Golf Flow

moment.”
    I recall sitting in a lecture with a former teacher of mine, Professor Frank Pajares, who gave me an analogy that works: NFL quarterbacks do not throw the football at a streaking receiver. Rather, they anticipate where the receiver will be at a future point in time. That’s where they place the ball.
    Similarly, golfers need to view themselves as emergent beings with emergent properties and realize that the habits of mind that they cultivate today will emerge at some future point in time. Beat yourself up today, and you will feel the effects down the road. Practice sloppily today, and those habits will emerge down the road. Savor the opinions of others too much today, and you’ll be a prisoner to their validation in the future.
    That realization is the best way to integrate the sense of emergence into your mental toolbox. Focus on the now, but realize that the habits we create—habits of patience, attitude, kindness, acceptance, and humor—really matter because the things that we do today will show up down the road when we are on the golf course. To quote Oliver Wendell Homes, “I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.”

Chapter 8
Resilience to Overcome Adversity
    One area where the differences between mastery golfers and ego golfers are especially obvious is in the way in which they deal with setbacks and adversity. Because image and validation from other people is the barometer of success for ego golfers, as we discussed in chapter 6, they tend to interpret bad scores as bad golf. When they don’t play well, and by that I mean when they don’t score well, ego golfers typically feel embarrassed, frustrated, and angry. They hold little funerals each time their results are less than perfect. Their negative reactions penetrate their psyches and seep into other areas of life in the same way that a chemical leak can pollute groundwater. These cycles often metastasize into self-doubt, and they begin to reinterpret not only their most recent failure but also everything they’ve done to date. Their failures begin to loom larger as their past successes drift further out of sight. Their self-criticisms jump from attacks on their golf game to attacks on their identity. Rather than saying, “I played bad golf,” they say, “I am a bad golfer,” and the more they say it, the more self-fulfilling that prophecy becomes. Attributions change, stress levels rise, motivation diminishes, and before you know it, they’ve talked themselves into a slump, all the while never taking any responsibility for the situation that they themselves have created.
    Conversely, score is not the barometer of success for mastery golfers. Because they view the game in terms of long-term improvement, they use score as a measure of improvement, but not the only measure of improvement. Whereas insecurity is at the heart of ego golf, learning and growth are at the core of mastery golf. Mastery golfers gauge a performance as much by what they have learned through the round as by what score they shot in that round. Mastery golfers know that if they focus on learning, they can apply those lessons next time and be a better golfer day after day, week after week, and year after year.
    Mastery golfers often respond to bad scores with curiosity. Because their motivation rests on continued learning and improvement, they reflect on their performance, identify what went wrong, and approach the next round with increased determination. Because they are driven by the love of challenge, they strive to rise to the challenges that the game provides. Ego golfers ruminate in a tangled mess of misery, embarrassment, doubt, and frustration.
    As such, after a good round, mastery golfers typically don’t brag, gloat, or peacock. After bad rounds of golf, they don’t lose their temper, berate themselves or other people, or relive every bad shot in their minds. In either case, good score or bad score, mastery golfers default to the learning possibilities that they just experienced and wonder how they can apply what they’ve learned to become better down the road. They live according to one of the truisms of life: It is all right to make mistakes so long as you learn from those mistakes. This maxim is as true in golf as it is in other areas of life.
    In my experience, the game of golf rewards this approach of learning from your mistakes. Much of the success that I have with golfers is not