression, brain farts, which is basically what
it looked like. Happened on a couple of the wedge
on thirteen and the wedge on eighteen. So it's like,
where did that come from? Well, it came from loss
of focus and positive intention and commitment to the shot.
Speaker 1: I was fascinated in a lot of the post round interviews.
He kept talking about how proud he was of himself
to get through.
Speaker 3: He came back from that. He came back from that, yep.
And he did that after the first round. He came
back from that adversity, and he talked about his resilience
and that is well, we.
Speaker 2: Kept talking about I was having a great round.
Speaker 1: I had two bad holes, but I have focus on
how well I was playing before.
Speaker 3: That, yep. So that's why we have all these aspects
of zen golf as taking a different perspective, not focusing
on the bad shots, but focusing on what you do
well and then going through your process and then maintaining
that positive attitude about yourself that you can accomplish what
you're trying to accomplish.
Speaker 2: Doctor Joe, I am so curious as to.
Speaker 1: What brought you to call the book, or you know,
what is your history that led you to write a
book book that you would call Zen golf, which is
not a term that most golfers before this book would
have ever used. And it's fascinating that you got to
that point.
Speaker 2: What brought you there?
Speaker 3: Well, what I wanted to do was to bring some
of the teachings that I had experienced to make it
a blend of Eastern and Western psychology, the Eastern wisdom traditions,
Buddhism and Taoism. Zen, which is a kind of one
of the schools of Buddhism, are actually, in their original form,
more of a psychology than a religion. You could say.
It's a kind of spiritual psychology, which is understanding the
mind and understanding how we again, how we get in
our own way, and techniques for getting out of our
own way. So that's really my background, as well as
my study and my degree in Western psychology. So I
was able to blend those together, and so I included
a lot of the traditional Zen stories, which are very
illustrative of how we get in our own way, and
how we can get out of our own way. You know.
One of the one of the stories is a musician
went to a great master and said, you know, how
should I what's the way that I should work with
playing my instrument and tune it just right? And he said, well, oh,
he said, he was asking how do I work with
my mind? And the teacher said, well, how do you
work with your instrument? See, we want to use real
life examples to help us understand how we work with
our mind. He said, how do you tune the strings
of your instrument? He said, well, I make sure that
they're not too tight and not too That's how you
should work with your mind, not too tight, not too loose.
So we take that into our golf practice and we say, okay,
you need to be somewhat focused, but not hyper focused
and uptight and not too whatever and not too relaxed
and lose and lose your focus. So one of the
things that I've been teaching lately is where your energy is.
Whenever somebody says, you know, I'm kind of in my
head and all my thoughts, and they use their hands
up here, you know, around their head and what I
want people to do is use their breathing. When we
breathe in, we gather. When we breathe out, we let go.
Literally we're gathering our breath in and then letting it
go out. So they activate different It's of our nervous system,
and the part of the nervous system that the outbreath
activates lets us relax and settle. So we use the
outbreath as a way to settle down. And so I
asked people, you know, have you ever heard the expression
down tight? I see, no, I said, it doesn't exist.
We're only uptight. We only get work up about things.
We only tense up. We don't tense down. And I
promise on the other on the other hand, no one
has ever calmed up, take a breath and calm the
right down.
Speaker 2: Did you need a beep on that one?
Speaker 3: Did?
Speaker 2: I can give you and give you. I can do that. No,
I don't have to do that.
Speaker 3: Okay, that's good.
Speaker 2: That's good. That's good.
Speaker 1: There is a great documentaries on right now called Soltic
City about the history of the Boston Celtics, and at
one point during it they talk about how.
Speaker 2: Great basketball when all the.
Speaker 1: Parts are working together and we're talking about the teammates
and whatnot.
Speaker 2: Is jazz is just like jazz because you have.
Speaker 1: Everyone who is highly skilled at what they're doing, and
yet they can go free form with it and stay
within their themselves.
Speaker 3: Right, the key word is improvisation. Improvisation, that's the key word.
You have a plan, but then you encounter the situation
and then you have to improvise. What did what did
Mike Tyson say? He said, you have a plan for
your boxing round until you didn't get hit in the face.
That's right. And the military says, all our battle plans
are perfect until we encounter the enemy. Yeah, so at
that point you have to improvise. But to improvise means
to rely on your skills. And the cool thing of
applying this to the golf course is think about how
we practice on the range. We give ourselves perfect lives
each time, and it's perfectly flat, and then we hit
shots and we get out on the golf course. Oh
suddenly one foot's in the bunker and one foot out,
or the balls below our feet above our feet. If
I were to design a practice range, I would put
mounds of different sizes along in different places on the
round on the range so that you could practice. You
get on the mound and you drop it on the backside,
the front side, left right, and you've got all those
kinds of four shots. But when we get on the
golf course, we have to improvise, and that means trusting
the skills that we have and also being realistic about
the skills that we have and not trying shots that
we have no business, no business. Now, why do amateurs
try those crazy shots?
Speaker 2: They've seen them on TV.
Speaker 3: No, that's not why. Okay, the reason is because of
the nineteenth hole. When you come in and you're not
going to say, oh, man, I shot this beautiful ninety two.
It was really really, oh what a great round, you're
going to say, you know, on the fifth hole, I
was behind this tree and I cut it around the
tree and ran it up between the bunkers and got
it to four feet. Don't ask me about the putt,
but you know, so we need a hero shot to
talk about it in the bar after after the round.
And that's why amateurs try those crazy shots, just so
they have they can say I pulled that one off
because they're not hitting such great shots all the way,
all the way around, but I'd like people to shift
their focus and love the way it leaves the club face,
and then you're going to remember lots and lots of
shots that felt really good, and it will inspire you
to do a better job of preparation, because that's your goal,
to want to have that feel of how the shot
takes off. So, you know, the the most important thing
after Zen Golf was all the other books that I
wrote were offshoots of that, Zen Putting and Golf Golf
The Art of the Mental Game. I was introduced to
someone who owned the rights to these beautiful Ravelli drawings,
so I developed very short, one page golf tips that
kind of matched up with with the drawings, and so
that's that's where that that book came out of. And
then How to Make Every put was my last golf book,
and it was really a revision of Zen Putting. Zen
Putting had a lot of philosophy in it as well,
and how to Make Every Putt is really the practical.
It's funny. Zen Golf had one chapter, Zen Golf had
one chapter, how to Make Every put Zen Putting had
a section called how to Make Every put And then
the whole book is called how to make every put
on the on the last one. And then I was
invited to do a few other books beyond Golf, Zen
Tennis with my dear friend Bill Scanlon, who has said
has passed away. And I was asked to by by
friends and my teacher to write the diet book because
it's using the same kinds of principles to change habits.
There are no menus in my diet book. It's all
ways of changing your attitude and changing your habits, and
that's been successful. You asked me about the title. I
picked a funny title for that one because I picked
it based on search engines. When people search for a book.
There are so many diet books out there. What are
you going to search for the best diet book? So
I called it the best diet book ever. But the
subtitle is The Zen of Losing Weight. We kept the
Zen theme. And the last book that I wrote was
is kind of my favorite as a excuse me expression,
Bookend to Zen Golf, and that's actually for families and
it's not about golf. My sister, who worked for Disney
for a long time. One of the Disney editors asked
her to ask me to work on a book on
mindfulness and kindness and compassion, love, gratitude, courage, all these
positive family values using Winnie the Pooh and Friends. So
it's called A Walk in the Wood Meditations on Mindfulness
with a bar named Pooh. We wrote sixteen individual stories
that goes through a day in the life of Winnie
the Pooh and his friends, and then after each story,
I wrote meditation instructions, sometimes outdoor meditations on nature, sometimes
contemplations on relationships with others, as I said, love and gratitude,
sometimes on reflections on life of impermanence and interdependence. So
it's a book for all ages. Somebody said, what's the
age range, and I said four to one hundred and four,
And it's that people can read it with youngsters, with
young people and then use the instruction sections to give
age appropriate introductions to mindfulness, awareness, and the values of
kindness and compassion, love and gratitude.
Speaker 1: Well, I guess you didn't figure out that you were
going to be a successful author when you started with
zen Golf, when you were starting your psychology practice, that
your life would have taken you to be a really
accomplished published author.
Speaker 3: Congratulations, thank you, and actually my idea for a golf book.
At the beginning, I was writing two page articles for
golf magazines, and I said, you know, when I get
enough of them, I'll pop them together into a book
because I already knew books with long chapters people never
make it through. You look and say how long is
this chapter? They go fifteen. I don't have time for that,
but they have time to if they see, oh, two
and a half pages. Oh, I can do that, and
they'll read fifteen pages, but two and a half at
a time. Yeah, bite size. So I had already planned
and zen Golf is a two hundred page book with
seventy chapters and a half pages each, you know. So
so so that was that was the intention. But again
through my sister, I was introduced to an opportunity to
publish the book and was able to make it happen
a little faster than two page articles. All the way through.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm going to have to get that book and
put it my library.
Speaker 3: We started over. I was just holding up that's the
Walk in the Wood book, and I'm so proud of it,
and it was so much fun to work on it
with my sister. Yeah, and so that's kind of the
my my little baby a little bit.
Speaker 1: What I'd like to do if we can, is get
more examples of how on the golf course, not in life,
but we'll connect those dots when we get there. But
on the golf how we get in our own way,
whether it's bad bounces, beating ourselves up on things that
we have no control. And I'm going to stop here
because I want you to do it. But how do
we get in our own way? And how do we
correct that?
Speaker 3: Well, you said, you know, we're talking about golf, not life.
But there's an old saying. I think it was Dave Hill,
one of the old protess, said, golf and life are
a lot alike. It's just that golf's a little more complicated. WHOA, So,
of course it's I was telling I was telling you
another time and another time that I had a student
who got very angry, a junior on got very angry
at bad bounces and like he'd hit a shot right
at the and it would hit a sprinkler head in
front of the green and bounce over and out of bounds,
and he was furious, And I said, why are you
so angry? He said, well, it was not fair. And
I said, Oh, so if you hit it into the
woods and it hits a tree and bounces back into
the fairway, you get angry at that too. Huh he said, No,
I said, but that isn't fair. He went, oh, oh, so,
it's just it's all about getting the results we want
and being attached to those results so that when they
don't come out, we feel like, why did you know?
Why did this happen to Muah? Why did this happen
to me? And we apply that to life as well
as golf. Why did that happen to me? Now we
can talk about karma, but that's a whole deeper topic.
But basically, if we say, okay, that is what happened
and what can I learn from it? Rather than why
did that happen to me? And or what's wrong with
me that that happened and beat ourselves up, as you said,
instead saying okay, what can I learn from this? And
then we have the possibility of improving so getting in
our own way. There are many ways that we do that,
and they all have to do with outcome, with how
they're going to turn out, and attachment to the way
we want them to turn out. FORMI for me, I
want things to turn out for me. And if we
can get out of ourselves and say, you know, I
want things to turn out better for others, that actually
is helpful because then we're not in our own way.
As a golf instructor, I got to tell you, I
hit my best shots when i'm demonstrating when I'm not
doing it for me, but I'm doing it for others. Wow,
that's when I hit my best shots. And I've talked
to a number of other instructors and all it's all
the same because we're out of the self centered orientation
and just doing it for others to show others. So
that's one of the things. When we're getting up over
a shot, we get in our own way, creating interference
with swinging the way we are capable of because of
worry about results. Christy I worked with Christy Kerr and
helped her get to number one in the world. She
had a great acronym worry about results. The acronym is war. War.
When I worry about results, I'm at war with myself. Wow.
So when you're at war with yourself and you don't trust,
then as you get over the shot, you say I
wanted to draw, I think I better help it draw,
or wanted to fade, I better help it. I wanted
to go far, I better help it go far. Those
are not so useful, to say the least. Or we
haven't targeted properly, and we say I got to stay
away from that out of bounds on the left, or
I've got to stay away from that pond on the right,
and then we hit an avoiding or preventing swing, sometimes
combine them. I need to stay away from the pond
on the right, so I really need this to draw.
And then we do double duty and hit it out
of bounds on the left. I usually say, really good
job avoiding the pond on the right, not so good
hitting the fairway, but really good job of avoiding what
you were trying to avoid. And then the last one
third part combination and that is not so untrusting that
we get guidy and just try to steer it where
we want it to go, which is a combination of
trusting and not trusting, of helping and avoiding together. So
none of these are helpful. The key is again, pick
a plan that you can commit to, a feel swing
that you can trust, and then do your best to
love the way it leaves the club face, whether it's
a putter, an iron, or a driver.
Speaker 1: Wow, that sounds like a perfect close for the show,
but it's not because I have one.
Speaker 2: I want to keep going.
Speaker 1: I played with someone recently and at his golf club,
and with every hole, because it's the club that he
belongs to.
Speaker 2: With every hole, he gave me.
Speaker 1: Over and I felt he was over instructing, with all
the hazards and all the difficulties and all the problems,
and I'm like, where am I going to put it?
I don't want to know where. I don't want to go. Please,
I want to know what's my target? What you know,
what's the distance? So I know a club I'm bringing?
Can I take driver here? And I just like my
head was kind of exploding and I couldn't say anything,
but he went on. It was like TMI, man, it
was just too much information.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you have to be the communication is delicate in
those situations. Yeah. So at a certain point, after he's
gone through all of those things, you say, Okay, given
all of those challenges, what's the safest line for me
to take?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: And then he'll give you the positive. Well, you want
to aim at that bush right over there. Now, do
I want to start it at that? Or is that
where I wanted to come down? Oh? Okay, well yeah,
I think you want to come down on that. Oh
thank you. Well, I'm going to play a draw of there.
So I'm going to start a little bit right of that.
Speaker 1: And then we bring it back to aim to a spot,
play to an area there you go. Right, So you
alluded to the fact that we know that you're, you know,
a PhD doctor, but you're also a golf instructor, right
if you had training with that or you just work
with golfers, you.
Speaker 3: Know, people say, are you a golf instructor? Well, I'm
a golf instructor, but I'm not a swing instructor. Uh huh.
I don't teach swing technique. Now, I know enough from
working with players. For example, I had a pro that
I was working with. This is just by you know,
by video. I didn't see him hit the shot, but
he was describing a shot of a like a wedge
into a left pin position and it overdrew and went
into the bunker on the side of the pin. He
said it was just a bad shot, And I said,
was it just a bad shot? What were you trying
to do. Was it a full swing shot? He said no,
he was trying to take a little bit off of it. Aha. Okay,
So the pros when they take a little bit off
of it often pull it to the left because they're
so used to using their body in the swing and
their body and their arms together. Taking a little bit
off of it, they don't make as big a movement
with their body. Their arms keep going at full speed.
Off it goes to for right handers, off it goes
to the left. So what I said was you need
to give the new plan time to sink in. I
have a chapter in zen Golf called give it time
to sink in. I want you to make four or
five practice swings getting your body and your arms in sync,
rather than just one or two. Because up your brain
is still going to tell your arms to swing at
full speed, but it's going to tell your body to
slow down, and you don't want those two crossing. So
there's an example that you would talk about it as
a swing instruction, but it's really a mental thing about
how the brain runs the muscles, you know. That's what
the mental game is about. It's not just mental, it's
how your mind and your body work together, or don't.
Speaker 1: Doctor Joe, it is such an honor to be a
friend of yours and have you agree to it. Come
on to our show and be able to start the
next thousand with you as we started the whole process.
I truly appreciate it and I can't thank you enough.
Speaker 3: Always fun to talk with you, Fred,