Golf Flow

mirrored his increasing freedom: 71, 67, 65, 64. He birdied his final hole to force a playoff and then birdied four out of his six playoff holes for his first PGA Tour win.
    In working with golfers for over 20 years, I had never seen a golfer go from so high on the mountaintop as the elite player in college, to so low when he was slumping, and to the heights again during that final round when he was in flow. During his 5-year slump, it seemed reasonable at times for Bryce to stop chasing his dream of winning on tour and leave golf. It seemed as if he might never get it back, especially when he was shooting in the 80s on smaller tours and getting beat by amateur golfers. But Bryce kept rolling with the game, learning, and growing. His story is a story of dreams and resilience, of humility and talent, of growth, and ultimately of acceptance and freedom.

Part IV
Ten Keys to Flow on the Course
    If there is one fundamental rule of success that is almost universally acknowledged by successful people I’ve studied, it is the importance of learning what to do with failure. To quote my friend, author Daniel Coyle, the brain requires failure to improve: “Struggle is not optional; it’s neurologically required.” You will read more about this theme going forward in this book, but now is a good time for you to consider how you’ve handled your failures so far, and how you may handle them in your future. If you thoroughly embrace all the material in this book, you will still struggle. But ultimately, you will improve, and you will increase your chances of getting into flow more frequently.
    A mastery orientation, sufficient self-efficacy, the proper challenge–skill balance, and the ability to channel setbacks into learning opportunities to create an environment for continual growth and improvement will help you achieve the calm state of mind that can lead to flow. The stories from the PGA golfers and the lessons that they learned will inspire you. But in addition to all that, I have found that golfers benefit from specific keys and exercises that they can return to repeatedly.
    In this section I offer specific measures that you can take to increase the likelihood of getting into flow and thus the frequency with which that happens in a given round or tournament. Depending on your personal style, your current state of mind, the aspects of the game that you struggle with most, and the particular situation that you find yourself in, some chapters may prove more or less helpful than others at any given moment. I offer this particular group of keys because I have found that successful high-level golfers who get into flow with regularity exhibit them. Whether you implement them all in order or select and perfect the ones that speak most directly to you and your game first, these keys will help you experience flow.

Chapter 16
Study Success
    There is an adage to the effect that success is not accidental. Although most golfers believe that the bulk of their work begins and ends with the development of their golf swing, for the competitive golfer a sound golf swing is a launching point rather than a destination. To many golfers, working hard means going out there and beating balls, when, in fact, working hard should mean working to learn everything it takes to be a complete golfer: developing effective swing mechanics, improving fitness, getting the right equipment, and fashioning the mind toward winning. When you watch a PGA Tour professional on television, what you don’t see is all the work that happens behind the scenes. Every one of them is working on his body, mechanics, and mental sharpness.
    Jack Nicklaus observed, “Once a golfer has developed and ingrained a fundamentally sound method, by far the biggest mountain left to climb is learning how to win.”
    Note that he says “learning” to win. Winning is not necessarily the natural result of effort and practice. To win (a lot in Jack’s case), you have to understand the art of winning. While Jack Nicklaus spent his youth studying the mind and manners of the great Bobby Jones, an entire subsequent generation of golfers studied Jack. This group includes the likes of K.J. Choi, Nick Price, Tiger Woods, Geoff Ogilvy, and Ernie Els. Greg Norman studied Nicklaus’ game while he was an up-and-coming pro in Australia. He ends his book
The Way of the Shark
(Norman 2006) by reflecting,
And then there was the incomparable Jack Nicklaus—my childhood hero, a man who was