Golf Flow

the golf ball making decisions on its own, a sense of destiny and cooperation materializes between golfers and their equipment as they pick the right club for the right shot. And when they pick the club, they do so with confidence, with no second-guessing. And when they put the club into their hands, the fit, length, weight, look, and feel are all perfect. In my camp, that is, among the golfers with whom I work, we refer to this occurrence as a time when the machine is working, an analogy that captures how machines function smoothly because many parts are working together in unison.
    U.S. Open winner Jim Furyk captured this aspect of flow perfectly:
The club just feels good in your hands. My hands feel different on the club. My hands feel long and thin rather than short and stubby. It makes the grip feel small, yet really comfortable. You can place the ball right where you want to, and be so confident about it . . . and be able to play effortlessly.
    British Open champion Steward Cink reported similar impressions:
I don’t feel like I have a club in my hand, rather, everything, including the club and my body, feels like one in the same. It is almost as if I am tossing the ball where I want it to go. It is that easy.
    This sense of connectedness and ease is automaticity at its best, and it’s a function of the thousands of hours of deliberate practice that myelinate our habits. We practice for precisely that reason: So that when it comes time to be on the golf course, we select the right club, go through a routine, execute the appropriate shots, and accept the results without engaging in a whole lot of extraneous thoughts. The impression of the club being an extension of ourselves is a sign that the brain is working optimally. The brain has built-in filters that block out nonessential information and key in on the things that matter. There is nothing extraordinary about this, because we do it every day. When you first learn a physical task such as roller skating or riding a bike, you have to think about how to balance, steer, and brake. Over time the physical tasks require less conscious thought; they become natural and automatic. The real fun comes when you feel so connected to your skates or your bike that you move as one!
    For the golfer in flow, the brain filters the extraneous, zeros in on the task, and provides us with the wonderful perception of being in easy harmony with the equipment and the game itself.

Energy and Effort
    When you spend a lot of time traveling with golfers, one of the things you notice is that people involved in the traveling show known as the PGA Tour become road weary around the end of June. By the time September rolls around, many of the world’s best golfers are walking around like zombies with dead eyes. Flow states noticeably diminish in frequency. The hope, energy, enthusiasm, motivation, and effort characteristic of late spring and early summer are replaced, for many, by a limp to the finish line. This state of psychological atrophy is the antiflow.
    Although flow states seem effortless, the body and mind are actually working extremely hard. Think of driving a V12 Ferrari Testarossa with 390 horsepower. As you accelerate in the Ferrari, it may seem as if the car isn’t expending any energy at all, but in fact it is burning a great deal of fuel. Similarly, an F-16 fighter jet can fly with effortless lift, but that level of performance burns an enormous amount of fuel. These two analogies fit the flow state on many levels. Flow states are the most premium and optimal of mental states. They are best in class. They are also efficient and powerful. And like the Ferrari and the F-16, they consume a great deal of energy, though you don’t feel it at the time.
    The energy used to fuel flow needs to be restocked, and if it isn’t, golfers fall into antiflow. For that reason, many of the world’s best players vary their playing schedules. They often choose to play three or four weeks in a row and then rest for a couple of weeks so that they can replenish their physical and emotional energy in the hope that they can generate flow during the next cycle. Johnny Miller and Phil Mickelson, who both preferred to play many early season tournaments, garnered few of their career victories in the second half of the year.
    The links between subconscious control and effort are abundant. By trusting your habits and engaging in implicit (rather than busy and verbally explicit) thinking, you are