Golf Flow

dangerous territory. My job is to protect you at all costs, even if it means shutting down your digestion. You’re tapped!”
    The brain and central nervous system have all sorts of survival mechanisms that process information unconsciously and snap a person back into balance and comfort. But here’s an interesting proposition put forth by Dr. Thomas Rowland (Rowland 2011):
The internal, unconscious mechanisms that help regulate heart rate, body temperature, and digestion are the very mechanisms that place limits on individuals who are trying to break through their own personal thresholds.
    Psychologists have long known that people often self-sabotage when they get out of their comfort zone. As William James observed,
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
    Through his astute observations of human behavior, James was able to detect this restricted circle in which people live. What James did not have access to a hundred years ago was the scientific research on brain anatomy that we currently have. Today researchers are concerned with where the extra resources reside and how to tap into them to push past personal barriers. One of the key findings from recent brain research has to do with the unconscious governors that instigate that perceived threshold. According to Rowland, humans have a central governor that acts like a subconscious protective brake and limits how hard our unconscious brain will allow us to push ourselves. Rowland puts forth convincing evidence that even the world’s best endurance athletes actually have more to give, if only their brains would let them.
The point of the central governor is to ensure that there is always a reserve so in a sense, it always promotes underperformance. Even in the world’s best performances, there is still a reserve—the athletes could have gone faster. That is why they don’t die at the finish. (Rowland 2011, p. 16)
    Rowland’s central governor hypothesis provides insight for the type of self-handicapping and self-sabotage that William James and other psychologists have witnessed for years. Just as the brain keeps nutrients, glucose, and oxygen stores to make sure that we have a comfortable reserve, it keeps us feeling comfortable when we stay within our perceived limitations but often pushes back when we seek to break through performance thresholds. As a result, most people tend to fall back to their average. What promotes the discomfort that golfers feel when they get out of their comfort zone? The answer is that exceptional performance is abnormal, uncomfortable, and by definition unknown, and the brain is designed to keep us in a comfortable realm full of familiar experiences.
    Going back to the example of my young swimmer Benjamin, the resistance that he felt when he put his face underwater came from a place deep inside him that told him, “That’s dangerous.” But his central governor was preventing him from doing something that he was clearly capable of doing. His brain was, in Rowland’s terminology, promoting underperformance from a deep, internal place that was precognition. Ben was afraid before he knew what he was afraid of.
    What was the path to getting him swimming like a fish and breaking through those barriers? My approach was much like the work I do with golfers; I redirected his focus and played games with him. I turned his thoughts away from the fear and toward games that promoted retrieving the ball from underwater and swimming lengthy distances. At one point, as he was propelling his body away from the edge of the pool and toward me, he kept saying, “I can’t, Mr. Gio. I can’t, Mr. Gio.” As he got closer, I took tiny steps back to make him swim a little farther. He traversed the length of the pool, saying, “I can’t,” even as he was swimming! When he finally made it to the other side, he looked back with alarm at what he had done. But the mental block was cleared, and from that point forward he was able to swim the length of the pool easily.
    Similar things happen to golfers. I’ve known Matt Kuchar for more than a