Author: Benjamin

Jerry and I both take a pretty dim view of the quality of golf instruction we see around. One recent example: we were at the range and watched an instructor give a “junior clinic.” Mostly he seemed to be doing little more than providing the kids with balls. One little girl of about eleven was swinging entirely from her arms, no shoulder turn at all, and so unsurprisingly was hitting without any power and without any accuracy. She clearly wasn’t having any fun. If the point of the exercise was simply to make contact with the ball, it’s really no harder to swing from core than than it is with the arms, but he didn’t offer her one word of explanation. From what we could see, all she learned that was that she has no power and that golf isn’t fun. Not only could we not see how this “clinic” was serving her, we thought it was likely to her detriment.

More broadly, if golf instruction were better, wouldn’t more people be better at golf? I came through this winter of teaching skiing with many criticisms of the way skiing is taught, but I’ll say this: with a little application, a novice skier can learn to ski well enough to actually have fun in just a few days.

Now it’s not unreasonable to say that golf is a harder sport than skiing, but I still think it’s an indictment of the way golf is taught that so many of us don’t get anywhere with our games, and, for as obsessed as we get, so few of us really have fun at the sport.

I’m not suggesting that instruction isn’t important. I came out of a winter of teaching skiing more impressed than ever at the value of good instruction. It’s worthwhile to take advantage of the knowledge of those who’ve come before you.

Nevertheless, neither Jerry nor I have taken a golf lesson since starting TTW. We’re applying our knowledge of energy dynamics and proper body function. We’re experimenting. And we’re definitely seeing improvement.

Still, it’s worth asking: could we speed up that process with some good instruction?

By definition, the answer is yes: good instruction helps you learn more quickly. But the sticking point–and what I intend to discuss over the next few weeks–is that it depends very much on what you mean by good.

A piece of wisdom handed down from my music teachers, but applicable to any craft in which we seek improvement, is that it is far better to practice for fifteen minutes every day than to practice for half an hour once every two days, or 45 minutes once every three days, etc.

In the realm of golf, a problem most of us run into with respect to practicing is that practicing golf is an ordeal. We have to go to the practice range, and a trip to the range involves getting in the car. Let’s face it, in the midst of all the other things we do in our daily lives, making a daily trip to the practice range is too much of a hassle. Furthermore, any time we go to the range, we’re going to go for long enough to make the trip worthwhile. We’re not going to make the drive for 15 minutes of quick practice. All of which means that on any given day, we’re unlikely to practice.

We want to get better, and the only way to get better is by practicing, but practicing is a hassle, so we don’t practice. It seems like we have a bit of a conundrum, doesn’t it?

A few weeks ago, I started a different approach to practicing golf: most mornings, I go to my local park and practice there. Now, before I go on, let me be clear: practicing in a park raises a couple of important issues, namely safety and protecting the park. Regarding the former, I only practice with real golf balls when I’m chipping–there just isn’t enough velocity on the ball to hurt anyone, and I’m not going to hit a shot so awry that anyone’s going to be in harm’s way. When I take full swings, I use light foam balls–they’re light enough that I don’t think they’d hurt even if you were standing right in front of one, and obviously I’m not going to hit one at someone directly in front of me. About the latter, because I too would be aggrieved if anyone went to my neighborhood park and tore up the grass, I only hit from a practice mat I put on the sidewalk.

I start my sessions with chipping. I set a bucket out in the grass to use as my target. In the short time I’ve been doing this, I’ve already seen myself improve. I rarely drain one into the bucket, but my grouping around the bucket is getting tighter and tighter. My aim and execution have both dramatically improved.

Afterward, I’ll hit some full-swing shots. Little by little, I’m working with longer and longer clubs. I’m seeing some improvement. Clubs that I couldn’t hit at all a few weeks ago, I’m sometimes able to hit.

As an added benefit, I’m seeing my improvements come much more quickly. Let’s say my limit before frustration sets in is 10 six-irons. Let’s say it takes five sessions of those ten balls, paying close attention and making tweaks, before I see any improvement. If I’m practicing only once a week, it takes more than a month before I see myself improve. If I’m practicing daily, it takes only five days.

I also play with things in a way that I wouldn’t at the range. It’s hard for me to go to the range and feel like I can take half swings, or intentionally mishit shots to learn what that swing feels like in my body. Yes, a ball at my local range only costs ten cents, but it still feels wrong to “waste” balls doing anything less than full swings that I’m trying to hit as well as possible. But at the park, if I’m trying, for example, to understand what it is I do to create that ugly push-slice I tend to hit, I can work on doing it intentionally, and it doesn’t feel like I’m wasting anything.

I’m also noticing that my ability to solve golfing problems has improved. Earlier this week, Jerry and I went to the chipping green, and we were practicing a shot from some really deep grass, and I was not succeeding with my shot. I got a little frustrated but I stuck with it and tried to figure out what I needed to do to hit the shot successfully, and by the third or fourth go-round practicing that shot, I was seeing my shots improve.

Now that I’ve been doing this for a few weeks, I am coming strongly to believe that a major part of the reason that most of us don’t see our golf games improve is that, even for the few of us who actually practice, we don’t practice often enough to get better at practicing itself. By practicing every day, I’m giving myself space to play with how I enter the practice mindset, to play with how I warm-up, and to play with the order of shots that I practice. In short, while I’m practicing, I’m also practicing practicing. My practice sessions themselves are getting more effective.

As I’m seeing the benefits in my own game that this change in approach is bringing, I’m discovering a mission for myself: I want to encourage people to bring to find a way to make practicing less of a big deal, so that we do it more, so that we improve, so that we have more fun.

Our initial jumping-off point for this project was the observation that centering and other techniques that Jerry teaches would dramatically help Tiger Woods in his desire to return to being genuinely competitive. I spent a month’s worth of pieces describing how centering would have helped Jordan Spieth at the Masters. In light of the recent pieces from Jerry and me about the practice of centering and how it helps people at our level, I thought it might be worthwhile to talk briefly about how centering might help other people at the top of their game as a way to pique thinking about other ways centering can be useful in our lives.

Because the French Open just ended, I’m going to focus on professional tennis players.

Serena Williams is still the person to beat in women’s tennis, but she tends to get listless and disinterested in the middle of matches, and then needs a dramatic over-compensation to get back into the match. It’s inefficient and it wears her down. She did this all through the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open last year, and it finally caught up with her in her match against Roberta Vinci. She no longer had sufficient reserves to draw on and she lost. I’m sure it’s clear enough to her when it happens–she is cruising along and suddenly she isn’t. Centering would help her feel as that listlessness sets in and possibly catch it before it became a problem. By feeling the difference between her flow state and her listless state, it would also allow her to let go of it more quickly when it does set in.

Maria Sharapova could benefit as well. Assuming she doesn’t get a doping ban that’s so long it ends her career, then she needs to deal with the real weakness in her game, which is her serve. Specifically, her toss is all over the place, which makes her serve very inconsistent and puts her under high stress during her service games. As we have spoken about at length with respect to our golf practice, centering gives the foundation for change by returning more fully to the present, rather than falling away into the past or future. For Sharapova, either the stress has become habitual (past focus), it stems from a worry that things could go wrong (future focus), or it’s a combination of both, but whatever it is, it’s corrupting her ball toss. A return to the present moment via centering would begin to shift that stress away. The ball toss could just be the ball toss.

For another example, consider Andy Murray. Murray tends to waste vast amounts of energy getting upset when things aren’t going his way in a match. He directs that energy toward the people in his player’s box. It got bad enough that his most recent coach, Amelie Mauresmo, with whom he had considerable success, admitted that their parting stemmed in part from the discomfort she felt being at the receiving end of his negativity during matches. (I can empathize; as a fan, it can be genuinely hard to watch.) Centering would allow him to experience the annoyance and frustration simply as they are, without needing to put more energy into them. It might also make him more aware of the effect he’s having on others.

A couple of things worth noting with respect to Murray: in last weekend’s final at Roland Garros, which Murray lost to Novak Djokovic, we saw very, very little of this habit. He did complain about a few things during the match, but those things–an interviewer in his player’s box during the match, seeing a cable-cam designed to look like an airplane in his peripheral vision while serving–seemed like fairly legitimate distractions. Of course, as Jerry spoke about in his piece from Tuesday, there are always distractions. The question is, how do we deal with them?

Also, the tenor of what Murray says during those spells matters a lot. Many, many tennis writers have discussed how singles tennis might be the loneliest of all sports–you’re separated from your opponent by both a substantial distance and a net. You’re not allowed any coaching. Whatever comes, you have to handle it all by yourself. When Murray is speaking things aloud but without the negativity, it may be a way to let go of that sense of aloneness, and thus be energetically worthwhile. He needs to learn to differentiate between practices that let go of negative energy and practices that soak in it.

Over the next week, consider ways that you could bring the awareness and flow brought by centering into problematic or at least energy-leaking habits in your own life.

Last week, I wrote about a day I spent fishing on the San Juan River and described how I had the most successful day I’d ever had by slowing down, paying attention, and then acting on what I observed.
I ended last week’s piece with a series of questions relating to what we’re doing here: “To what degree are the improvements in our golf game simply the willingness to slow down and pay attention as we practice? What is it that makes what we’re doing with TTW any different from what I did at the San Juan?”

Over the past week, I’ve put a lot of energy into those questions, and the answer I’ve come to is that essentially, it’s exactly that willingness to slow down and pay attention that’s driven our improvement. That is exactly what we are trying to do with TTW: to slow down and attend deeply to the moment, seeking to create a space where our rational mind and our intuitive self can engage with the task at hand and work together optimally instead of fighting each other. To feel our bodies as best we are able and to discern what happens moment by moment with as little judgment as possible. To bring a sense of play to our practice.

With the techniques at the heart TTW, we’re trying to create a ground for this to happen. That is what centering, this practice of bringing attention to the body and the breath, is all about. That day on the Juan, the circumstances were as they were, and I flowed with the river. On another day I might have succumbed to frustration, smacked my rod against the water, and broken the tip off. (How I know to offer that specific detail as indicative of frustration taking hold will be left as an exercise for the reader.)

The practice of centering is to give us an always-with-us, easily available means to access that state. For most of us most of the time, access into a calm, centered, flowing state happens at best haphazardly, during those few fleeting moments when our focus in some activity becomes just so. For many of us, it happens not at all.

Centering and related techniques offer the promise that this state–what has become popularly known as flow–can be accessed at will. More precisely–this is very important–flow is a skill that can be learned. It needs to be practiced. It gets easier to access as you work at it, and grows in depth as you practice. Like any other deep skill, it will meet your explorations of it with ever deeper rewards, and will still never become fully discovered. You will never exhaust that exploration.

Now think back to the story Jerry told about his client who speaks of the decline of her golf game but says that she doesn’t like to practice. What if we could convince her that practicing is fun? What might happen then?

How would we do that? It starts with centering. Centering brings your attention to the present moment, and the present moment, properly noticed, turns out to be fascinating. If she practiced centering as she practiced golf, and suddenly practicing golf became fun, what might happen with her golf game? More importantly: what might happen with her life in general?

Jerry is in Arizona celebrating his father’s 77th birthday with him, so he’s taking the week off from posting. In the meantime, I have been thinking hard about the question I asked at the end of my last piece, and aim to have some answers for my piece on Friday.

In Jerry’s piece from Tuesday, he described a client/friend of his who heard about the improvements in his golf game and said, “That’s great, Jer, but you’re bound to get better by practicing so much.” Her suggestion that the TTW principles amount to little more than a call to practice got me remembering something.

Back in the summer of 2013, a little more than a year before I started working with Jerry, I went fishing with a couple of friends at the San Juan River in northwestern New Mexico. We fished an area just below Navajo Dam. The water flows from the bottom of the dam, and so it stays consistently cold all year long, making it an excellent environment for zillions of tiny little bugs and the trout, especially rainbow trout, that feed on them. The fish there get big. There’s a restricted-limit zone for the first couple of miles below the dam, and in that area you’re allowed to keep one fish over twenty inches per day. You can catch trout that size pretty regularly. Like I said, big.

I’ve been fishing the San Juan since I was a teenager, and have been many times, but it had been a long time since I’d gone, maybe approaching ten years. It was good to be back.

My friends and I got on the river by mid-morning. We did okay but not great at the start, and then, as happens at the Juan, we hit a lull and didn’t see a strike for a long time. During that time, rather than giving in to frustration, I did something I’d never done there before: I stopped fishing and started really observing and thinking about what I observed.

One of the fascinating and frustrating things about fishing the San Juan is that when you wade in, the fish will come right up to your legs and use you to block the river’s current. From what I understand, the fish like it there because by cutting the current, you cut the energy they require to stay in place, and the way the water flows around your legs concentrates food behind the break in the current. An upshot of this is that when you’re not catching fish, you can’t petulantly convince yourself that they aren’t there–you can see them, just a few feet away.

So I started watching, really watching. What I saw was interesting. They’d swim in place against the current, and all of the sudden they’d dart a few inches to one side or the other, moving to get food. Additionally, I noticed what they don’t do: they don’t move up and down. They stay at a particular depth and feed there. If you watch, you’ll see.

From that simple observation, I concluded a few things. First of all, they’re constantly feeding. Once I looked for it, it became obvious. So if they’re not biting what you’re drifting down, there are only a handful of possible reasons why. Either you’re fishing a fly that’s the wrong size or the wrong color, or you’re not fishing at the right depth. That’s it. Those are the only possibilities.

With that realization, I started fishing again. Figuring out the right fly turned out to be easy enough–just take a good look at the nymphs that were making it up to the surface and match them as well as possible. From there, the only question was how to weight the line so that the fly would reach the right depth. So I watched and I played with different length tippets and amounts of weight and placement of the weight on the line, and each time I would drift the fly, I would visualize as best I could what that combination of factors was doing with the fly–how quickly it was sinking in the current, how long before it began to drag on the bottom, and so on. And sure enough, before not too very long, I started catching fish.

It ended up being probably my best day ever at the Juan. I was pretty pleased. I’d figured something out.

At the end of the day, my friend Coit, who is like a second father to me and taught me pretty much everything I know about fishing, said to me, “You know, I’ve known you so long, in some ways it’s hard to not see you as the kid you were. But today I really saw the man you’ve become.”

I took that as a very nice compliment, but I thought it also spoke to some of the benefits that come as we age, as we become a bit more calm and willing to slow down a little and really pay attention to what’s happening around us.

I tell this story here because Jerry’s piece from Tuesday got me wondering: to what degree are the improvements in our golf game simply the willingness to slow down and pay attention as we practice? What is it that makes what we’re doing with TTW any different from what I did at the San Juan that day?

As of right now, I can’t say that I know the answer. I told this story to Jerry, and he thought it was a question worth asking. In upcoming pieces, we’ll strive to find the answer.

I started playing classical guitar during my first year of college, and when I came home that summer, my dad suggested I continue my studies with the guitar professor at UNM. I thought it was a worthwhile idea, so I called him and we agreed to meet.

At our first lesson, after watching me play a piece or two, he said, “Your teacher must be a student of a student of Segovia. Your right-hand technique is badly out of date. It’s inefficient, produces inferior tone, and increases the likelihood of injury.” He demonstrated what he considered proper right-hand technique, and I could quickly see and hear his point: it made much more sense biomechanically and it did sound better.

When I tried it, it felt deeply unfamiliar. It was immediately clear that I was basically going to have to start over and rebuild my right-hand technique from scratch.

Unsurprisingly, I found the prospect deeply daunting. But at the time I had dreams of pursuing guitar very seriously, and I understood that if I didn’t make this change, I’d be putting a ceiling on my abilities as a guitarist.

He gave me a number of exercises to work on. The practice was every bit as tedious as I feared. He had me plucking single notes at a time, following a metronome set at a very slow tempo. It was about as far away from actual music making as you could possibly imagine. At the same time, it demanded serious concentration; there was no phoning it in. To properly produce the stroke, I had to catch the string at the interface of the fingernail and pad of the finger just so, or else the tone suffered. And I needed to learn to be very precise–if I was ever going to play a piece at tempo, I’d have to work until this level of precision became automatic, no matter how fast the figuration in the right hand might be.

As you might imagine, my ego hated this. I went from playing music to devoting entire practice sessions to doing the most rudimentary of exercises. It was deeply humbling.

It wasn’t easy, but I stuck it out, and ultimately it paid off. My tone was far better, and I could play faster with less fatigue. I was unequivocally a better guitarist. That ceiling on my abilities was no longer there.

My memory of this episode rose up during the last week as I’ve confronted the reality of this same basic process with respect to my golf swing. If I’m really interested in improving, I’m going to have to sigh and step up and do the fairly tedious work I described last week. There’s just no way around it. And exactly as was the case all those years ago, I have to concentrate to make sure that I’m precise in my practice. There’s no sense doing all this work if I’m only going to end up grooving another faulty swing.

As before, my ego doesn’t like it. It wants me to be good now. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way. The only path forward is to accept with humility the unsexy work that needs to be done.

We’ve begun focused work on rebuilding my golf swing. We hoped that by using centering (as Jerry has described here in recent posts), we’d be able to make changes quickly. Unfortunately, the process has turned out to be a little more complicated than that.

The faulty patterns in my swing are so deeply ingrained into my body that they feel “normal.” I literally cannot feel when I’ve gone out of center during the golf swing. In many ways, we’d be having an easier time teaching me to swing a golf club if I’d never played the game before at all and thus wasn’t working against years of patterning.

We brought a couple of video movement-analysis apps to the range last week, and being able to watch myself helped immeasurably. Watching in slow motion made it clear that there’s a lot to work on.

Most critically, what I noticed from those videos is that I usually start out of center–I collapse my shoulders in toward my chest, drop my head downward out of line with my spine, and make the forward bend in the body from the spine rather than the hips. Each of these problems is so ingrained that I don’t feel out-of-whack when I step up to address the ball. I still feel that I’m centered.

Now that it’s clear to me that the problems with my swing begin there, my work toward improving the swing gets simpler. There’s a clear focus. The actual work will involve invoking the ritual approach that Jerry describes. First of all I will come to center. Then I will take my stance, trying to build the feeling within myself that an engaged spine, balanced energy at the shoulders and grounding at the hips is more centered than the various breaks in the body that I do now. And then, rather than hit the ball, I will step back and repeat the process, again and again, until my old pattern stops feeling “normal” and is replaced by the new one.

It’s nothing glamorous, the work I’m describing here. Indeed, if I don’t bring careful concentration to what I’m feeling, I’m likely to succumb to boredom and fall right back into my old patterns. But if I’m diligent, eventually my initial set-up will get re-patterned. It won’t be fun, per se, but the first step to rebuilding my swing comes from fixing the faulty foundation.

Last week, even as I published, I felt some discomfort that my conclusions in my piece seemed to lack a certain solidity, but I couldn’t figure out why. Late that night, I saw what the problem was. It stemmed from my initial conception of the piece. The right initial approach isn’t a statement: “This is how we’d help Jordan Spieth.” Instead, we’d start with a question: “Jordan, how did you help yourself?” Regarding ten, eleven, and twelve on Masters Sunday, I trust my assessment of what I saw–after all, over the course of those three holes, I correctly predicted where Spieth’s shots were going to end up, just based on the energetic signatures of his body–but I have no access to what Jordan Spieth did to re-center himself after the disaster of two balls in the water on twelve.

But without a doubt Jordan Spieth did something with that fifth shot on twelve. Were we in a position to help him, the right jumping off point would be to find out how much he could say about what he did differently on that fifth shot. Whatever he did to re-center right then would be the foundation on which we’d help him build the structure for containing his energy and allowing it to flow in the face of the kind of pressure and stress that cost him the win that day, pressure and stress that he will surely face again and again in his quest to become a truly great golfer.

Now, it’s completely possible that he doesn’t really know. He surely recognized that something had changed–it was a radically different outcome, after all–and I’m sure it felt different, but it may be that he can’t fully describe how it was different. Here I draw on an experience I had during ski season. I was working with a skilled teacher, and I was struggling to bring what he was teaching me into my skiing. I thought I was following his instructions, but I was also kind of confused and frustrated. Then on one run during the latter part of the day, for a few short moments, maybe eight to ten turns total, it was suddenly like my feet had become weightless. It was wonderful. It didn’t last long, and it hasn’t happened again. But it happened once, and I know, now, the feeling I’m seeking. With good instruction and a lot of practice, I believe I will find it. So Spieth may be in a similar situation. He doesn’t quite know what he changed with that shot, but he surely felt something change. That’s what we’d be looking for. “Remember that feeling? We’re seeking that feeling.”

Here’s why all this matters: The major puzzle Jerry and I are trying to work out in our training together right now is how to unlock my golf swing. I am tall and long, and the simple physics of the golf swing would seem to dictate that I should be able to hit the ball a pretty long way. That I am not so able indicates a substantial energy block. We’ve been experimenting but haven’t been able to figure it out yet. Right now it’s getting worse instead of better, and honestly I’m getting frustrated to the point that I’m starting to imagine finding a high bridge or cliff to throw my stupid clubs off of. But I think back to two shots this year that flew high and true after swings that felt pretty much effortless. That’s the feeling that’s keeping me going. That’s the feeling I’m looking for. I don’t know what I did differently. The answer is in my body somewhere. Our task now is to find it.

(Before we go any further, you might enjoy reading this article by Rick Reilly about the twelfth hole at Augusta National, from the April 2, 1990, issue of Sports Illustrated. It’s a long piece, but gives a great sense of how challenging No. 12 historically has been. Money quote: “The best hole in the country is the 12th at Augusta National. … Jack Nicklaus calls it ‘the hardest tournament hole in golf.'”

One more thing: Keep in mind that, irrespective of the difficulty, everyone plays the same hole.)

The central idea and understanding of the TTW project is that the techniques that could help Tiger regain his dominance (or at least start playing golf with pleasure again) are the same techniques an amateur would use to improve her game, and vice versa. With that perspective in mind, today I’d like to explore what Jordan Spieth could have done differently on the first three holes of the back nine in the final round of the Masters.

Let’s review the situation one more time. Spieth finished the front-nine with four straight birdies, giving himself a five-shot lead going into the final nine holes of the tournament. Here’s an outline of all of his shots on ten, eleven and twelve:

• Ten (Par 4)

  • Tee shot: 3-wood. Off to the right, into the rough.
  • Second shot: Short and right, into the front-right bunker by the green.
  • Third shot: From the sand, well short.
  • Fourth shot: Medium-length putt, missed.
  • Fifth shot: Makes the putt.
  • Result: Bogey

• Eleven (Par 4)

  • Tee shot: Driver. Well right, into the trees.
  • Second shot: No shot at the green. Pitches out to center of fairway.
  • Third shot: From 122 yards, right at the pin. Lovely shot.
  • Fourth shot: Putt, about 6 feet, missed just below the hole.
  • Fifth shot: Makes the putt.
  • Result: Bogey

• Twelve (Par 3)

  • Tee shot: Short and to the right. Falls back into Rae’s Creek.
  • Second shot: (Penalty)
  • Third shot: Wedge from maybe 80 yards, hit fat, right into the creek.
  • Fourth shot: (Penalty)
  • Fifth shot: From same place as last shot, hits back of green, bounces into the sand.
  • Sixth shot: Out of sand, close to pin.
  • Seventh shot: Makes the putt.
  • Result: Quadruple bogey

(Also worth remembering: two years ago, in his first Masters, Spieth had come to twelve chasing the lead on the final day and had hit short and to the right and seen his ball bounce back into the water.)

Seeing it written out like that, the pattern is kind of hard to miss. With the exception of his second and third shots on eleven–the former a high-margin shot, the latter a beautifully hit wedge–every shot he hit on the back nine (excluding putts), up until the fifth shot on twelve, was short and to the right.

What do you think was going through his head as he stepped up to the tee on 12? How likely do you think it is that he was thinking, “Don’t hit it short and right?”

Pretty likely, I’d say.

One of Jerry’s teachings is “The body doesn’t know ‘not.'” That is, the abstraction of “not” has no energetic meaning to the body. When we say to ourselves, “Don’t hit it to the right,” the energy in the body is, “Hit it to the right.”

In last week’s piece, I noted that something changed substantially with that fifth shot at twelve. I bet Spieth was thinking something like, “I’ll hit it toward the back of the green. If it goes into the bunker, fine.” And by changing his conceptualization of the shot into something with a higher margin for error, and with a positive visualization without a corresponding negative one (i.e. no “don’t hit it right”), he changed his energy. Again, for proof, I offer that he made an comfortable up-and-down from the bunker, then birdied the par-5 13th and par-4 14th.

So from a TTW perspective, what might we offer to Jordan Spieth to keep this sort of thing from happening again, or to stave it off when it starts to happen?

A regular practice of centering might have helped. As I noted in my piece from two weeks ago, I noticed as he addressed the ball on ten that he collapsed his shoulders forward. Energetically, this is a way of protecting the heart center, and is usually a sign of trying to keep fear at bay. With practice, he might have noticed that in fighting his fear, he was pulling himself out of center, and then been able to re-center himself.

By the time he hit his second shot on ten, and certainly by his third, he should have been able to notice that he was establishing a pattern in his shots. Again, by this point, taking a few moments to re-center would likely have helped him.

Another possibility would have been to change the energy of the situation by changing the parameters for success. Narrow parameters for success, when not met, lead to feelings of failure and a diminishing of energy. Broader parameters for success make success much more likely, and success leads to positive changes in energy– literally, success helps beget more success.

Now, this approach is no panacea. Spieth said later that part of the problem was that he got conservative after the turn. Perhaps that’s why he grabbed 3-wood instead of driver on 10. A 3-wood is a higher margin club than driver, but nevertheless his tee shot on 10 went to the right, into the long grass. So something was different between his high-margin approach on the tee on 10 and his high-margin fifth shot on 12.

The point here isn’t to engage in endless counterfactuals. It’s to suggest that there are strategies to counteract a swing toward negative energy. Centering alone might be enough. Playful imagining might work. Changing the parameters of success and failure can help. Many of these tools involve using the thinking mind to generate a positive imagined outcome, which is unlikely to succeed without a means–like centering–to turn the process over to the body’s intuition.

Jordan Spieth has all the physical tools to be a great golf champion, but what we saw at Augusta during the final round this year tells us that he doesn’t yet fully have the energetic tools. (Jordan: call us. We can help.) He’ll need to develop them, or he’ll end up in exactly the same situation again and again.

And as for the rest of us? We, too, need to develop our energetic skills, or we too will end up playing out the same patterns again and again in our lives.