Golf Flow

technical skills, the regularity and discipline with which you apply your best habits, and the good and bad features of your attitude.
Remember that breaking through perceived limitations results from the accumulation of consistently applied behaviors, so your goal is to begin making qualitative changes in your practice sessions.
After you have identified qualitative improvements that you can make, commit to doing the little things regularly every day. You may find it helpful to enlist the automatic reminder feature on your cell phone to remind you to do those things every day.
Get honest with yourself about your attitude. Identify the good and bad aspects of your attitude and look to apply the best parts of yourself consistently. Don’t just think the right things; also say and do the right things.
    By making small, qualitative changes over time, I am confident that you will be able to push your talent to levels that you may have previously thought unattainable. More relevant to this book, because flow is the amalgamation of various psychological mechanisms coming together, you will be habituating the technical, psychological, and behavioral habits that lead you to playing golf in flow!

Chapter 21
Craft Your Environment
    Far too often I see golfers on the golf course dressed sloppily and eating hot dogs with one hand while they talk on their cell phones with the other. They rummage through their bags trying to figure out which pocket holds their tees, their ball markers, or their golf gloves. In simple terms, they are disorganized, and they create an environment around them that is reminiscent of Pig Pen from the old
Peanuts
comic strips. These conditions are not likely to produce flow. On the contrary, cell phones and other disruptions are the antiflow.
    The concept that environmental changes influence behavior changes is well known and widely accepted, and you’ve no doubt experienced and witnessed how gloomy, rainy days tend to dampen people’s moods whereas bright, sunny skies help to boost spirits. Such responses are hard-wired, or innate, evoked by processes similar to those that help us feel sleepy at night and more alert during the day. Research has verified that the amount of pollution in the air not only harms cardiovascular and respiratory health but also has an influence on mental well-being and even the ability of the brain to process information (Weir, 2012). This kind of wiring has led some people to embrace feng shui designing, which promotes the creation of a set of environmental conditions that are said to be conducive to better health and overall well-being. As a natural result of all the research showing the importance of environmental factors on performance, I caution my golfers to be aware of all aspects of their environment, including their ventilation and air filters, their home gyms, the hotels that they stay in, the food that they keep in their cupboards, and the people whom they keep in their inner circle. Ultimately, crafting a healthy environment that is conducive to high achievement will have an effect on the scorecard.
    If you are skeptical about the influence that the environment can have on behavior, the following story may change your mind. A restaurant owner once faced a tricky problem. His restaurant provided such an enjoyable atmosphere and such good food that customers were in no rush to finish their meals and leave. People liked sitting at their tables and taking their time dining. As a result the restaurant had a huge waiting list every night. He had created an environment in which people wanted to eat, but the waiting lists were often so long that many customers grew weary of waiting and left to dine elsewhere.
    Looking for help, the owner consulted a team of psychologists from a local university to find a way to get people to finish their meals quicker and make room for waiting customers without compromising the quality of the customers’ dining experience. In the restaurant business this action is called turning tables. After a month of observing customers’ behavior and timing the average time that people spent eating, the psychologists made a recommendation that they thought should solve the problem. Before reading further, take a guess what the researchers proposed.
    They suggested that the owner install dimmers on the light switches so that every time the restaurant started getting full, the owner could make the lights marginally, almost imperceptibly brighter.