Speaker 1: Ah.
Speaker 2: This is Lewis for Requt from Jacksonville, Alabama, and I
play at the Cane Creek Golf Course in Aniston, Alabama.
Speaker 1: This is Golf Smarter number nine eighty two. In terms
of what you say about flow states, Yeah, you're right.
It's actually a very relaxed state of mind. Your brain
goes into a relaxed brainwave state. It's off an alpha
state or a theta brainwave state, rather than a really
deeply focused state in the conventional sense. You know, the
kind wave you are solving a mass problem. You might
be spunching up your eyebrows. You know, the lines would
come onto your forehead. That's not how we want to
play golf. It's not how we want to perform in
a lot of these scenarios, whether it's forming at the
poker table, whether it's making a speech. Lots of studies incidentally,
on jazz musicians in flow states. They go into a
very relaxed state. But what they're doing is they're executing
their skills in a very relaxed brainwave state, and you
just slip into it, and it's the kind of thing
where you come out of it and you go, wow,
that felt so easy. And yet I was performing so well.
Speaker 3: The four stages of the flow state in golf and
in life with Stephen Baker. This is Golf's Murder, sharing stories,
tips and insights from great golf minds to help you
lower your score and raise your golf IQ.
Speaker 1: There's your host, Fred Green.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the Golf Smurder Podcast. Stephen.
Speaker 1: Oh hey, Fred, great to be here.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Thank you so much for joining me today.
Tell me what it is that you love about golf.
Speaker 1: Well, look, I like a lot of sport, and golf
was something I came to in my mid twenties, and
for me at that time, I was a courtroom lawyer.
It was just the perfect escape. I used to on
days when I knew I wasn't going to be in
court the next day. I would put the clubs in
my car, head off either to the range or to
the golf course and play around. And it was just
the perfect escape. And it was completely different. I mean
I was used to playing. I suppose my first love
in sport was soccer, of course, but you know it's
not something you can just say, oh, I'm not in
court tomorrow's let's go and play a game of football.
You need a lot of people to do that. And
I got into golf. It was really through my father
in law, who was a very good golfer. He was
a scratch golfer and he got me into it and
I was fascinated, because I'll be honest with you, at first,
I found it so hard. You know. I was used
to sports where I could just instinctively, you know, I
could see a ball, I could make connection with it,
and I couldn't really believe how badly frankly I was
playing with a ball that was stationary. I mean, how
how can it be this hard? But it was. But
it soon bit me, and yeah, I really got into it.
I moved to a part of the world here where
there are some beautiful golf courses. You know, my local
course is a wonderful links course. I love links courses.
Just down the coast from me, there's a great course
place called Burnham and Barrow. Further down the coast there's
some wonderful courses in Cornwall and then up in Scotland.
Scotland is golfing heaven. And you know what I really
love about it is you can you can build a
holiday around going going and playing golf and everybody has
a good time because you're usually in beautiful parts of
the world. So yeah, that was really how I got
into it. I'd love to say I was a wonderful golfer.
I'm a modest golfer, but doesn't stop me enjoying it
a lot, and it doesn't stop me being fascinated with
how to improve, which kind of ties in with what
I do generally in terms of mental performance across the
whole range of fields.
Speaker 3: Okay, so you got there before I did, but that's
where we were going. Were you ever in a place
where you can incorporate what you're teaching today to your
golf game or you've they've not really met in the
middle yet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean definitely. It's I've brought more calmness to
my golf game. I used to get you know, I'm
not gonna lie. I got frustrated them, absolutely, But now I,
you know, a enjoy it more and b think as
a result, I am better. You know. Sure, I've still
got huge amounts of technical skills I need to upgrade on,
but what I have managed to do is at least
make sure that when I do play, not this big
gap between you know, my technical game and how I
execute because of my emotions. And definitely the old one
of the old traits of you know, you hit a
bad shot and then you go immediately and hit another
one because you're still mad about the last one. That's
something I've eradicated.
Speaker 3: That's good. You know, we have a saying here on
Golf Smarter that's been around almost as long as the podcast,
which is never follow a bad shot with a stupid.
Speaker 1: Shot, exactly exactly. And that's easier said than done. Right,
Oh yeah, you know, because effectively what happens there is
our emotions just get a grip.
Speaker 2: Of us and exactly exactly, and that effectively, I suppose
the lessons I've learned through effectively my coaching practice are
something I've been able to transfer.
Speaker 1: I wish I'd had them earlier in my life. Not
just in golf, but I mean I work with not
just professional sports people, but I work with people in business,
in professional fields, knowledge professionals, and effectively, the same processes apply.
What we want to do is be able to get
control of our emotions rather than allowing them to carry
us along. And that happens on the golf course, but
it happens in a whole host of other contexts as well.
Speaker 3: So he said, you were a courtroom lawyer. Yes, I
read that you were also a professional poker.
Speaker 1: Player, absolutely yeah.
Speaker 3: And now you're a life coach.
Speaker 1: Absolutely yeah. Yeah. I one thing I came to realize
I became a professional poker player. And then there's this
thing within poker that they're called stables, And basically what
it is is it's groups of players who are backed
by a financial backer to play. It's a way of
scaling within poker. So if you think, wait a minute,
we can coach these people to play at a certain level,
we can make money off all of them. Well, they'll
take some of the profits, we keep some of the profits.
And I joined one of these organizations, did well within it,
and then I became a poker coach. So I then
became one of the people who coached the players who
came into the organization. And one of the things that
I really realized was I love coaching. So that was
number one. I love coaching. I kind of look back
on my time as a lawyer when I had a
law firm, and I realized that actually I really enjoyed
mentoring people within the law firm. And helping them be better.
But the other thing that I realized was I was
really fascinated with the way psychology worked. One of the
things that happens in poker is we again. You'd think
it's a bit like golf. You think we'll wait anek,
I've got time to make a decision here. How can
I make a bad decision? But it happens all the
time in poker. People can immediately and I experienced this myself. Well,
they can say, right, I know what I should do here,
and yet somehow I've come away not having made the
right decision. And I was really fascinated in that it
tied in with what i'd work The field i'd worked
in within the law predominantly was clients who'd had psychiatric
and psychological injuries. So you have to become very familiar
with psychology and psychiatry to understand how the brain works
so that you can cross examine experts and that kind
of that love of coaching plus that interest in psychology
really led me down the path of coaching, and that's
that's why I'm doing what I'm doing today.
Speaker 3: Hmm. Fascinating. I never made the connection between, you know,
poker and golf neither being reactive, if you can use
the word sport being reactive are like you know, playing soccer,
football or basketball tennis. You're really you're on a reactive
level there. But with those two competitions you can think
about it absolutely, which is probably the deadliest part of
the game, right because you can say you second guess
yourself absolutely.
Speaker 1: And you see this even within soccer. There's particular moments
in soccer. A classic one is is a penalty kick
and you'll see in a big, high pressure situation and
you can look at a player as they're walking up
to that penalty spot with the ball under their arm,
and you can say, this guy is feeling it. This
guy ishaking absolutely, and he's all the time in the
world to think. And that is where some problematical things
can happen unless you've trained your brain to cope with them.
I can still remember it's like an image in my
mind coming up to a shot on my home course
and thinking, you know, as my mind I could hear
the thoughts going through my mind about, oh my goodness,
because because to the right was the sea is the sea,
and and I developed a slice and as I was
walking up to this shot. My mind was going, don't
slice it, don't slice it, you know, and and it's like,
guess what, you know. It's it's when when somebody says,
don't think about pink elephants, all you can think about
is pink elephants, right, And.
Speaker 3: Well, when you say don't slice it, don't slice it.
To me, the only two words you're hearing the last
two slice.
Speaker 4: It, yeah, slicing, Yeah, you know when you don't absolutely
and you know, it's it's interesting because like for me,
soccer was just instinctive.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've you know, done martial arts as well.
When I when I when I fought, and you know,
I've won won my regional championship. I remember just not
thinking and I think high level sports, you what you
do is you train your skills. But then when you're
in performance in a flow state, there's no thinking, it's
just doing. And it's that ability, as you say, to
just be in the moment, leave your ego to one side.
And this is actually something we know from the study
of flow states that something that happens in a flow
state is it's quite a mouthful. It's called transient hypofontality,
and it means that the prefrontal cortex is actually downgraded. Now,
the prefrontal cortex is associated with with, you know, the
logical thinking part of our brain, the decision making part
of our brain, and we might think, well, why would
we want to downgrade that, We want it all engaged,
But it's definitely true that we can overthink when we're
actually performing in sport, and that part of our brains
also associated with ego and emotions. And one of the
things that happens in a flow state is you let
all of that go and you just do But you
have to train the brain to get into that state.
That's that's the difficulty. We've probably all experienced flow states
from time to time, but what we now know is
we can definitely do things to get there more often,
and that's useful whether you're making decisions at a poker table,
in a in a you know, courtroom, you know, in
a business negotiation, or on a golf course.
Speaker 3: The fascinating part about flow state, and I want to
get really deep into this it d Somebody wrote a
review about our podcast, and because Fred is obsessed with
the mental game, it's like, are you saying that as
a good thing or a bad thing because we all
know what golf is not just about hitting a ball, right,
you know, playing golf and hitting golf balls are very
different things, and you know a lot of it is
that doesn't get discussed and you're taking lessons because you're
just learning how to hit a ball. Is you know,
the strategic part and the mental part. So yeah, I
do get obsessed with this kind of a topic, but
I think it's really really helpful for all. Now, you
were talking about flow state. You know, when you're getting
into the flow state, you really don't recognize it while
you're there. It's almost like a post mortem. It's always like, oh,
I was in a flow state, Then how did I
get there? How did I fall out? How do I
get back? And I think that's primarily what we're discussing today, right.
Speaker 1: It is it is. I mean, just circling back to
what you said a second ago about the importance of
mental gain. I think anybody who stood on the driving
range and hit a sequence of very good shots and
then gone to the course and when it's a shot
which matters, has not been able to reproduce anything like
that shot that might there is the importance of the
mental game, because there is a gap very often between
what our theoretical technical skills should produce and what when
we are put under pressure, we actually do produce. And
this is true in a whole realm of fields. You know,
as I say, I work with I work with knowledge professionals,
I work with sports professionals, and very often what we
are focusing on is this question of, well, why am
I not producing the skills at the level I am
capable of. So if we if we sort of gave
ourselves a scale of zero to one hundred on our
golf skills, yes, there's work to do with your you know,
your professional, your instructor, your coach, who is going to
work on actually hitting the ball well. If you get
to the point where it's like, you know, I can
hit that shot well nine times out of ten in practice,
but I get to the course and guess what, it's
nothing like nine out of ten. That, right there is
is the mental game. And when somebody says, oh, you know,
why are we bothering about the mental game, Just learn
to hit the ball better, that's it's missing the point.
In terms of what you say about flow states, Yeah,
you're right, this is the whole point, it's actually a
very relaxed state of mind. Your brain actually goes into
a relaxed brainwave state. It's often an alpha state or
a THET brainwave state, rather than a really deeply focused
state in the conventional sense, you know, the kind where
you're you know, if you're solving a math problem, you
might be scrunching up your eyebrows and your you know,
the lines would come onto your forehead. That's not how
we want to play golf. It's not how we want
to perform in a lot of these scenarios, you know,
whether it's performing at the poker table, whether it's making
a speech. Lots of studies incidentally on jazz musicians in
flow states, and again it's very they go into a
very relaxed state. But what they're doing is they're executing
their skills in a very relaxed brain wave state, and
you just slip into it and it's the kind of
thing where you come out of it and you go, wow,
that felt so easy, and yet I was performing so well.
And we've learned more about the brain in the last
twenty years as a result of modern brain imaging techniques,
and we kind of knew in the previous two thousand years,
and what we actually know now is how we can
actually manipulate our environment and the way we prepare to
get into these flow states more often. And the great
news is it's actually extremely efficient to be in a
flow state. Involve huge amounts of hard work. It does involve. Look,
you know, if somebody said I've not practiced a bunker
shot for two years, If you put me in a
bunker and I was that person, I'll it'd be very
hard to get into a flow state because my mind
will recognize the fact that I've not got the core
skills to perform. If I've done the right kind of
practice and I've done the work around getting into a
flow state, I will be able to relax and be
much more likely to reproduce what I do, what I'm
capable of from the training ground on the actual field
of play. And that's what happens in a flow state.
You are able to relax. And we've seen it with
great sports people, right you know, we think about I
was thinking before this podcast of moments where I've thought
of great golfers and you see them in flow and
it was a shot Fred Couples played. I think it
was years ago in the Masters, and he hit it
and he just went oh baby as he hit it,
and that was just like that was flow. It was
just pure relaxation, just doing his thing, not overthinking. You know,
you took Ernie L's to be easy. Everything looked effortless, right,
and that's how Yeah, and that's what we want to produce.
Whereas a lot of a lot of people bring tension
to what they do, be it round of golf, making
a speech, pearing. You know. Again as a lawyer, you know,
used to be involved in a lot of negotiations, but
you want to be relaxed. That conveys authority. So this
is what this is what the training I do with
clients in whatever context tries to bring about this state
of relaxed focus. So it's the ability to zone in
on what you want to do, but without bringing all
sorts of thoughts which are unhelpful into the moment.
Speaker 3: Flow state jazz, it's the perfect combination. It's the perfect
description of flow state is jazz. Yeah, you know, pure jazz.
It's just letting it go, trusting what's there and letting
it let it come through you. I love that, Yeah,
I mean that's awesome.
Speaker 1: You know, Basically, the science has identified that there were
four stages to the flow cycle. And I won't go
through the morning detail today, but number one is.
Speaker 3: The four stages don't tease me and leave me.
Speaker 1: Okay, So the four stages are struggle. Now, people don't
want to hear that when when they're talking about flow states.
But that is where you learn your core skills. So
when we're talking about the jazz musician who produces this
beautiful improvisation, at some point they will have learned the
core skills. They will have done their scales, they will
have learnt that piece of music in its most basic
for but they'll have got that down. So like for us,
it will be okay, I'm going to basically have some
core skills in terms of the way I drive the ball,
the way I hit my iron shots, the way I
hit the ball out of a bunker. I'm going to
get that, and I'm going to get it to a
point where it feels I've at least got something which
is reliable and repeatable. That's that's unavoidable work. Then there's release. Now,
this is the interesting thing, and this is the lesson
I wish I'd had when I started playing golf, I
you know, when I went to the driving range, I
just wanted to hit as many balls as possible. And
one of the things that the brain does is it
wants to break every now and then. So let's say
I do it the way I should have done, which
was okay, let's just focus on a particular technique that
I want to integrate into my swing. Then step away,
step away, go for a walk, go and have a
cup of coffee for fifteen minutes, and the brain will
subconsciously work on integrating that it's learning. And you only
even need to think about You only need to go
away and say I just need to think a bit
more about this. The brain will do it. This is
really vital for a lot of skills. It probably seems
more logical to apply it to knowledge professionals. I mean,
Albert Einstein used to after he'd done his working the lab,
he used to go on late Geneva and go fishing,
and he actually found he had his greatest insights there.
This was this release phase of the flow cycle in operation.
The brain goes into a more relaxed state and it
actually knits all that you've been trying to work on together,
So that's really important. And then there's the flow phase itself,
and what happens in the flow phase is there's huge
amounts of dope men and Europe and ethrine driven to
the brain and they drive this state of effortless focus.
And then also important is the recovery phase, and there's
lots we can talk about there. There's physical recovery, but
there's also mental recovery. Again, I tend to do talk
about this in more detail with professional athletes, but it's
definitely applicable to people you know who are working, for example,
in a knowledge profession, and I think a lot of
people just work extremely hard and don't understand the importance
of giving themselves proper recovery to allow themselves to get
into a high performance state. Again, so those are the
four phases. Now, what that actually looks like for an
individual very much depends on what their life looks like,
but that's something we work on. I then use one
of the tools I do use, and I know you've
had other podcast guests talk about hypnotherapy, but I use
hypnotherapy to help integrate these skills into the way people
approach whatever it is their challenge is. So you know,
if it's a round of golf, I will get them
to visualize being in a flow state. They have experienced
probably moments of a flow state in their life before,
and we will leverage that to get them back into
that state on the golf course. We'll do other work
to make sure that everything's aligned to achieve that, but
we'll also engage memories of having been in that state,
even if it's not in a golf a round of golf.
I mean, if somebody says to me, I've never been
in a flow state on the golf course, I'll say,
have you ever been in a flow state anywhere? And
they usually will have been, and I will use that
memory to transfer that state of mind to the golf course.
Speaker 3: When we're on the driving range and we hit ten
shots as we're working on something and nine of them,
as you said, go, well, that one doesn't. That's the
one that we get nervous about when we're walking up
to the shot on the course because the course, on
the driving range, obviously there's no pressure to perform. That's why,
like when I'm when I'm warming up for putting before around,
I'll ask my playing pardon, let's let's have a little
competition here, just to put a little bit of pressure
on these putts, because if I put four in a
row and one of the four goes in, I'm like, oh, okay,
I'm ready to go. Well really yeah, you know, so
we want to try to find the time. You know,
golf is even the best golfers in the world make
bad shots. It's about how you recover from them. That's
that's the point. But I don't know do we want
to There's two things I want to go after. One,
I want to talk more about the recovery phase, but
also you talk about, you know, professional athletes, professional poker players,
professional golfers, how they get there on that flow state.
I want to know how do we as recreational as amateur,
no matter what our skill level, whether we're an eighteen
twenty handicap or we're scratch or one or two, can
we get there?
Speaker 1: Yes? You can, absolutely you can. We've got to recognize
that a flow state for a fifteen handicapped golfer is
not going to look like a flow state for you know,
somebody who's a musician, Yeah yeah, or somebody who's competing
down the stretch in the Masters. Okay, what it will
look like is, hey, I am playing my best golf
and I why it will look where it will look
similar is that they will be getting out of their
own way, they won't be getting in their own head,
and they will be performing at their level. Okay, so
they will be performing at a level commensurate with their skills,
because that's what we're talking about here. What we want
to do is at least perform and a level commensurate
with our technical skills. And what very often happens for
a lot of golfers is that they fall below what
they're capable of, you know. In other words, to come
back to our example of the person who hits nine
out of ten good shots on the range a particular
type of shot, and they go to the course and
they're not hitting it with anything like that frequency. So
we can definitely prepare the recreational golfer to perform at
their level. Now, they have to still do the hard
work if they want to improve their game to take
it to the next technical level, but mentally they can
do working. It can be very time efficient by the way,
you know, I mean when I work one of one
of the most common kinds of clients I have. I
do have professional sports people, but I also have clients
who are in business or in a professional line of work,
and they also are extremely interested in sports, so I do.
I've got a client now who's very keen golfer. He's
a lawyer and he loves his golf, and we will
do work on that because that is his big passion,
it's his big outlet. I've got clients who are into tennis.
Same thing. Very common one for me given my background
is I've got clients who are maybe in business, but
they love poker. And what I do with all of
these clients is work on basically ensuring that we've got
techniques that we can build into their lifestyle. And it's
a busy lifestyle for most of these people, which they
can they can transfer to their passion, their recreational passion.
And the good news about this is that, well two
good pieces of good news. Number One, you can be
time efficient with this stuff, and secondly, these skills tend
to transfer to the other things you're doing in life.
So if you can get into flow states when you're
on the golf course but you're not a professional golfer,
you can actually use these same approaches to perform better
in your business because they are skills which transfer I've
mentioned jazz musicians, I've mentioned professional poker players, tennis players, golfers,
people in business, traders you know, I act for a
number of people who are crypto traders and four x traders,
and being able to perform in a flow state there
is important. So these skills are very transferable across all
of these spheres. And the good news is they, as
I say, you can do it in a way which
is extremely time effiicient. It has to be. It's slightly different. Obviously,
if somebody is a full time professional sports person, they've
got all the time in the world to prepare themselves,
and it is their business to prepare themselves. But it's
definitely true that you can develop techniques to get into
flow in a way which is extremely time efficient, even
if you just you know, are playing around on a Saturday.
Speaker 3: But what does it take for you to recognize that
you're in it? I mean, how much I guess how
much work does it take? Do you have to be
at that level? Or can can an amateur golfer go, WHOA,
I'm in the flow state right now? Or is that
identification immediately the opportunity to self sabotage.
Speaker 1: No, well, let me ask you.
Speaker 3: The first question is asking two questions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the first question answer. The first question is
an amateur golfer absolutely can be in a flow state.
As I said before, the question is what does that
look like given their skill level. But the point is
what does a flow state mean for an amateur golfer.
Let's say it was me, a mid handicapper. It just
means I am executing the shots the way I know
I can. Now, that's not going to be anything like
a professional golfer, let's be honest, but I will be
playing my game. In other words, if I am hitting
that shot ten times well on the range, I will
be hitting it nine out of ten times well on
the course. That's what it looks like for me. I
won't be hitting it as far or as accurately as
a pro, but I will be getting out of my
own way. I won't be overthinking. I'll just be in
that state of flow. So it can look and feel. Certainly,
it can feel exactly the same as it would for
a professional sportsperson. Because flow is essentially a person experience,
you still will perform on a level which reflects your
your actual technical skills. But the good news is, you know,
as so often isn't the case, we are actually at
least performing at the level of our technical skills. You know.
That's that's the point I'm making here about close states
that one of the things that happens is you perform
at the level of your capabilities. And so often when
we go to the golf course and when we're playing
in that situation where it matters, hitting that shot matters
as opposed to I get five more to get it
right on the range, you know, don't We don't play
at that level when we're on the course when it
really matters, But when we're in a flow state, that's
exactly what we achieve, and that's what we want to do, right.
All that practice is designed to produce a shot which
we're proud of on the course when it really matters,
and that can be achieved for the recreational golfer in
just the way it can for the professional golfer.
Speaker 3: But that's the thing about golf is as comfortable as
you are with this shot, it may leave you with
the next one as a shot that you're going I'm
not comfortable with this. I'm not confident in myself in this.
And again we're back to the self sabotage part I.
For myself, I have recognized times that I was in
the flow state. Afterwards it's like, oh, that's why today
was so comfortable. Yeah, that's why, because I was just
there and not getting my getting in as you say,
as doctor Joe Parent says from the very first episode
that we did I help golfers get out of their
own way. We get in our own way.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. I mean one of the one of the exercises
I do with clients is I will do visualization with
them under hypnosis and I'll record I actually record an
MP three for clients, and usually it will be some
thing I will update from time to time. So somebody
may go through a phase of finding a particular shot
difficult and a particular situation difficult. So let's say you're
in a flow state, you're hitting, you've hit some good shots,
and then you find yourself in a bunker, and let's
say that that that's your bet noir. Being in a
bunker is is something where you're you're not feeling comfortable.
So obviously number one you've got to work with your
your coach, your technical coach on being as good as
you can be. But what we will then do, having
done that work is I will get you to visualize
being in that situation and being comfortable with it. So
part of visualization, a really important part of visualization, isn't
just seeing everything going great, because that's just not the
way life works and it's not the way golf works. Right,
you know, you will hit that ball in the bunker sometimes,
and what we will do is get your mind to
be comfortable with facing that situation and you know, maybe
even playing a bad shot, you know, because that's also
going to happen. Hey, you know, you sit down and
watch any great player, they will hit a bad shot sometimes.
And what we want is is for the mind to
already be comfortable with the idea that Okay, that's gone.
I now deal with the next thing. And you can
definitely improve that state of mind by actually using these techniques,
by using a combination of what we know from flow
states and what we know from hypnotherapy, what's happening there
in those moments where things go wrong, and playing it.
I do remember playing a round of golf with a
good friend of mine, and he was one of the
most calm, chilled guys I've ever known. And I remember
him being in a bunker and I was across, I
was on the fairway watching him across in this bunker.
He was turning like a different shade of lead as
he hit multiple shots and they weren't coming out of
the bunker. And that was, you know, a classic case
of an emotional hijack on the golf course. You know,
your your subconscious is just like, I hate this, this
feels bad. And what we want to do is mentally
prepare for those moments so that we actually can keep
that same state of mind, so even if you are
in a difficult situation, you can train the mind to
actually say, hey, we've got this. There's been lots of
examples of this from sports psychology. I mean, a really
well known example is Michael Phelps, the swimmer, and one
way he was prepared by his coach was the coach
used to break his goggles so that the goggles and
then make him swim we've broken goggles. And it turned
out for one of his Olympic races his goggles were
actually broken, and mentally he was then not just technically
prepared as to okay, how do I keep swimming straight
and quickly, but also mentally he was already in the
zone where it's like I can cope with this. I've
been here before. So one of the things I do
with clients is prepare them for the difficult things that
can happen. I do think hypnotherapy is an extremely powerful
way of basically getting the mind prepared for that. I
know you've had Dr David Spieger on one of your podcasts,
and you know he can talk at some length about
the what's actually happening at a level of mural structures.
But effectively, what we're doing is we're teaching the mind
to learn how it's going to respond to these challenges.
And with this kind of approach I use with clients,
you can prepare your mind for those difficult moments so
you won't be kicked out of the flow state.
Speaker 3: You said emotional hijack. I've never heard that term, and
I absolutely love it, but I want to dig into it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, I mean I'm not the first one to
come up with that.
Speaker 3: I'm going to give you credit for it.
Speaker 1: No, I think I think the first person who came
up with it is a psychologist called Daniel Goleman. I'm
trying to remember the book. I think it was Emotional
Intelligence was the book, and he talks about the amigdala hijack.
So what happens is is this that we and will
recognize this. We get into a tense situation and often
we'll feel a physical response in our body. Strong emotions
produce strong physical reactions in our body. So if you've
ever got really angry or upset, you might feel attention
in your shoulders or your chest, and the amigdala recognizes that.
The brain recognizes it, and it tends to then send
a message to the fight, flight or freeze mechanism in
our body, which is in the mind, which is really
part of our evolutionary programming, and it says, hey, this
is this is a threat, and we then respond accordingly. Now, fight,
fight or freeze was a very useful evolutionary program, you know,
kept us alive as a species. It's highly unlikely to
be particularly useful as a response on the golf course.
You know, we are never going to be in a
situation where we need to fight, fight, or fly or freeze.
What we want is a much more calibrated, calm response.
You know, yeah, I found myself in the rough. That's
not a fight, flight or freeze situation. But we have
to train the mind to recognize that, because that may
be the situation if you're playing a money game or
you're playing for whatever stake's the matter. You know, it
may just be a four ball where there's a little
bit of private stake. The brain might still go to
that over exaggerated response. And what we what we have
to do is train the book the mind to say, hey,
wait a minute, there's a better way of dealing with this.
And this is something that comes across in lots and
lots of contexts. You know. One of the things I
work with a lot of clients on is fear of
public speaking. There's been some amazing studies. It's showing that
people are more scared of giving a speech than dying.
It's crazy, but that is that's an emotional hijack. Nothing
terrible is going to happen, but quite often we are
wired to respond in that way. And some of the
problems go back to the way we I mean, particularly
childhood experiences you might have had to have given a
think of a client who had to give a talk
in a classroom as a child, and the teacher was
unplayed and classmates were unpleasant about it, and so they
had a lot of difficulty at a point in their
life where they had to give a speech. They found
it hugely stressful, and what we had to do was
unravel that and teach their mind a new way to
thinking about it. Because it's really important for us to
be accepted playing a good shot on the golf course
and not letting your partner down if you're in a
if you're in a four ball, you know that still
matters to us. And it's no good just saying to somebody, oh,
come on, put it all in perspective. What we have
to do is train the mind to say, hey, let's
just create a good way of approaching how we're going
to deal with this situation. And you're not going to
be able to just do that on the hoof. You're
going to need to prepare for it mentally. But the
good news is there are ways of doing it. You know,
Daniel Goldman's book around Emotional Intelligence really is saying there
is a better way of approaching many many situations in
life where we have an instinctive emotional response. We can
retrain that response.
Speaker 3: You know, it's interesting. I see the correlation between an
unpracticed bunker shot and getting up on stage to make
a speech in front of a crowd of people as
not wanting to embarrass yourself in front of others for
something you're not comfortable doing in front of others, right,
I mean, it's like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, well again, think of this. You know, I've
already referred to the fact that this fight, fight or
freeze response is evolutionary. Think about one of the most
important things for us in evolutionary terms was to be
part of a tribe, to be accepted. And if you
stand on a stage and make a speech and it's
embarrassingly bad, your brain hates that because it's like, oh
my goodness, I'm not being accepted. If you let your
teammate down in a four ball you know that that's
that's a difficult feeling because it's the same thing. You know,
think of those guys in the Ryder Cup, you know,
and you know final holes, and you know you've got
to make that put You're you're not just looking after yourself,
You're you're basically it's hard. I mean look, even if
it was just you, you don't want to be known
as the choker, you know, So even then there's an
element of how do others perceive me? But again, this
is what we want to achieve when we go into
a flow state. We get all of that out of
the way. We don't want all of that extra stuff
on our shoulders. We just want to We just want
to play, We just want to hit the shot, and
we want to be able to get all of that
out of our heads. And that's what happens automatically in
a flow state. And through this combination of I mean
there's multiple leavers I use within the coaching I do,
but it is the flow states, the hypnotherapy, some body
to mind techniques like breathwork, my other mind to body
techniques like meditation. It all sounds like quite a lot,
but I find the right balance for clients and something
that they can fit into their everyday lives. Yeah, but
the good news is that, you know, it actually does
not take that much effort or time to actually achieve this.
It just takes a little bit of consistency in a
little bit of planning, and with that, you know, you
can get all the benefits.
Speaker 3: So you were saying that the four stages of flow stata, struggle, release,
the flow phase, and the recovery phase. Yes, and I
wanted to follow up on the recovery phase.
Speaker 1: Okay, So recovery is really well known as a concept
for professional athletes, and what people have in mind there
is Okay, make sure you're resting a lot, maybe getting
some massage for your muscles.
Speaker 3: But it's not an immediate phase. I mean, as far
as the fourth phase, it's not something that's all incorporated
in say a golf swing.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, absolutely not so so for example, Okay,
so the struggle phase, and let's let's translate this to
somebody who's playing golf. The struggle phase is what you're
going to be doing on the on the practice ground.
That's where you where you where you with your coach,
will break down your swing, will work out what you're
not doing right and having to do some hard work
to actually, you know, model the swing on a particular
shot the way that you need to, and that will
be difficult. You've got to try and build your skills
to the point of unconscious competence. There's there's no getting
around that. And it's going to be impossible to get
into a flow. As I say, you know, if I
now go into let's imagine I haven't played a round
of golf, will practice my bunker shot for a year.
Guess what if I then try and get into a
flow state and I find myself in a bunker, I
won't because I haven't gone through the struggle phase of
actually improving that technical skill. No amount of mental magic
I can do with the client is going to overcome
the fact that the client's conscious brain is going to say,
don't tell me to be relaxed here. I don't know
how to play this shot. I haven't practiced it enough,
so you have to do that work. The release phase
is something you can do at the practice ground, and
I would recommend it. It is just stepping away. I
do this. I play tennis every week and my coach,
you know, I will say to my coach sometimes just
give me five minutes. I've hit a number of serves.
Give me a few minutes. And I actually find that beneficial,
firstly physically to recover, but secondly just to let me
my brain just compute the way I've been hitting those serves.
That's really important. The same you know, when you're practicing
those shots. It's not a case of let's get the
most out of what. Let's say you've paid for an
hour of tuition with your golf coach. It may be
that it's a really smart use of time. Maybe golf
coaches feel they can't do this, but I would say
it's a really smart use of time to say to somebody, right,
you've been hitting that shot for the last ten minutes,
just take it easy. Let's just you know, sit here,
have a chat, have a cup of coffee for a minute,
and just let that all percolate effectively in your mind.
That's kind of what the re release phase looks like,
the flow phase looks after itself. That's the whole It's natural.
Recovery will be something that you will do after the event,
whatever that event is. What happens in a flow state,
and I think I've touched on this already, is and
a mental and neurologic level, what's happening is huge amounts
of dopamine and europin ethrin are being driven to your brain,
and those are extremely expensive neurochemicals for the body to produce.
So when we're talking about recovery in the context of
flow states. We're not simply talking about physical recovery. We're
talking about the recovery of the ability to regenerate these
flow neurochemicals. So things that are really important. This is
going to apply to any of your listeners who are
working extremely hard in a knowledge professional environment. You know,
they're working in an office, and a lot of people
just work, work, work, and think, I'm going to have
to solve this project. I'm going to have to solve
this problem I'm working on. But what's really important is
that they, after maybe some concentrated time working on the problem,
they actually step away and they do things like go
and have a sauna, go and have a massage, make
sure you do not compromise on sleep, go and do
some light exercise. You know, all of these things are
proven ways to regenerate those neurochemicals, and they then start
the flow cycle again. They then help you get back
into float. Without recovery, you don't get back into flow.
That's why it's a cycle. It restarts where a lot
of people, where a lot of people who really want
to achieve a lot in whatever field fail is. They
work hard, they get into the flow state, but then
they just say I've got to keep working. I've got
to keep grinding. And what you do need to do
is recognize the importance of recovery in starting that flow
cycle all over again.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, that you know. Golfers have to be
able to identify how important what you just said is
for their overall game, their overall you know, start to finish.
It's not just shitting balls, and so much of that
is so important. Thank you, Oh my god, that's incredible.
Take the last minute. If you can to promote yourself,
your podcast, your books, your poker game, whatever you'd like.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, Well, you can find me on www dot
s Baker s for Stephenbaker dot life, and you can
be a k e R. That's right, yes, and you
can have a free consultation if you there, there's a
there's a link. And yeah, if you think that I
can help you improve your golf care game or your
business decision making, anything where performance is important, just feel
free to reach out to me then and we can
we can spend half an hour chatting about how I
can help you.
Speaker 3: And just to make sure people understand, don't go to
s Baker dot com, It's s Baker dot life.
Speaker 1: That's correct.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh wow, Steve even this has really been informative
and enlightening. I feel like I need to recover from
the flow scrape here on this conversation. Thanks so much
for your time. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Fred really enjoyed it.