Author: Benjamin

It's been almost two weeks, but Jordan Spieth's fifth shot at the 12th during the final round of the Masters is still on my mind. In the midst of everything bad that happened during the first three holes of the back nine, that shot stood out.

Let's review the situation as he stepped up to the tee box on twelve. On 10, he'd been short and right on his tee shot, ending up in the rough. He was short and right on his second shot, landing in the front-right bunker. His sand shot fell short, and then he two-putted for bogey. On 11, his tee shot went right, into the trees. He had to chip into the fairway for his second. He pitched from the fairway to within six feet, but two-putted for another bogey. He walked onto twelve having seen his five-shot lead cut to one. Finally, he certainly remembered his tee shot on twelve two years ago when he was chasing for the lead. That day he hit short and right. It didn't make the green and ended up in the water.

This year, his tee shot on 12 was an echo of the shot two years ago. It went short and right and bounced back into the water. After the stroke penalty, he took his third shot from about 80 yards and hit it so ridiculously fat that it barely made it to the water. Unfortunately for him, though, it did.

He took his fifth shot from the same place as the third. This time, he hit well long. The ball hit the very back of the green and rolled into the back bunker. It's not a deep bunker, and from there, he made an easy up-and-down (well, as easy as an up-and-down as it can be when you've just blown up into a million pieces) for a quadruple-bogey 7.

So why does the fifth shot on 12 continue to so fascinate me? Because after so many bad shots in three holes, with his energy all in a whirl, he hit what appeared to be another bad shot--after all, Jordan Spieth is capable of pitching onto the green from 80 yards. But that shot appeared to settle him down. He calmly made his up-and-down. He went to 13 and hit a lovely drive, which led to a birdie. He made par on 14 and another birdie on 15.

Which suggests that with that fifth shot, he substantially cleared out the negative energy. So what was it about this shot--still apparently a bad shot--that allowed him to re-center?

I have no way to prove this, but I think he hit that "bad" shot intentionally. More specifically and accurately, I think he gave himself permission to widen his target and his definition of success. Had he hit short (within reason) of where the ball ended up landing, he'd have simply been on the green. Had he hit long, he'd have landed directly in the bunker. He knew it wasn't a particularly hard bunker to play out of. By changing his approach to a broader notion of success, he found a way to make a successful shot. In doing so, he was able to re-center.

All of which leads me to suggest that he had that tool all along. Had he intentionally hit an "imperfect" tee shot on 12, perhaps even aiming to put the ball into the bunker, thereby giving himself permission for par (or even bogey), he would have been able to clear out the negative energy. My major point of evidence for this assertion is that he hit a shot that did exactly that. He just did it four strokes too late.

I had a very busy Sunday, and so was only able to dip my head occasionally into the Masters. When I checked on Spieth during the latter holes of the front nine, he was several strokes ahead and seemed to be cruising. But when I checked back a couple of hours later, I found Spieth several strokes back, and the commentators were talking about a "meltdown." After looking a sure thing to win his second Masters in a row at the age of 22, he ended up having to put the Green Jacket on Danny Willett.

A few days later, Jerry and I spoke about it. "The energy of it was fascinating," he said. "You should watch and see what you think."

So I did.

Because I hadn't been able to pay close attention on Sunday, I first went and did a little research. Just how had the round played out before Spieth's meltdown? What had Spieth done to be cruising during the earlier part of his round? I looked at his scorecard, and what I saw grabbed my interest. After a bogey on five, he birdied the next four holes, and started the back nine with a five-stroke lead.

I went back to five and watched from there.

On five, his drive left him on the left side of the fairway behind some trees. For his second shot, he attempted a low-margin sharp hook that he failed to fully execute, leaving himself with a challenging chip just off the grandstand on the side of the green. He then two-putted for a bogey. Though laying up may have been a better play, it was hard to fault his aggressiveness.

Afterwards, he played beautifully. His approach play left him easy putts on seven and eight, but his birdie putts on six and nine were both quite challenging. When he made the last of these, he had moved himself to -7. He genuinely appeared to be cruising.

With my foreknowledge of what was about to happen, I expected to see someone either overconfident or not paying full attention as he started the back nine. Instead, as he took his tee shot, I noticed that he seemed slightly hunched at the upper back. His normally erect posture seemed a little curved in on itself. Now, I don't yet have a particularly practiced eye for golf technique, but I recognize this posture from my own hitting. Indeed, in my own practice, I've been working on trying to stand more erect and pull the shoulders back in order to open the chest. "If I'm right in what I'm seeing," I thought, "He'll hit it right." And he did. His 3-wood off the tee landed in the rough. On his next shot his body alignment looked similar. I predicted that he'd be short and to the right. Sure enough, that's exactly what happened. The ball landed in the bunker on the front right of the green. His sand shot looked lazy and he left it well short of the pin. He missed his par-putt about a foot right, and holed in for bogey.

Meanwhile, Danny Willett had a chance for eagle on the par-5 13th, missed but managed a birdie. A five-stroke advantage had just become three.

Spieth hit driver off eleven, and his swing looked better to me, but he went right again, into the trees, and left himself no shot at the green. He had no choice but to chip out to the fairway. His next shot was announced as "122 yards," and he hit right at the pin, ending up below the hole, about six feet away. His par putt missed just below the hole, and he tapped in for bogey.

Meanwhile, on 14, Willett put his drive into the second cut, then hit a beautiful second shot to within three or four feet of the pin. After Willett made his birdie putt, Spieth's five-stroke advantage had fallen to one.

There was a huge grandstand behind the tee on the par-3 twelfth, and I have to assume there was a leaderboard there as well, and I have to assume that Spieth saw it. Because, again, I watched his shoulders hunch forward and his back curl slightly downward. Once again, he hit short and right. The ball hit below the green and fell back into Raes Creek.

His wedge from the drop zone looked even more extreme. Watch the curve in his upper back and the way his shoulders extend away from his body:

That's one of the worst shots you're likely to ever see a professional golfer hit.

Now lying five, and desperate to not leave his next shot short, he hit well long into the back bunker. He got out of the sand and close to the pin for his sixth shot, and then made his putt for a quadruple-bogey seven.

As this was happening, Willett's tee shot on the par-5 15th left him needing to lay up. He pitched close, then two-putted for par, staying at -4. His playing partner, Lee Westwood, rolled over the green for his second shot, then hit an amazing chip for eagle to go to -3. On 14, Dustin Johnson made par to stay at -2. Spieth's quadruple dropped him from -5 and the lead to -1, into a tie for fourth.

It is a testimony to how good he is that he was still in contention late in the round, that he didn't freak out completely and shoot like eighteen-over the rest of the way. At the same time, isn't it interesting that once he'd lost the lead in so dramatic a fashion, his play immediately improved?

So what happened? I wouldn't be surprised if, as he made the turn, he thought to himself, "So long as I don't collapse, I've got this in the bag." As Jerry likes to point out, "The body doesn't know 'not.'" By thinking something like collapse, he engendered in his body the fear to do exactly that. The extension of his shoulders and the curve of his upper back look like someone collapsing his body around his heart to protect himself from fear. It's something I see a lot with my beginning ski students--and something I have recently noticed in myself in both skiing and golf. In Spieth's case, by fighting the fear, he put more energy into it, thereby enabling it. Once the collapse was done, he could release the energy, relax and resume playing his game, though sadly now no longer from a position to win.

Jerry and I had a practice session yesterday at the chipping green and driving range that left me quite frustrated.

As of right now in my golf practice, I'm incapable of hitting anything longer than about a nine-iron. I've been feeling a bit demoralized, so I'm trying to find my way past the struggle and discover new ways to practice and improve.

This spring, I've been working on initiating both my up- and downswings from the hips rather than letting the arms lead. The result, when I've succeeded, has been effortless power and beautiful flight paths. I've been most successful at it chipping and pitching, and while "effortless power" isn't something you may particularly want in your chipping, I've been willing to accept overhitting the hole in exchange for substantially better direction and loft.

I came to yesterday's practice session with a question I wanted to test: would it be possible to practice chipping with, say, a six-iron, and begin to groove that same swinging-with-the-lower-core that I've been playing with on pitches and nine-irons, and then bring that groove to the range on full-swing six-irons?

So far the answer is: nope. (Anti-climax, I know.) But my struggle and frustration led us to some ideas that will be interesting to play with over our next practice sessions. We think we identified some physical patterning in stance and alignment that I've done so long I'm no longer aware of them, patterns that are substantially getting in the way of a smooth, fluid swing. A fair amount of my practice over the next several weeks may be as simple and unexciting (but critical) as addressing the ball over and over, trying to groove a new stance.

Not to say that there weren't a few real positive results (rather than potentialities and areas for future practice) from the session. The most notable was that on a couple of occasions, practicing chipping with the six-iron, I hit the ball extremely cleanly. The sound of a cleanly struck ball is unmistakable and tells me that I'm doing something right, and gives me hope that I'll be able to do so again.

(I should note that while I struggled during the session, Jerry, playing with the idea of chipping with longer clubs and putting a similar focus on the hips as the driving impulse of the shot, ended up hitting seven-irons at the range so well he was giggling.)

After we finished at the range, I decided to go to the tennis courts to hit some serves while bringing that same focus on the hips. I also decided I would approach the shot differently from how I ever have before. Rather than try to emulate the smooth, unified toss-hit motion I see from top servers, I decided to just toss the ball up high enough that I could kind of reset before swinging through. Because I wanted to get the feeling of swinging from the hips and letting the arm follow, I gave myself permission to do nothing more than try to strike the ball that way, with no focus on aiming at all. To my surprise, I immediately found myself hitting some of the smoothest, most powerful serves of my life, with surprising accuracy. To my further delight, the sound of the ball leaving the strings was, like I describe above in relation to hitting a golf ball, immediately recognizable as an extremely cleanly hit ball. I've never heard that sound from my shots before. Previously, all I've ever heard when hitting the ball was a relatively high-pitched toink, but yesterday the ball came off the strings with the deeply satisfying pock sound that I've heard from better players but have never before achieved.

So while it was partly a frustrating day, and while I may not always be seeing improvement, what I'm hearing is that putting focus on motion from the hips is leading to the potential for definite improvement.

Now that my ski-teaching season is over, I've been reflecting a lot on my teaching, what I learned, and how to teach more effectively.

I had to admit to myself that I went into this winter with the idea that learning centering would enable everyone to improve radically, almost as if by magic. When I put it that way, the idea looks pretty ridiculous. Certain students had major breakthroughs through centering and focusing on the breath, but in general, while a few minutes' instruction followed by consistent admonitions of "remember to breathe" may have sped up learning (hard to know for sure), it was no panacea.

What I didn't understand with sufficient clarity was this: People bring deeply held patterns of stress with them. The process of learning a new skill will dredge those patterns up from the sediments of the students' lives.

Getting students to center and breathe freely on flat ground while not moving worked pretty well. But as soon as they did something that took them out of their comfort zone--which, for some first-timers, came as soon as we started to practice side-stepping (the second skill we practiced once we got both skis on, after sliding around on flat terrain), and hit almost all of them the first time they went up the magic carpet and saw that even on the minimal slope of the bunny hill, being unable to control one's speed could have serious consequences--patterns of stress in the body generally came clearly to the fore.

Thus the question that's dominating my reflections: How do we most efficiently replace those patterns of stress with patterns of flow?

We're a few days past the spring equinox. Jerry and I launched this project on the autumn equinox last September, six months ago, making this a good time for a little reflection. We said in our initial pieces that our goal was to develop a training program that would help people reach their highest potential. How are our results so far?

In many ways, we're still just starting this process. Our initial hypothesis was that we could use Jerry's energy techniques to radically accelerate our improvement in sports, using golf as our playground. Unfortunately, because of my shoulder injury back in the fall, we haven't been able to test that hypothesis much. The injury really limited what we could do for a while, and by the time I was healed enough to take full swings again, winter was shortly to arrive. Winter is just now releasing its grip; we're finally on the cusp of being able to focus on the experimentation and practice that will be necessary to bring this project to fruition.

On the other hand, even under those constraints, we have seen some evidence of real progress. To name just the most recent example: a few weeks back when Jerry and I went to the pitching green and practiced what I called "allowing," we hit some of the best chips and pitches of our lives.

What I have learned by teaching skiing this winter will doubtless inform my approach to the project as we accelerate back into it in the weeks and months ahead. Between all the energy I put into improving my own skiing and teaching scores of students these past few months, a few principles about learning have come much more clearly into focus for me:

1. There's no substitute for practice.
2. Quality instruction is, at minimum, helpful, and is often indispensable.
3. Centering is a skill, not a panacea.
4. Patterns of negative verbal/linguistic self-description substantially hamper our ability to learn or improve a skill.

In weeks ahead, I'll be writing more about these principles, and, now that winter and the ski season are winding down, intend to bring a great deal of focused energy to the project Jerry and I set for ourselves six months ago. My goal remains to break 100 over an 18-hole round. My dream is to do it by the anniversary of starting this project. I look forward to getting to work.

Happy spring. Thanks for reading.

My wife has been expressing interest in learning to play tennis. She's been asking me to go out to the courts with her and teach her a few things. Last Saturday, we went and did so.

Before we went to hit, I asked her, "Have you done any racquet sports before?" She said, "I played a lot of squash in college. But I haven't played tennis since high school. And back then we were still using wooden racquets."

That's a long time ago now, and while playing squash is good for practicing hand-eye coordination, the tennis stroke is completely different. So we were starting not completely from scratch but close to it.

I'm not really qualified on teach more than the very basics of the tennis stroke, but I am able to see things like swing path and what the racquet face is doing. What we found most effective was me standing at the net with a bucket of balls and hitting them to her so she could practice groundstrokes. Unsurprisingly, she hit a lot of them into the net and a lot of them long. In response, I would either say something like, "You opened the racket face on that one" or I would try to demonstrate what I'd seen so she'd have a visual of what her body had done. I figured if I could help her understand the "why" of when her shots went awry, she might be able to use experimentation and her intuitive understanding of what a good swing looks like (from having watched high-level tennis) to improve without me saying too much. Because she's seen good tennis shots before, some part of her brain/body is trying to emulate what it has seen. My hypothesis was basically this: if you can help a student understand what she did to get the result she didn't want, she'll know where to focus her attention as she experiments.

At one point, after hitting the unpteenth ball into the net, she said, "I'm pretty bad at this." I responded almost automatically: "No, you aren't bad at this. You just haven't ever done it much, and you haven't done it at all for half a lifetime."

When I say that, I'm not being insincere and I'm not making a semantic distinction without greater significance. Having watched the improvements I've seen from my ski students this winter, I have come to believe that most people are capable of doing much more than they give themselves credit for, but they don't know how to let themselves be beginners. I am convinced that the difference between not doing something well and doing it well is partly good instruction and mostly a willingness to practice.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we try a new activity, compare ourselves to people who've practiced it much more than we have, and then declare ourselves to be bad at it? Bad is not a neutral word. In essence, we're declaring ourselves to be in some way deficient. We're shaming ourselves. And I'm not claiming that I'm somehow immune to doing the same thing. But I see it all the time and it's starting to make me sad. We use that judgment to narrow our worlds. We use it to keep ourselves from exploring, from experimenting, from fun. By saying, "Oh, I'm bad at that," we limit our lives.

At the end of last week's piece, I pointed out that even a talent as seemingly innate as walking actually requires a great deal of practice before we become proficient, which led to a question: What do we call things that are available to anyone with normal abilities--things like soccer or skiing or learning a language or learning to play an instrument--but require dedicated practice to be able to do? Are they easy or hard?

We tend to call things that require a lot of practice hard. But I propose we're doing ourselves a disservice in two different ways by choosing that term: first, by calling something hard we make it hard; and second, calling something hard allows us to stay safely in our comfort zone rather than entering into the discomfort required to undergo any process of change.

When we call something hard, we expect to struggle, so we struggle. When we struggle, we fight with our bodies and our experience. We tense up. We get frustrated. We run from what we're doing. In short, we set ourselves up to fail.

But if we eschew the word hard and simply say that these activities require well-directed, concentrated practice, then we don't need to struggle. We just need to be awake to the experience. We need to stay centered, and to breathe, and to accept that we won't immediately excel at the activity. All we really need to do is commit to the experience of quality practice, 95% of which is showing up, concentrating, and engaging in repetition.

By using the word hard to describe a skill that requires commitment to a practice, we give ourselves an excuse to not make the commitment. After all, who will blame us? No one blames anyone for choosing not to do something hard.

I am hardly the first person to note that we struggle with change. It scares us. We prefer to stay in our comfort zone. We know it there. We are familiar with it and, though we may be less fully realized than we'd like to be, in that comfortable place we know we can survive because we've done it for so long. A commitment to a practice, on the other hand, forces us to live with uncertainty, for the practice will, by definition, change us.

Any process of self-growth invariably threatens the ego because the ego seeks to see itself as fixed. So within the ego, the two problems with hard combine. The ego wants to be special. It wants the aggrandizement of doing something we call hard, while at the same time fighting against change.

Aggrandizement is rarely the outcome for anyone who engages honestly in a practice. Much more common is a double dose of humility. On the one hand, when we recognize that the difference between ability and not is the willingness to commit to a practice, we recognize that anyone can do it. We become, in the egoic sense, the opposite of special. On the other hand, when engaging in a practice of sufficient depth, we are forced to learn that there is no destination, no end point. No matter how deep into the practice we get, there is always more to learn. No matter how much mastery you may attain, you'll always be a student.

This realization is profoundly freeing. Not that we are henceforth and forever free from frustration and the like, but instead of either living in some distant future where our ego is stoked by our expertise in something we've accomplished or, worse, using the notion of hard to never take the risk of trying at all, we begin to move, finally, truly into the present.

The question arose because there's never any shortage of skiers on the mountain, and most of them are able to tackle at least intermediate terrain: is skiing easy or hard?

The more I thought about it, the less clear the answer became. On the one hand, most people can learn the rudiments of skiing in a day and achieve what we think of as basic intermediate proficiency within a week. On the other hand, it takes most people years of practice to really get good at it.

The more closely I looked at the question, the more I came to feel that there's a problem contained in the words themselves. Easy and hard are so abstract and imprecise that they confuse our understanding of the world.

Imagine you are standing on the shore of a lake, right at the water's edge, holding a small rock in your hand. You want to throw the rock into the water. The lake is big and you are standing right next to it: for anyone older than, say, two, it is essentially impossible to fail. I think we can safely call this easy.

Now imagine you are standing ten feet from a swimming pool with that rock's identical twin. Can you throw the rock into the swimming pool? Clearly, this is slightly harder, but most of us will succeed most or almost all of the time.

Now, imaginary rocks in hand, start imagining different sizes of and distances from your body of water. Interestingly, we use the same word, hard, to describe throwing the rock into a bucket 30 feet away and throwing the rock into a lake from 50 or 60 or 70 yards. The former is within our physical capacity--we can throw the rock that far--but we may lack the precision to succeed very often. On the other hand, there is a certain distance beyond which we simply lack the physical gifts to throw the rock, no matter how big the target. But notice, too, that a professional baseball outfielder might struggle with the precision of tossing the rock into a bucket, but would have a 100%-success rate throwing the rock into a lake from a distance that for the rest of us would be impossible.

There are things that are beyond our current abilities but which might be attainable with practice. And there are things that are simply beyond the physical capabilities of most but not all people. These are two very different things, but we call them both hard.

So here's another question: is learning to walk hard or easy? Don't answer too quickly. The toddler just learning to walk falls down an awful lot. It takes her many days of practice before she becomes adept at it. Therefore learning to walk is hard. But on the other hand, by the time she's a certain age, she'll be, like all of us, perfectly comfortable with walking. Indeed, no one needs lessons to learn to walk. Therefore learning to walk is easy.

So then, back to our original question: is skiing (or soccer, or golf, or learning to speak Spanish or play the piano) easy or hard?

Last week, Jerry and I went to hit golf balls, our first practice session of 2016. I'd been telling him about my experiments with allowing--the experience with the soccer ball I described last week, as well as further experiments with skiing and tennis serves--and I told him I thought I was on to something. We went to the chipping green and tried it. And the results were extremely promising.

We centered and put a real focus on feeling the core, then allowed the club to move in a relaxed swing, with all the motion generated by core. It worked as we hoped. After my experience with the soccer ball, I wasn't terribly surprised that the ball came effortlessly off the club with much more power than I was used to. The ball flew with a lovely trajectory, right toward (and, with my shots, usually beyond) the aim point.

It was a challenge for me at first to figure out how to control the power. I worried that I'd try to do so by tightening up, and so for the bulk of the practice session, I simply allowed myself to hit long, enjoying how sweetly I was striking the ball and not worrying too much about the result. At the end, though, I felt confident enough to try a shorter chip. I allowed, still all the movement from core, but gently, and I put the ball within two feet of the pin.

Over the course of the session, we reveled in the sounds of our practice. Every golfer comes to love the unmistakable sound of a ball hit cleanly with a square clubface, and that's what we heard. On a chip, it's a crisp little thwack. The ball's flight confirmed the clean strike. The ball would fly through the air and then land with a similarly delicious thump.

Now let's be clear: it wasn't that every shot was perfect. A fair amount of the time I was so excited to see my shot that I looked up before I hit. And sometimes I struggled to allow, and cheated by getting really handsy, which obviously doesn't work. So I'm not describing some panacea. But my best shots that day were the best chips I've ever hit.

For our next practice session, we intend to practice at the range with full swings. For me, the challenge will be to see if I can keep myself from tightening unnecessarily in a misguided search for power. I have a strong tendency to think, "I have to hit it hard." But allowing doesn't feel like hitting it hard. Allowing feels effortless. My expectation is that it'll take some practice to learn to allow. I have a lot of muscle memory to the contrary.

A couple of weeks ago I had an interesting experience at the gym. Before my weight workout, I played a little with a soccer ball, hitting some passes against the wall and playing with a dribbling technique I've been exploring. Then I did my weight workout, which included a few exercises that target the legs. After I was done, I went back to the gym to play with the ball again. I discovered that I could kind of let the leg hang and then let the whole weight of it swing from my core rather than use my muscles to swing it. It's kind of hard to put into words. It was like I let myself truly feel its weight and then I allowed its weight to swing. When I succeeded, the result was effortless power. It was almost like I wasn't even using my muscles.

I thought back to a time over the Labor Day weekend when I was watching many hours of the U.S. Open and thought I had an insight about how the pros hit overheads so hard, so I went to the tennis courts by my house to experiment. Basically, I tried to feel the racquet heavy in my hand, and then I allowed the weight of the arm and racquet to swing rather than swinging it. I still remember the last overhead I hit that day. I was using an old ball with very little bounce. My smash landed in the service box across the net and then bounced clean over the fence.

I'm still struggling to put this insight--for it does feel very much like an insight--into words. Right now I'm calling it allowing. The experience of it is action entirely without struggle. I'm very new to the sensation, but I'm exploring it every chance I get. As I continue to experiment, I'll share here what I learn.