Just finished reading “Golf Flow,” and I recommend all 608 pages. After reviewing my highlighted passages and all past performances, I realized that when I really performed well, I was in flow.
The short definition is that when you are in flow, your mental process is in sync with your physical process. In other words, you are not in your own way.
I remember shooting with my first shooting/traveling partner Jim Jule, a left-handed pitcher in the minor leagues. He was always slow to walk and react, and I was the worrier and the fidgeter. For a whole year, he beat me by one bird at every tournament…every tournament. I finished second in so many shoots that year, but at the end of the year, I finally beat him by one bird and won the tournament with a 63/100 at Champion Lake Gun Club in Houston.
What I remember from that day was that I was in slow motion. Everyone was complaining about the difficulty of the targets and after traveling the country shooting tournaments for three years, I had learned to not worry about the difficulty of the targets. Just keep shooting and doing the best you can. Head down and plow straight.
As I began to think back about previous performances and compare what happened with what I highlighted in this book, I began to understand more about what the author was describing when he talked about flow. It’s is a state of mind and body that occurs when your thought process and your physical process are both in sync with each other and you are not trying to do anything. You are a participant, but you don’t have to try. You “just do it.” Where have you heard that before…?
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