2014-08 – August 2014 Coaching Hour – Golf Flow

As we enter new realms of mastery in our skills and performances, we can often lose sight of the very simple truth that mastery does not mean perfection, and that even the most skilled performers in any realm are going to experience failure and off days.

That’s the main topic of discussion this time around, fueled by our notes on the book, Golf Flow by Gio Valiante.

Thoughts On Golf Flow

Gil: Welcome to the coaching hour, August, 2014. My life has been shaken by Gary Davidson introducing me to the Golf Flow book. First of all, I have to thank you. It was an incredible read. I read it within three or four days after you told me about it, and I’m through it twice now, and I have to tell you, Gary, that it’s scary what I wrote down and what you wrote down.

Gary: Really?

Gil: One of us is really brilliant and the other one is a copycat. Okay?

Gary: I’ll just point out I sent you mine first.

Gil: I will yield to you. And for those of you-guys who haven’t read this book, it’s called Golf Flow by Gio Valiante, and it is an incredible book. It’s a 608-page book that I got through in three days, I think, first time through. We went on our Alaska cruise and it just zipped on by.

The first part of tonight is going to be Gary talking to us about some of the ah-has he’s had in his practice regime and his tournament shooting. He’s had some really good tournaments, but we’re going to digress to that in just a minute.

And anybody else who has read the book, I want you to give me some feedback now because as I read this book the first time, I couldn’t help but have flashbacks to things that we had said here on the coaching hour, that he was not necessarily saying it in a different way but just reiterating.

Would that be a fair statement, Gary?

Gary: I felt like as I read the thing, even though it was a golf book, that every time he talked about a shot I didn’t think about a golf club or a golf ball. The concepts that he talked about just carried over so much. And he may not know it; but he could have written the same book about sporting clays.

Gil: Right.

Gary: And I don’t think I couldn’t point to anything in it and say, boy, I’ve never heard this before, this is a brand-new concept.

Gil: Right.

Gary: But I thought his presentation was such that it was a really good read. It was a great reminder of a whole litany of things, and I think it was a little bit different approach than some of the things that we’ve heard, not to say any one is right or wrong.

Gil: I agree.

Gary: A little bit different approach to the overall goal of obtaining flow or the zone or whatever. 

Gil: Right. Immediately as I read this book over a three-and-a-half- day period, I began to go back through my past peak performances, whether it was speaking to people or shooting or photography or whatever it was. I just began to go back through them and one of the first things that it said to me was that when you’re in the zone or in flow, as he said, your physiology and your thought process are in sync, and I’ve never really heard it said that way; but as I go back through all of the peak performances that I’ve had, that resonated. I never really put my finger on it until I read this book, and everything that happens to you in life that causes you stress or that comes from fear is designed to make either your physiology speed up and your mind follows or your mind speeds up and your physiology follows.

Both of those either carry you forward or backward and out of the present, and I’d never really heard it said that way. It really spoke to me on many different levels; but that one thing right there was my biggest takeaway the first time through.

I understood the mastery and the ego part of it. That makes sense to me. I’ve never heard it said that way; but we’ve all talked about how we love the game, and you’ve got to get past trying to impress other people. But it was just an amazing revelation to me, and I go back to public speaking, because 30 years ago I was not a good public speaker. Some would disagree with my assumption that I’m pretty good right now; but I’m not worried about those people.

I go back to Dave Fisher’s place when I gave a level one with Jerry Meyers. It was the first time I had to get up in front of a bunch of  people, and the only thing I wanted to do is get through, and I was strafing those guys with words. If my words had been razor blades, they would have all bled to death in the first three minutes of the speech because I was speaking so fast because I wanted to get through.

And, coincidentally, that’s how a lot of people look at tournaments or a station. A perceived difficult station, you get into it, and you break the first pair and all you want to do is get through with it before you forget how to do it, and all of a sudden you’re ahead of yourself and you leave yourself behind and you’re no longer in the present and you just can’t handle it. I guess what I’m saying is that the thing that first hit me was the concept of your physiology and your thought process being in sync. That was a huge thing for me. Now, enough about me.

The first statement tonight is about Gary and what Gary has experienced and discovered about himself and about his practice routine and his commitment to practice and his tournament shooting. So I’m going to turn this over to you right now. 

Gary: Well, all right. Partially as a result of having read this book and trying to digest what was in it and partially as a result of where I am this year in my shooting curve, and interestingly I’m not shooting well as we speak this moment the last few weeks; but one of the things that I found when I went back and looked at things in light of this book and looked at my history is the fact that I go through these cycles every year.

You can see it in the history of my scores that almost invariably it’s easy enough for me to understand. I’ll go shoot some tournaments in March and April that I shouldn’t because I’ve been working 50 or 60 hours a week, and those results are really poor and I get disgusted over that and put my nose to the grindstone and getting in my practice routine and get after it, and I’ll have about two to three months where things pick up, and that has happened this year. I had a really good stretch there and had some HOAs, and I placed in about four different tournaments in a row, which is a long streak for me.

And then lately I’ve fallen into part of the pattern, and if I don’t figure out something to do a little differently and what I’ve  just directly done, I’ll be there for three or four weeks and then I’ll come out of it again.

Well, one of the things that I found really helpful in this book, and when I started accumulating my list of notes out of it, was how many times he talked about what I call perspective, and that is keeping in mind that this journey we’re on is not a constantly ascending straight line of the mastery curve. It’s going up and it’s coming back down. It’s going up and jagged, hopefully trending upward; but it’s a jagged graph line and essentially what he said is, whether we like it or not, get used to it.

The fact that you happen to be in a point in time in your curve where you’re not shooting like you want to is not cause for panic,  not cause for stopping what you’re doing, rushing off to get a release trigger or buy a new gun or find a new coach. It’s just part of the natural learning curve. This is a difficult game that we’re playing. Everybody goes through it and it’s just your turn.

And of all the things that was in this book and kind of related to where I see myself and what’s happened to me is I had a really good streak this year, got a lot of punches over two or three months, and that’s backed off now.

And I think that my wife would tell you that I’m a happier person right now than I was this time last year when I was in the doldrums or whenever. It happened to me last year. It varies a little bit; but the curve and the history is unmistakable, and I found that to be just the things that he reminded us of. In one place he said: we can do every- thing he suggested in this book. We can do it all to the best of our abil- ity, and he didn’t say it exactly this way; but at certain times we’re just going to suck it up.

Gil: Yeah.

Gary: And that’s just part of the deal. And we spend a lot of time talking about getting in the flow and what makes good things happen and all that, and sometimes I think we just need to recognize it’s not always going to be that way. We’re going to have bad outings, and it’s how much weight or emphasis you placed on those bad outings that determine how much impact you’re going to have. If we dwell on them and dwell on the bad parts of them and our brain is wired to remember the bad things more than the good anyway that those bad things are going to stick with us, and it will impact our learning curve; but his suggestion is no matter how bad a round was somewhere in that round there was something good you could take out of it, and you need to learn to come away literally working on making a point to remember those good things out of a round and dump the rest of it.

And I think over the long run that’s just an invaluable concept because there may be somebody on the line who doesn’t go there; but my experience is we all go there.

Gil: Yeah. There’s no doubt that we all go there. Inevitably it’s fear.

When Flow Occurs

Gil: I will share this with you. We just got back from Argentina, and I was shooting the shot cam for eight days straight and let me tell you what, buddy. If you want to build up your front arm, shoulder, front hand, shoulder, you put that damn shot cam on there and you shoot it 350 to 500 times in the morning and the afternoon for eight days straight, I’m going to tell you what. You could lift a Volkswagen with your left arm, and I must tell you that I began to see things more in three dimension. Although I was looking at the bird, in order to shoot that damn thing, you’ve got to really be thinking about making a movie, and everything has to come together and everything has to slide together, and you have to know what you want the movie to do.

Once you approach the bird and you start doing it, it kind of takes care of itself; but once you pull the trigger and kill the bird, then you’ve got to follow that sucker all the way down to the ground, and that’s not easy to do.

But I came away with over 300 dove shots and about 250 pigeon shots that were edited that were really good, and I got to where I was shooting really well with it, and this thing about not hurrying, this thing about having your mind and your ass in sync was a big deal for me. I caught myself one afternoon when I was having trouble. I was flinching, which is a by-product of looking at everything in the picture, you understand; but I caught myself being concerned about not get- ting enough shots, and I felt myself speeding up. I felt my movements get jerky. I felt everything that he talked about in this book, about  when one gets out of sync with the other, and I put my gun down and I walked around really slow, watching the birds, and all I did was just watch the birds.

My bird boy thought I was going into a trance, I’m sure, but when I came back I loaded the gun slow. I closed the gun slow. When I saw a pigeon coming I knew I was going to shoot, I turned the camera on. I got set and I did everything mentally and physically in slow motion, and all of a sudden the birds began to die again, and I was shooting birds at 50 and 60 and 70 yards, really long birds because I got all the close birds I need.

And shooting at 50, 60, and 70 yards, as you can imagine, there’s a lot of failure in that, and I realized something. The more I consciously gave myself corrections and the more I consciously described how I screwed that shot up, the more I screwed up the next shot.

And like you were talking about a minute ago, if in everything that creates adversity, you can find something good in it and tell yourself how you’re going to improve it the next time, then flow occurs, and I realized that at that point in time when the conscious brain gets involved with the correction, the first thing it does is it tells you how you screwed it up, and then it gives you voluminous lines of banter that is really meant to tell everybody around you that you know what you’re doing.

Even though you screwed it up the same way five times in a row, you still know what you’re doing, which is just nothing more than the ego part of your brain kicking in to not let anybody think that you don’t know what you’re doing.

Vicki has a situation that she’s going to talk about here in a little while. You just find yourself, even though you know what you’re supposed to do, you get trapped into that egocentric part of self- correction, and it ceases to become a positive correction thing. And  I found when I shot my best, if I missed a shot, all I had to do was visualize what I needed to do on the next shot and not even talk to myself, and I could hammer the next shot.

It was an amazing thing to me how much it helped to get the mind and the body together by moving slower and making sure that you didn’t hurry to do anything. For instance, the first day we were sup- posed to go out and shoot doves, I had forgotten to program the cam- eras, and programming the camera involves plugging it into the com- puter, going to the software, clicking on about four different things, clicking configuration completed and undoing them and then ejecting them. I don’t have to do that very much; but it’s normally something that gives me anxiety.

But when I realized I hadn’t done it, I didn’t hurry to do it and I didn’t feel like I had to hurry and do it. I opened the computer, turned it on, undid the shot cams, put the cords up to them and I slowly plugged one in. I programmed. I configure it, cut it off, ejected it, plugged the other one in, slowly did it, did it, did it all the while everybody in the lodge is getting ready to go out to the truck to go, and I’m just slowly doing it, staying within myself, ejected it, unplug the shot cams, put them back in the bag, turn the computer off, shut it down, packed my bag, didn’t get in a hurry, walked out of the lodge not in a hurry, and the funniest thing was the truck was still there. They didn’t leave, you know. It was like I was so calm, and I have my experiences with reading this book to thank for that, and I’ve used that with students several times since then.

Now, Gary, you said a minute ago when you were talking about your year that you normally go into a little slump; but if I were to ask Rachel, she would say that you were happier in your slump this year than you were last year; is that correct?

Gary: I think so.

Gil: Well and maybe happiest is not the right word.

Gary: No, I’m not happy about not shooting well.

Gil: Right.

Gary: But I’m not overly concerned about it. It’s not ruining my dinner with my lovely young wife. It’s easier for me to just let it go because I’ve thought about what we’ve read in this book, and when I go back and look at the log or just go back and look at my tournament results on the registered shoots, I mean, the pattern is just clear as it can be.

I’d like to think, well, I’m going to study this and figure out how  to keep that from happening; but chances are I’m not. I don’t think most people master how to keep that from happening at all. Like I said, I think that learning curve is a series of ups and downs; but I am convinced I can accept it and deal with it better than I have in the past.

Bob S: Now, Gary, have you looked at something he spent some time on in the book, which was circadian rhythms? Have you looked at your rhythm during the time periods when you’re not shooting as well com- pared to how you spend your day, your hours, what time you get up, and things like that on the times when you’re doing well?

Gary: Bob, only to the extent that it’s real easy for me to do that. What I’m talking about is early in the season. It pretty much doesn’t matter what I want to do. In March and April I’m not going to be a very good shooter because I’m just working, working too much. I’m working on working less if you get my drift.

Bob S: No, I understand; but that was the part I was looking at, was I understand the one early in the season. I’ve been there, done that; but I was looking at the one when you start to have that encroached slump because, one, that may be part of a circadian rhythm for you; but there may be other things going on, but there’s some interesting research on that about environmental factors.

Gary: I haven’t made that association, Bob. The only thing that I can say about my personal ups and downs is invariably, when I begin to shoot well in tournaments, it’s always been preceded first by a fairly extended period of good practice. By that I mean not rushed, and it is practice with a purpose. The improvement often doesn’t follow it as quickly as I would like; but invariably it seems to happen, and I think then there comes a point after I’ve shot well long enough where what creates the downturn in my performance is when I stop concentrating on the process and what got me to shooting well and I start concentrating on trying to shoot well. I know that may sound a little funny.

Bob S: No, it doesn’t at all.

Gary: My default when I overtry goes right back to the basic underlying problem I started this game with. I’m sure nobody else out there has ever checked the lead when you’re really trying to hit something; but at every level of my learning curve I have revisited, and God, I hate to say this; but exactly ten years ago when I started this game in 2004 some guy named Ash said, Your problems will recur at different levels as you go up this mastery curve.

Gil: I’ll be darned.

Gary: Yeah.

Bob S: That’s essentially what the golf pro said.

Gary: Yes.

Bob S: Almost exactly that, in fact, in one paragraph.

Gary: No, you’re right. You’re right. I have that paragraph highlighted in my book.

Bob S: So do I.

Gary: I think that’s one of the things that I do, and what I would like to do is recognize that pattern a little earlier and put some things in my practice routine that would help mitigate that; but, again, I think, as he said, we can do it all perfectly. We can do all of his advice, do everything Gil has ever told us to do and we’re going to have periods where we don’t perform like we want to, and the bottom line is, more or less, get over it. It’s part of the deal. It happens to everybody. Learn something from it and move on, and I think if I have anything to thank this guy for or what I’d thank him the most for if I ever met him, was just helping put all of that in perspective because I think I do it less and less now; but I think we’ve all made ourselves miserable for some period of time over having a lousy round of sporting clays and what a silly thing to do.

Bob S: Sure. Absolutely. I have a question.

Gil: Well, hang on just a second. I only got one more question for Gary, and then I’ll turn it over to you.

Describe, Gary, the difference in the way you practiced after April 15th and how that deliberate practice got you into the performance mode that you were in. Anything that you did differently?

Dedicated practice is something that’s talked about in this book, something we’ve talked about over and over again with the preload and all the stuff that we’ve been talking about in the last 24 months. But I think you mentioned to me that you put in a certain amount of practice time, and then when you began to shoot tournaments, you didn’t practice as much; is that right?

Gary: That’s right, and part of that is just personal limitations on schedule and how much time I have to play; but when we leave the 74 Ranch each spring, I come away with something very, very specific that is a new twist in the game to work on. 

Gil: Right.

Gary: And I will this year in particular, and I spent some serious time. So I can go out to one of our private clubs and shoot by myself which I do. Probably half the time that I’m practicing, I’m the only one on the course, and I religiously worked on stabilizing the picture and being stubborn on the crossing shots and being stubborn with the picture on the quartering moves, and I would do that at least a hundred rounds every time I went out, and then I would finish with 50 to a hundred rounds of just one or two presentations, just working on feeling that target getting ready to blow up, just smoothing out the move, and nothing difficult at all, and I think I did that. I worked on that hard.   After April the 15th, I would practice two or three times a week and probably 200 shells a round. That’s a lot for me.

But then as I began to shoot tournaments, I might go practice for a hundred or 150 rounds in a week that I was going to shoot a tourna- ment. I try to practice on maybe a Tuesday afternoon or a Wednesday afternoon. I try to pick a day where I wasn’t going to be too busy at work, could take off a little early so I wasn’t worn out when I got to the course, and then just go shoot the tournament. The third thing I’ll add is I worked a lot on the preload, and when I’d go shoot the tourna- ments, I’m thinking about the preload, trying to limit the thinking to that. Well and, you know, I wouldn’t say that I hadn’t read the book at that point. I wasn’t thinking about being in a mastery mode; but I was in a mastery mode.

I mean, the things I was doing were consistent with being in a mas- tery mode. For some reason, at Austin, I just had good performances.   I think for some reason a number of my best shoots have been over there, including some HOAs. And so you go, people notice, and the next thing you know I’m out there shooting, and instead of thinking about the preload and how this is a “stabilizing-the-picture shot” and get out of my way, you start thinking about hitting the damn target.

And as silly as that sounds, what’s really happening then is, for me anyway, I’m inviting the conscious mind to step in there and help me take a peek at that lead, and once I start doing that, it’s like a wino going back to the bottle. It takes awhile to get back off of it.

Bob S: Gary, do you got your book in front of you? 

Gary: I don’t. I have some of my notes I made out of it; but I don’t have my book. 

Bob S: Well, on Page 175, he describes an end of practice sequence that he recommends, and I wonder if something like that wouldn’t be useful in our sport, and what he had was six different shots, and we have six different groups. So it’s not hard for us to translate that where he said: All I want the person to practice is visualization and performance, and they do that at the end of every single practice. He wants them to do the same things.