Training Tiger Woods

The time has come for Ben and I to actually play a round of golf.

They say that the longest distance on the golf course is the distance from the practice area to the first tee. I guess we’ll see.

Wish us luck.

If the real goal of the practices we’ve been describing is to improve not just our golf (or tennis or whatever) games but our lives–if the goal is to make ourselves better people–we need to be aware of the way the games themselves can foist upon us certain narratives about ourselves and our capabilities, and that these narratives can help or hinder our growth.

Consider the following scenarios:

Imagine you are playing a tennis match. It’s your serve. You start the game with a powerful ace: 15-love. Next, you produce an egregious double-fault–your first serve is so long your opponent has to duck to get out of the way, and your second serve bounces on your own side of the net: 15-all. Now you blast another ace: 30-15. And then another double-fault, a carbon-copy of the first: 30-all. You hit your next serve so powerfully you can see it red-shift as it travels away from you. Ace: 40-30. Your next first serve improbably bounces off the top of the frame, goes straight up, and hits you on the top of the head. Even more improbably, your second serve does the same thing. Another double-fault. Now serving at deuce, you put so much spin on the ball that it visibly distorts as it spins away from your frustrated opponent. Another ace: ad-in. Finally, you send an untouchable serve down the T for a final ace, leaving your opponent in tears and giving you the game.

During this game, you struck the ball eleven times. Five of those shots were excellent, six were very poor, but because of the structure of the sport and its scoring, you won the game. Those bad shots can disappear into the ether. They no longer matter at all.

Now imagine that you’re playing golf. You’re on a 500-yard par five. Your drive is lovely, straight down the middle of the fairway, about 230 yards. With 270 yards left to the hole, you grab your trusty fairway hybrid, but you top the ball so badly that it skitters about fifteen yards down the fairway before stopping. 255 yards left to the hole. You swing your hybrid again, this time hitting it well. The ball travels about 180 yards into the middle of the fairway, leaving you with 75 yards to the hole. You grab your pitching wedge, take what feels like a careful swing, but hit it so fat the divot travels further than the ball. Your next swing produces the same result. On your third attempt, you finally hit the ball well, putting it within fifteen feet of the pin. On your putt, some strange magic befalls you, and you mishit your putt so badly that the ball whistles past the hole and keeps going, all the way across and then off the green and into the deep rough. Your first chip shot sails over the green, landing in the rough on the other side. Your next one travels about six inches, embedding so deeply into the rough that it seems almost impossible that you’ll get it out. But you make a lovely chip, relative to the lie, and leave yourself a twelve-foot putt, which you mercifully make for a sextuple-bogey eleven.

On this hole, you struck the ball eleven times. Five of those shots were good, sometimes very good, and six were poor. Here, there’s no escaping your errant shots. Each and every shot counts toward your final score. You’re stuck with the indignity of a sextuple bogey.

Notice how different the emotional tenors of these two situations are apt to be. In each instance, you hit five good and six bad shots. On the tennis court, you might walk away from that service game feeling pretty good about yourself. Maybe you’re breathing a sigh of relief and calling yourself lucky. Either way, you won the game, and are one step closer to winning the match. On the golf course, you’re likely to be feeling pretty bad. Sextuple bogey. Your playing partners don’t even want to make eye contact after a hole like that.

Again, despite exactly the same ratio of success to failure, you’re likely to be engaging in two very different narratives about your ability, maybe even about yourself as a person. One of those narratives is likely to help you stay in flow. The other is likely to drive you out of flow. Our goal is personal growth. So how do we deal with this kind of thing?

As we bring centered practice to the sports we choose to play, the ultimate goal isn’t actually improvement. Improvement is just a side effect. What we’re really seeking are the deeper things that emerge as we make this consistent effort to begin to meet our true potential. For those of us old or wise enough to have released whatever dreams we might ever have indulged of going pro, putting our utmost into being a really good golfer or tennis player has little value for its own sake. Winning an amateur tennis or golf tournament might be nice, but if the value of the effort comes only in meeting the goal, what happens should you not succeed? What happens when your skills decline? Can the point truly be only winning?

We say no, and our answer to that question is at the heart of why we’re doing this. We’re not interested in seeing our golf games improve only because we want to play better golf. Competition and play are wonderful, but only part of the point. What we’re really talking about is striving to use the practice to become better people. That’s why so much of our focus is on energy and feeling rather than technique. Being able to hit a 220-yard drive straight down the center of the fairway has utility in exactly one place. A feeling awareness of the body, concentration, centering–these are things you can use everywhere. These things make your life better.

As I mentioned last week, your energetic center or energy bubble can be used in many ways to better understand yourself, the world around you, and our interactions with others. Honing the skills necessary to reliably use your energetic center (energy bubble) under various circumstances requires practice. With my clients, this practice is built into their workouts. Every repetition of every set is an exploration of being centered.

Ben and I use centering to find and explore the truth within the golf swing. In his piece last Friday, Ben explored feeling the center of the golf club in an attempt to find more balance within his swing. He shared how the relationship between his energetic center and the center of gravity of the club creates a sense of flow within the swing which results in a more consistent and repeatable swing.

Finding the energetic center, where the golfer, club, and ball all exist in harmony will be the key that allows Ben and I to easily obtain the goals that we have created at the start of the TTW program.

I encourage you to experiment with different ways in which to use your energetic center. Practice creating and developing your understanding of the energy bubble.

This week, I ask that you re-read the pieces that Ben and I have posted over the last few weeks. Start with the first piece on truth and monitor your energetic center as you move forward. Spend some time sitting and feeling your response to each piece. Look for the truth within each piece. Read from center and see what speaks to you.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve argued in some depth that the only really effective path forward in learning sports is in learning to feel, that feeling is something of a missing link in instruction and learning.

A few weeks ago, I was playing around swinging a club in the backyard. I was thinking, if what I’m saying about feeling is accurate, we’re only going to get anywhere with the golf swing if we learn to feel the position of the club in the hands, feel the plane of the swing, and feel the contact between the clubhead and the ball. As I was playing with the club, it occurred to me that it’s very hard to feel the striking face of the club, that I didn’t really feel its connection to my hands. In what might have been a moment of insight, I tried to find the point on the shaft where the club balanced, that is, the club’s center of gravity. I was surprised to discover that the center of gravity isn’t somewhere in the clubhead, nor at the point where the shaft joins the head (which would have been my guess), nor even particularly close to the clubhead. On this particular club (an eight-iron), it was a good six inches or so up the shaft of the club. Wouldn’t it be easier to swing a club properly, I thought, if the part of the club that naturally should be our focus–the head–was where the club’s center of mass, and hence its feel, was?

After a little research, the reason clubs are engineered this way made a bit more sense. Because of the physics of leverage, the closer to the hands that the club’s center of gravity is, the easier it will be to accelerate the club, which will make for a faster clubhead speed, which leads to longer shots.

So it makes sense, but I nevertheless remain convinced that less experienced golfers like myself are naturally going to put our focus on the clubhead–it’s what hits the ball, after all–and we’re likely to imagine we feel the weight of the clubhead where it actually is in space, but that’s not where we feel the club’s weight. We feel the center of gravity. What we think we feel isn’t what we feel, which is going to lead to a certain kinesthetic confusion,

After a bit of practice, I found I could feel the center of mass swinging from my hands, which had to be an improvement. This led to an idea: I found the point of balance along the shaft of each of my clubs and wrapped a bit of electrical tape at that point. (The longer the club, the further up the shaft the center of gravity is.) That way I’d have a visual cue for the club’s center of gravity whenever I picked up a given club.

As I’ve practiced with it since, I’ve found that this visual cue has helped me feel the swing of the club much more accurately. It’s led to an increased smoothness. Throughout my swing, I have the sensation of the club’s weight at the club’s actual center of gravity. I rely on my eyes to guide the clubface back to the ball (as most of us should), but because the club’s weight pulls from a spot several inches up the shaft, the clubhead kind of floats in space.

I recommend finding the balance point of your clubs as well. A visual indicator at the center of gravity will help you connect with the feel of the club. Working on learning to truly feel the club as you practice your swing can lead only to positive results.

As Ben and I discussed this series of pieces, he reminded me that this material is hard to reconcile, because it actually challenges our preconceived notions of reality. The idea that we are energy beings and not just the physical bodies that we walk around in can be difficult for people to believe. In fact, Ben likes to remind me, that sometimes it’s difficult even for him to believe. Ben has moved so fast in his energy awareness and training that I forget that he’s only been training with me for the last 18 months. Having worked and played in this field for the last twenty years, I often take being able to see and feel energy fields for granted.

This week I hope to provide you with a little more understanding and clarity as to what I’m trying to help you do and more importantly, feel.

From the moment we enter this world we have been programmed to think and feel certain ways. For the first five years of our lives we are learning how to navigate the world from our parents, siblings, and other relatives. As we watch them live their lives, we learn through mimicry, mirroring their deeds and actions. We learn to walk, talk, and think just like them.

At the tender age of 5 or 6 we start the socialization process by going to school. We learn to think and act in a manner that’s acceptable to society. We’re taught their ideas and beliefs and these teachings shape our ideas and thought patterns as we learn to interact with others within our society.

For those of you who were raised in religious families, the church, whichever one you went to, added another layer of ideas and beliefs that shape how you think, feel, and act.

All this programming has been crammed into your head your entire life. Unfortunately, not all of this information was correct. I’m sure if you tried, you could come up with many instances where what you were taught as a child was not only wrong, but goes against your belief system as an adult.

Now, I’m not saying that this programming or teaching was in any way malicious. This is how we have learned to raise and educate our young. What I am saying is that we have another level of intelligence and knowing that we were brought into this world with. The ability to access this ‘innate intelligence’ was hard wired into our systems and is accessible to all of us, if we’re willing to access it.

In fact, I’m sure that you already have. For some of us, we occasionally get a ‘gut feeling’ or a flash of understanding that we can’t explain. Others have learned to trust their “intuition.” It doesn’t matter how you want to think of “it” or explain “it”, this is your innate intelligence trying to guide you.

Centering is simply a tool that I have developed to help people become more intuitive, while making their innate intelligence more accessible.

When teaching my clients about fitness and exercise, I always begin by teaching them to center. The first instruction in any exercise to find and establish their center. I do this to help build the center position into their posture and begin the process of teaching them to access their innate intelligence. If they can feel the truth within a movement, they can begin to feel truth within their lives.

The use of energy bubbles and other little tools that I introduce are simply a means to help you feel and access your truth. They become very helpful when using centering to explore other aspects of your life.

Earlier this week I was chatting with Terry, the woman who gets such a kick out of seeing me practice in the park. She asked how my writing connects with what she’s seen me practicing, and I gave her my standard answer, that we’re writing about energy flow in the body and how it contributes to learning sports and athletics. This was my standard on-the-chairlift answer all winter long when someone asked about my writing, but it always felt vague and kinda lame, and even all these months later, I’d never figured out a way to say it better. But then just after Terry and I finished our conversation and she rode away on her bicycle, I finally thought of a better description: we’re seeking to revolutionize the way sports and athletics are taught and learned.

Perhaps I needed to see the results of this first not-quite-year of experimenting and practice before I was comfortable making so bold a claim. As I see my golf short game get more imaginative, consistent, and with a deeper repertoire of shots; as I see more and more of my full swings fly straight and long; as my tennis serves more and more frequently pock off the strings with easy power, I’m seeing, in areas in which I stagnated for, literally, decades, consistent and often substantial improvement.

The energy techniques that Jerry teaches work. They work better than anything else I’ve ever tried. Do I dare claim they’re the missing piece in sports instruction? It makes me nervous to make such a statement, but…well:

• Over all those summers of tennis lessons as a kid, no one ever adequately explained to me that the power of the shot isn’t in the arm, it’s in the legs and core, and certainly no one ever got me to feel that truth.

• The golf lessons I took as a kid left me with a hideous push-slice and no power.

• I took years of yoga classes with many different teachers, including a couple of famous teachers whose names you’d recognize from the magazines, but for all the talk of “connecting to the breath,” no one ever explained that the free flow of the breath determined the depth of the pose. I figured it out by myself after applying centering to the yogic breath one summer morning. Without exaggeration, centering taught me more about properly finding the pose than any teacher I ever practiced with. From that perspective, it wouldn’t be entirely untrue to say that Jerry is the best yoga teacher I’ve ever had, and he doesn’t even do yoga.

That Jerry and I have both seen such improvement working together to teach ourselves, with neither of us having any deeper familiarity with “proper” golf technique than the mediocre lessons we’ve taken in the past and the occasional bit we’ve read in a book or online, leads pretty inexorably to the conclusion that most instruction is poor.

It’s not fully the instructors’ fault. Few people have the personality and constitution to look at the conventionally held wisdom and say, “Wait. This doesn’t actually seem to be working.” That conclusion makes most people feel desperately out on a limb. If people think to wonder just why it is that more students don’t see better results, the answer given back all too frequently is one of the most pernicious, disheartening and false answers one could imagine: that the students in question just lack talent.

It appears that something separates the top, top performers from the rest of us. Maybe no amount of the best instruction and concentrated, dedicated practice would have ever made me into a Tiger Woods or a Roger Federer. And that’s fine. But I know now that my level of accomplishment never even came close to the limits of my potential, and in my observed experience this is true for almost everyone. The rare kid who really thrives in the current system is declared talented and moved into the sports track; the rest are shunted to the wayside. Consider this: several times this winter, I’d have a student explain to me that she isn’t athletic, that she is actually a klutz–and then, by connecting the centered breath to what she was trying to do, turn out to be the student who picked up skiing more quickly than anyone else in the class. Where did this story about herself come from? It was taught to her. But it isn’t true and almost certainly never was.

This is why we make such a big deal about centering and the feeling of flow that it engenders: because once you learn to feel flow in the body, you can follow that feeling to the truth of any athletic pursuit. Most of our limitations are untrue stories we carry with us. Centering begins to move us beyond those stories. Which isn’t to say that it’s a simple process. Letting go of stories we’ve carried with us for much or most of our lives can threaten our sense of identity. But after two years on this path, I feel confident in saying that we’re better served letting go of our limitations than we are staying constricted, no matter how comfortable we’ve become there.

Last week we learned more about using center to discover personal truths. This week I would like to continue to hone this ability by sharing a technique that I use myself.

Let’s begin by Centering and establishing an open and flowing breath. Feel the flow as your breath moves through your body. Notice the sense of ease that accompanies each breath. Enjoy the feeling of being connected to yourself and your surroundings.

Remember, to be in a state of flow is to be in a state of truth. Anything that cuts or diminishes your flow should be looked at with a skeptical eye, because living to your highest potential is impossible when your flow is limited.

A technique that I find extremely useful when monitoring reactions to other people, places or things is what I call the energy bubble. The energy bubble is a ball of energy that you create and hold within your body. You can hold it anywhere, but I find holding it within the core allows for better monitoring while interacting with the world.

As you sit centered, imagine a bubble of energy within your core. It can be as large as you like, but keep it to a size that you can easily manage. Just sit and breathe through that bubble. Feel it respond to your breath. Notice as you inhale that it gets slightly bigger. Feel the quality of the energy flow as it moves through your bubble.

Now, just sit and notice the energy. Don’t do anything, just notice. Slowly move your focus from the bubble itself to the room around you. Try to remain aware of your bubble, but not focused on it. Take in your surroundings while being aware of your energy bubble. Notice any changes to your energy bubble as you take in your surroundings.

For me, I find that anything that causes my energy to expand and open to be positive and beneficial, while anything that causes my energy to waiver or contract, to be potentially harmful or dangerous. Don’t be surprised if your energy doesn’t react to anything immediately around you, especially if you’re reading this at home or somewhere you feel comfortable and safe.

As with any tool, it requires practice to master and use effectively. So this week practice creating your energy bubble in many different situations. Notice as it reacts to different situations around you. I wouldn’t necessary act on the reactions yet, just notice them. We want to be able to fully understand what our reactions are telling us before we react to them.

Jerry and I started this project with the hypothesis that by using the energy techniques he’s developed over the past twenty years, we could work together to radically improve our golf games. I’ve spent the past three weeks writing about the possible value of outside instruction, but what I haven’t done is really measure our success in terms of that initial hypothesis. Once I began to use that yardstick, the question about the need for instruction got much more clear.

We’ve been working on this project for less than a year, and the improvements we’re already seeing strongly suggest that our hypothesis was accurate. We’ve both improved markedly. Our short games are far stronger than they were. Jerry has seen improvement throughout his bag on full swings, and while the long irons are still proving to be a challenge to hit consistently, the distance he gets from his hybrids, coupled with how well he hits his 7-iron, 9-iron and wedges, should already be enough to get him close to his initial goal, which was breaking 90 regularly. I’m still working on the more basic goals of hitting my shots straight and with some power, but things are clearly getting better. Over the past couple of weeks, on a couple of occasions I have hit my driver straight to about 180 yards. That may not seem like much, but I literally cannot remember the last time I hit a truly straight drive. Sometimes I even hit a hook now, and though that’s “bad,” it shows very clearly that my swing is changing. I used to push-slice horribly almost one-hundred percent of the time. And about a week ago, I went to the range and hit a three-quarter 7-iron about 110 yards. Again, that may not sound especially impressive, but until recently I’ve been unable to hit an iron longer than a nine at all.

My initial goal when we began the project was to break 100, and I gave myself five years to get there. Based on what I’m seeing, I think there’s a good chance I’ll manage my goal before the end of 2016.

So back to the question that has occupied me for the past few weeks: what defines good instruction? A good measure would be the student’s consistent improvement, don’t you think? Based on that metric, the instruction Jerry and I are currently receiving is quite good indeed.

Last week, I had you monitor your flow as you interacted with others. This week I hope to explain some of the things you probably saw and felt as you monitored your flow.

Have you ever taken or seen a polygraph test administered? Felt the numerous straps and devices attached to your body in order to monitor and detect the slightest physiological response to the questions being asked. It’s really quite intimidating knowing that you cannot control your physiological responses under these or any other circumstances. As intimidating as all those straps and devices are, the machine isn’t even the lie detector, it’s just a monitor and recorder. Your body is the lie detector! In fact, unless you’re a sociopath, the human body is incapable of lying. From blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration changes, to pupil dilation and restriction of flow, the body will always react to the stress of lying or subverting the truth.

Because the body is incapable of lying, it truly is the perfect lie detector. Think about it: all of the physiological changes that occur in the body when being dishonest or disingenuous will block or otherwise break the feeling of flow.

Now, I’m not interested in using my ability to center and feel flow to catch someone lying. I’m interested in using these abilities to feel truth. My truth!

When we are centered and in a state of flow, we are in a state of harmony and truth. Anything that breaks our sense of flow has to be in some way or another bad for us.

Now think back to last week. Think of the times that you felt your flow get interrupted and weren’t quite sure why. It was that something being said or done wasn’t quite agreeing with you. It was interrupting your sense of flow and harmony.

Now, it does NOT mean that someone was lying to you or trying to intentionally deceive you. It just means that whatever it was wasn’t aligned with your sense of flow. Here’s an example: I was recently approached by a woman who sells supplements. She was telling me about her company’s latest product. By watching her energy, I could tell that she really believed in the product and thought that it would help me. As I listened to her spiel, I held a bottle of the product and monitored my center. As she talked, I felt my center contract and begin to withdraw. I took that as a sign that her product really wasn’t for me, so I politely thanked her for showing me her product but declined the opportunity to try it. It wasn’t that she was wrong or trying to deceive me, it was just not the right product for me.

Using my ability to stay centered in the moment and to feel flow allows me to explore what is true and right for me. For some of you, this idea that I can feel right from wrong by simply centering will be a stretch. Next week, I will share a basic technique or two so that you might explore these concepts further.

This week, I would like for you to once again monitor how your sense of flow reacts to others around you as you watch and listen from center. Try to use your ability to feel flow to learn more about yourself and your truth.

Remember, begin by centering and establishing an open and flowing breath. Feel the flow as your breath moves through your body. Notice the sense of ease that accompanies each breath. Enjoy the feeling of being connected to yourself and your surroundings. To be in a state of flow is to be in a state of truth.