Golf Flow

of. His first three rounds of 64, 62, and 68 were definitely flow states and were the highlights of a stretch of golf that would have him leading 14 of 16 tournament rounds in a row during 2010.
    Whenever a golfer wins something of significance, a good deal of attention comes with the win. Whether it’s status at your local club, respect among friends, or, as is the case with the PGA Tour, worldwide attention, this audience effect, as it is called by psychologists, can be hard to cope with. Even a newly minted mastery golfer can have trouble blocking out a sudden burst of attention.
    Now that Justin was back in the public eye, the spotlight proved a little too bright for him to hide in his mastery mind-set and fearless routine. As the Sunday unfolded, Justin was visibly nervous and edgy on the golf course. Shot after shot was slightly off the mark; putts that the week before seemed to have eyes for the bottom of the cup were now sliding by the hole. By the time he made the turn, he’d already lost the lead. He shot a final-round 75 for a ninth-place finish.
    I was excited about his performance and told him so. I think he thought that I was nuts. How could anyone be excited about blowing a lead? I quickly sent out a message to the entire team: “This is not a funeral, nor a reason to sulk. It’s an opportunity to learn. You will learn and you will be better.” The point of my message was this: There is no way to improve without making mistakes! In other words, we couldn’t learn unless we had the experience to learn from! That’s why I was insistent that his Sunday 75 was exactly what we needed to happen and that he would be a better golfer if he interpreted his 75 as a learning experience.
    That Monday we had a longer than normal conversation, and rather than following our typical process, I was direct about expressing my ideas. I made him a “Sunday Guide for Closing,” which he took into the next week at AT&T, a guide that explained the key mental aspects of closing out a golf tournament.
    A key principle to effective functioning in any competitive domain is the principle of kaizen, which we talked about in chapter 6. Although kaizen translates literally from its original Japanese simply as “improvement,” it has come to embody an entire belief system whereby people see themselves as dynamic creatures, capable of endless improvement. This belief that we are always capable of getting better requires us to immerse ourselves in a process of continual challenge, growth, and learning. And learning is what golf is all about.
    I end my weekly conversations with my golfers by asking them to tell me something that they learned from the previous week. I ask them to put aside their emotional reactions from the week before—no sulking, no overreacting, no getting lost in the psychological devastation that comes with relentlessly reminding yourself of how close you were, what could have been, or how much money you’ve lost—and instead immediately get into a mastery mind-set of identifying what lessons can be learned.
    Justin went into the AT&T Classic in Philadelphia. The legendary golf course was set up to be difficult, and Justin had been saying that he was treating it as the U.S. Open. The other thing that was exceptional about the week was how Justin was handling his media days leading up to the tournament. After “choking” at Hartford (media term, not mine), Justin sat in front of the media and patiently answered questions. But he answered questions from the mind-set of a mastery golfer rather than from the mind-set of an ego golfer. He wasn’t embarrassed by his performance. Rather, he was encouraged because he had learned valuable lessons. “I am sure that last week’s tournament has made me a better golfer,” he said. In private Justin had said to me, “You know what? I would rather learn my lesson about rhythm and tension and tempo now, rather than having to blow a major to learn it. I see this as a good thing. A learning experience.”
    I smiled. Those are the words of a mastery golfer.
    The following excerpt from his Friday at AT&T is a little long, but it perfectly illustrates how mastery golf plays out in real life. It explains how golfers can become better through adversity if they transform failures into learning experiences and then apply those experiences. Think of this as a golfer mentally flushing away the negativity.
    Question: Can you put into words what you learn out of an