A few thoughts on keeping your mind from running away with you

Another excerpt from my upcoming book—Getting Unstuck: Seven Transformational Practices for Golf Nerds

When it comes to home renovations, I describe my attributes as: “Strong back, weak mind.” That is, I’m really good at tearing things down, but I suck at constructing things, especially finesse work like hanging doors or mitering corners.

I often felt the same way about my golf game. Turned out I had a pretty good swing, but a weak mental game. Namely, my thoughts often ran away with me.

Players tell me all the time that they have a head full of noisy thoughts that make them anxious, choke, and gum up their swings. They don’t know how to quiet their minds.

I address this in my upcoming book—Getting Unstuck: Seven Transformational Practices For Golf Nerds. The following is an excerpt that I hope you find helpful. It’s from the chapter called ‘The First Practice: Don’t Be Scared, It Ain’t Weird … to Meditate.’

I have two questions for you:

Do you have a mind? Or, are you your mind?

Consider the ramifications of your answer. One provides you with choice and freedom. The other makes you a victim of your mind, such as the person who rationalizes his or her behaviour—and often the quality of their golf—with, "That's just who I am."

Being a victim means you give away uour power. You're stuck, shackled to your past, your beliefs, shadows, stories, and behaviour patterns. No way out. Being a victim is a dead-end.

When I say, "I am angry," or "I suck," I've identified myself with those feelings. "This is who I am." From this place, it's almost impossible to become emotionally neutral and make choices that serve you.

This next bit may sound strange, but changing anything requires getting uncomfortable and working through your resistance. Instead of getting caught up in your thoughts and feelings, you might find it helpful to say, 'My mind is afraid that I'm going to screw up this round.' Or 'My mind is angry that I have three-putted twice."

Observing your mind provides you with opportunity, possibility, more freedom, and greater perspective. When you observe your mind, you can take advantage of a wonderful phenomenon:

Awareness is curative.

Just being aware of your mind decreases the intensity of your feelings, frees you from your usual thinking patterns, and from defaulting to behaviours that sabotage you.

This, of course, is not the way the majority of people relate to their feelings and thoughts. Historically, we have not been taught in Western culture to relate objectively to our minds, and to develop a relationship with our minds that allows us to make choices about what we're thinking, feeling, believing, and how they affect our behaviour.

That's why it's integral that you train your mind in the skill of awareness.

To develop your skills of awareness, you have to engage in practices that allow you to integrate these new ways of being into your golf and life. In the same way that you won't develop your muscles by reading a book about weightlifting, you won't develop a healthier relationship with your mind unless you train it.

The No. 1 way to improve your relationship with your mind is to practice meditation.

For more on meditation, including some basic instructions, check out my blog post on meditation from 2016.

In the book, I demystify meditation and discuss that it’s not mystical or woo woo, but a down-to-earth practice used by elite performers in sports, business, the arts, and more. Of course, if you want to chant and wear saffron robes, go for it … but you don’t need to.