Beat The Course-Not Yourself! by PGA Tour’s Older Rookie, Gary Christian

To be honest, for some people, it works. For most they don't have time to really change anything fundamentally, and so you can have this great lesson, but you know, after you've hit your bucket of balls, you're probably not going to hit another bucket of balls correctly until you see the next lesson. And so people, I think, get frustrated and they're paying all this money for a swing lesson. And yeah, my numbers look better and this line looks

better on the screen. But I keep shooting the same score, and I keep hitting the same shots, and I keep making the same mistakes. There's a lot more podcasts involved with wisdom and experience and filling fives into fours. A different approach to be able to help you score better.

So great journey. A lot of the time, the journeys, I think more fun than the actual destination.

to make the two and it wasn't me. And so you always of battling and and it just I always had the ability to win. I think just because I was just naturally a tough personality. I always say I hated losing more than I enjoyed winning, and you learn a lot from that, and but you know, it takes a lot out of you. So you know, it's funny now that I don't really enjoy competing that much in many respects. I think I used up my reserves of energy and emotional and energy to be able to get

where I got to. So you know, now when my son beats me a ping pong, I don't solve for half an hour like I used to. So that's kind of nice. It makes you a little bit better human being as well, which is even better. But yeah, I always had the belief in myself that I had something of what it would take to get to the highest level, and we just were trying to put our finger on what was that little bit of glue that would put the final pieces together that would allow everything to work.

You know, you can be you know, maybe undersized, maybe under talented, maybe under financed, maybe under coached, but if you have one thing that kind of puts everything together to give you what it is you do have, but has everything working together at the same time, like everyone's put in the same direction, you can achieve great things. And that's what I think I did with the mental side of the game to dedicate myself to that to

be able to push me over the edge. You see a lot of incredibly talented players with amazing swings, amazing you know, coaching, but they don't have that thing that allows it to happen when they need it to happen.

And you know, it's almost like it's almost like the game's too easy for them, and they kind of overlook certain other things that I would never have overlooked, and you know, I would just be jealous of kind of I could just have that talent or that swing or that bank balance to be able to go and see who I want when I want and try and improve constantly. You know, I could have done some really great things with that, and I would have been a rookie at thirty or not forty.

connection with what I had just achieved. And someone took a photo of me making my six inch part to get my PGA Tour card and win the tournament, and they sent it to me. I sent it to mister Palmer and he signed it like he does. He did, you know, for so many people. So it's just that special, special memento that They've got a lot of special things, but that's certainly one of the more important ones.

That's the final line of the nature of professional golf. And you know, you look at it, it may come down to you know, one nine holes and might come down to one hole, but you know, you've just got to just got to maintain that belief. And you know, I didn't really worry too much about that the young guns coming through and taking taking my spots on the PGA Tour because I knew I was going to get there eventually, and I just, you know, as as I played the years on the corn Free Tourt, I got

more comfortable with the courses. I got more comfortable being in contention. And you just have to use prior experience to be able to perform better when you get an opportunity the next time. And that was always my goal. Whatever happened, I always learned something from the experience, whether it was good or bad, and then applied that the next time. You know, I'd vow to not make that mistake. The next time, I would I would sit back after that.

I was very good about looking at things objectively. I didn't take things emotionally. So, you know, you may go into the tournament in the final group or two with a chance to win a Corn Forrery Tour event, which may may or may not get a PGA Tour card, and you end up not playing great. You know, a lot of people it will crush them. Because of the resilience I had, I was just able to kind of sit back, say, hey, you know, I try my best. You know, things didn't work out that day. Now let's

go over that round. Let's see what I could have done better. You know, maybe in course management, maybe in decision making, you know, but usually the most of the most of the answers were in you know, maybe deviating from my routine, getting distracted, get in a little bit taken by the situation, and then you kind of say, okay, next time. You know, My goal was to try and play, you know, in effect, play a little bit like an emotionless robot, even though I'm an outgoing, friendly guy in

between shots, That's what I am. But when I get when I was getting into the shots, my job was to take everything out of play, every distraction, every thought of score, every thought of position, every thought of what if, and say, I'm going to dedicate myself to giving myself the best chance to make the best decision on this shot, to visualize this shot as clearly as possible, to feel exactly what it is I'm trying to do with this swing, and then to get set up and then connect to

the target and let it go, and then whatever happens happens. But what I could do is I could look myself in the mirror after that shot and say, hey, I did anything I could do. I cannot do anything more than this, and sometimes go it's a hard game. And sometimes sometimes is a degree out and that past two degrees out and the ball goes twenty yards offline. That's

just part of the game. And I worked really hard on that, and I would grade myself on how I perform my routine, and I would try and get seventy five percent of shots hit, whether they were drives, iron shots, chips or puts as an a as grade in it as an ad man, I did everything right there. It's impossible to do for one hundred percent of the shots,

but seventy five percent was kind of my checklist. And I'll go through my yardage book at the end on my pin sheet and our grade every shot, and at the end, I was saying, man, that was a good round of golf today. I got seventy eight percent of routines done to my liking.

wasn't working. Because it was working well enough to make money on the Mini Tours, which is almost impossible, and to win events every single year, but it just wasn't enough to get over that hump of getting through second

stage of qualifying school. So when I dedicated myself to that, I was able to see a different path, see a path where to be in control of one's mental makeup, one's emotional makeup, the ability to react positivetively not negatively, to talk kindly to yourself, all of these things that we see in every gold psychology book we read. But what brought life to it was reading the Eight Traits of Champion Golfers by Graham and John Stabler, and I

just kind of just threw myself into it. And the more I read of that, the more of these little vignettes would come out to help me on the golf course. And it wasn't theory. It was it was practical, practical advice. You do this, this will happen. You do this differently, this will happen differently. And that's what I wanted. I just wanted a roadmap. And to that point I didn't have a roadmap. I was kind of a little bit lost in exactly what it is I needed to do.

And this helped just focus me a little bit more to instead of, you know, trying lots of different things and wasting energy kind of as I said, going forwards and then saying, well that doesn't work, let's back out this space and go to another another tunnel and see if that works. This now was was what it is that I needed, and that was that gave me the ability to be way more efficient in the time spent

with preparation to play golf at the highest levels. As I said, I had family commitments where I didn't need to be out of the house for eight hours a day, and so I cut back on my physical practice and spend more time at home. But I would go to a quiet spot and really work hard in developing the skills necessary to be able to translate that on the golf course of visualization and relaxation and just awareness, awareness of how it is you're thinking. You know, we are

not very mindful of what's going on. We're not mindful of what we're eating. I eat too quickly, I don't maybe listen the way I should do. I don't open my senses, and all of a sudden, when you become mindful, you're suddenly aware of God tell you what my body is extremely tight here, or I'm now very aware of these very poor messages I'm telling myself. And I used to do that. You know, I would get frustrated playing go if I wouldn't show out and break clubs or

throw clubs or custs or anything. But there was that inward, in a conversation between me and myself about how unacceptable that was and how poor that was and how much I sucked. And you can't be doing that to yourself, and you flip it around and if your parents had said the same thing to you that you were saying to yourself, it wouldn't be a very healthy relationship. So, you know, I've always been a positive guy, but I could just you know, I was seventy five percent positive.

I had to get one hundred percent positive. So everything that I did, every situation that I faced, I framed it as positively as possible. I could go on top one, but I could say to myself, you know what, man, your routine felt pretty good there, or you had the right club, or can't wait to hit this next shot and see if we can hit a great shot and then another great shot and make part on this whole. I did that in a PGA two event in Memphis. It was just a shot out of the blue, like

a pool top that went about one hundred yards. I hit three with thirty forty yard short of the green, pitched onto two feet and made part. But if I'd have got in my own way of telling myself how bad that was, and you know, telling myself, I'm a PGA tour plan, I've just topped a ball and look at all those people watching. How embarrassing is that? I can't believe I'm a pros just done that. My mind just went immediately to let's frame this as positive as possible.

Let's get onto the next shot. They said a great shot here, and they said another great shot. And that's what I did.

And I think that's a powerful way. You know, when you had teachers at school who could turn a very boring history lesson into something that came alive, where you put yourself in that battle or in that courtroom drama or whatever it was in that you know, you know, congressional meeting, whatever it was. When I heard those kinds of stories, I just lived at I was there. I imagined, I could you know, vividly imagine being you know, somewhere

two hundred years ago. And I think that's the secret to good teaching, good write, in, good broadcast, in whatever it is. You've got to allow that person to experience what it is they experience and then help them change that experience.

me a hundred lessons without him knowing it. It gave me a steady head, It gave me a good pivot, It gave me a flat left wrist to impact. He gave me weight transition. It did everything that you needed to do to hit the ball consistently. So I've never ever worried about making good contact with the ball because of that lesson when I was six. But you know I got through you know, junior golfert whatever level I

played in England, I earned a scholarship to Auburn. Being self taught, which in many respects was, you know, maybe put me a little bit behind other people. But I think what I gained from it was I own my swing.

I owned the DNA of my swing, so I was able to correct things way quicker than other people because I could correct things on the course because in effect, I was my own coach, whereas other players with way better swings than me, as soon as they hit one bad shot, you know, if mister coach isn't there, they don't know how to go to Plan B or how

to correct when things go wrong. And so I knew that obviously I had to finally get a coach, and so when I was twenty six, I started working with a great coach called Wayne Flint, top one hundred instruct who lived close to where I lived in Birmingham, and that helped refine what it was I did already, but it didn't change the DNA of the swing. So I still had the belief and the feel and the understanding of the swing, but we just in effect knocked off

the rough edges and with the golf psychology. I read a load of books, they didn't really speak to me, you know, Bob Rotello. I enjoyed those books, but it didn't feel like it was tailored to me. It was, you know, some lovely little anecdotes that I could get stuff from, but I needed something that was more for me, a personalized touch, and that's where Deborah Graham and John Stables book spoke to me. So then I started working with them on a one to one basis and that

just helped solidify what I knew already. So it was kind of the same kind of thing with the swing and the mental side of the game. I was basically self taught and then had the experts come in and just knocked the rough edges off and just help the understanding a little further.

I played my rookie year on the PGA Tour. I made the FedEx Cup playoffs. I had six or seven top twenties, top ten, So I played, you know, had some good results, and I mean I would grade myself a B minors, maybe even a C plus. And I finished, you know, and got on the FedEx Cup playoffs. If I'd have played the way I'd played the previous year,

I would have finished top seventy, I think pretty comfortably. So, you know, on the tour, you just it suited my game because it was about minimizing mistakes, and I tended to keep the ball in play. I tended to hit a lot of greens, and I tended not to beat myself, which would be a good name for a bookouldn't it. So that was the kind of the secret of playing on the on the PGA Tour, you just you know, everyone thinks you got to go super low out there.

You don't. You just go, you shoot four rounds on the par You're going to make a fortune every year. And it was just I was unfortunate in that my game. You know, Yes, the course is a little bit harder, and it maybe highlighted a few of my weaknesses a little bit more than it did on the corn for a tour, But on the corn for a too, I was top twenty and part in on the tour, I

was outside the top one hundred. And that was basically the difference between playing four good rounds five weeks in that year to play in three good rounds five weeks a year. And if you had played four good rounds, I would have had five top tens and finished in the top seventy pretty comfortably.

you know. I mean, I've been telling people I'm not good, but I'm not that bad.

me the most. On the PGA too. Any weaknesses is magnified there because the penalty for a lack of skill and a department is just a little bit higher than it is anywhere else, and you get found out. And when you're playing against the top one hundred and fifty in the world, that basically, you know, that's a recipe for getting run over. So I was glad that what I was so glad I never had that overarching dream and goal of I have to play on the PGA Tour. My goal was to improve, to see how good I

could get and wherever that took me, I would be delighted. So, you know, to go from being a part time player because I had a full time job in England. I'm one of the few PGA Tour players who's ever had a job as well. So I left school at eighteen and worked full time in the pensions field for two years just outside London, and I was playing twice a week and everyone was playing seven days a week. So you know it is to go from there to playing college goal for Auburn. What a massive jump that was,

What an amazing journey that was. And if I'd have finished there and that was the limit to how good I could get, then I could have probably laid my head on the pillow and been fine about it. But then to go from there and be able to play on the mini tours and win thirty times, that's a pretty good career right there for someone who started where I started from. And then to go to the corn Free Tour and win two times there, that's an amazing story.

To go from working as a pensions administrator to win in twice on the corn Free Tour and then to be a rookie make the Fedexcat Playoffs as a forty year old and play with tiger woods at the Barclays. That kind of puts the cherry on the top to know where you went from and where you finished that. But again, it was always just that I just want to see how good I can get, and I was glad to see that that was a PGA Tour level and to be one of the best players in the world.

how things used to be. You would kind of learn how to fail for many many years on the on the mini tours and whatever, and then all of a sudden you would hit it just right and get through qualifying school and get on the PGA two and may or may not have a career, long term career, but it was possible to do. Now you got PGA two university where these university college students graduates the accelerated program.

These guys are, they're in their teens or their early twenties, and they're the equivalent of thirty year old players that the the tools they have behind them. You know, they when you think of what I did, I was self taught to I was twenty six. Not one player is self taught. I didn't get into goal psychology till I was thirty three. Basically every single top college player will have a psychologist. Basically every top college player has a PGA to a team behind them as a teenager. And

that's the difference. So they are they are so far and above what people from the previous generation were at their age that they are. You know, they're they're just incredible, incredible athletes and incredible players that have this amazing talent,

but with that maturity added in. You throw that in with you know, players in how bigger, stronger, more powerful at you know, twenty five years old players they hit in it three hundred and forty yards and they're just playing pitch and park golf courses all the way, all year long. You know, forty year olds tend to hit it a little bit shorter than a twenty five year old. So you know, the way I look at the best way to explain it is through my experience of playing

at the highest levels. I hit the ball, let's say two hundred and eighty five yards, I get paired with Rory McElroy, I get I have to give him forty yards on every single hole where we hit driver. Now, over one round, I might have one of those days with my seven irons where I just have that incredible ball striking round and they have a load of birdie chances with the seven nine, maybe two rounds, I might be able to stay in hang in there by doing

having some incredible ball striking. But over the course of four rounds, a forty yard head start is gonna catch up with you, and you get no chance to compete without just having basically playing a perfect four days of golf ever free. And that's the difference. And that's where it's not just Rory who does that. It's one hundred players. The PGA tour and so that's that's the hardest thing

to compete again. So you know, I'm very proud that I think I will be certainly, if not the last, very close to the last kind of story that that I think we can we can relate to. You know, I'm in every man we call a guy that did the best with what he had and didn't have the resources to do it any more than I was capable of doing. And I made it to live a dream. And you know, we will strive for that, don't we.

We go through college and we we we try and get a job that will allow us to fulfill a dream. Some people start their own business because they have a dream. A lot of people fail, there's a few that succeed. And that's kind of kind of how I feel in that my dream, you know, came came to fruition. There's a hundred others whose dream just got was the roadkill on on mini tours where they invested a ton of money and time and effort and sweat equity, and at the end of it, they lost a load of money.

And you know they didn't They're thirty years old and they're still driving a car. Put together with duct tape. And that's kind of how I was until I figured out how to be successful. It was such a fine line once again.

because we all love a train wreck. And so playing in the Canadian Open, I just started playing really well on the tour my next my second year, my sophomore year. And I don't like the heat, and this was one of those perfect weeks in Canada. It was seventy degrees and you know, I just wanted to just get some

fresh air in my body. And so I had dinner and I was going to go back to the hotel and watch The Bachelor, and I guess text backs and falls with my wife, and I said, you know what, I think I'm gonna I'll watch it on DVR when I get home. I'm going to go for a walk,

and so I had an ice cream. I walked to a place called Bronte Harbor, which is on Lake Ontario, and I was just walking around through the woods and I walked over these rocks that were kind of like an embankment around the lake, and I slipped off the last rock and I paw my ACL mcl maniscus all

at the same time. So my knee kneecap was jiggling at the spot that it shouldn't have jiggled, and that was basically I had had it repaired, and I tore it again in the corn Free Tour playoffs at that time, trying to get my tour car back, which you trying to get back, Yeah, so I was. I was around

and four holes away from getting it back. I played really well for two rounds and then I got I got in a bunk with a massive steep face and hit it and I couldn't hold my balance and as I started falling back, I just heard it snap and swelled up like a grapefruit. And I I tried to gut it out the next day, and I think if I could have shot seventy one the last round, I could have got my tour I would have got my

tour card back. And I think I shot seventy seven, but hobbled around on a tour in acl and you do what you have to do. And I had it repaired again and tore it again, and then I had it repaired again. So there was actually a special moment. This last year, I covered the PGA Tour event, the Canadian Open for PGA two Alive, and it was at Hamilton Golf and Country Club where I actually had my my loan top ten on the tour. So it was

a special moment for me anyway to do that. But on the way back to the airport, I drove back to Bronte Harbor and I wanted to just go back to see if I could remember where it happened. And it was a it was a cathartic moment, but it was one that just just gave me goosebumps, just to you know, to be there and see the rock and remember being enough heat a crumpled heap on the floor and just right there sitting there saying, well, that's the

dream over, and what do I do next? I remember vividly saying that, well, I'm not going to be playing golf anymore? What do I do now? And so it was it was special to see that. And then funnily enough, I flew over it on the way back home as well, so I saw it from a different angle. So it just it was almost like, you know, it's almost like a it's sort of like almost like the Hollywood ending the wrong way, but still something that you got something out of and you framed it the right way and

you said, Okay, well here's the next challenge. What do I do now? And I've always been good about kind of moving on.

having a fifteen year journey to get there. Well, now let's throw some energy into the next stage of things. And I wanted to get into broadcast and in my fifties, not in my forties, and I always felt like I was going to be good at it. I always enjoy

talking to the media. I always enjoyed giving thoughtful answers, and so it was it was fortunately was able to make that transition through Sky Sports in the UK where they needed a British voice that had actually played the PGA Tour or their talent played on the dp World Tour, so I could add a different angle because I'd actually played the golf courses. So that was that was very,

very fortunate to have been able to do that. I got to go home, I got to spend time with my mom and dad and my brother and my friends, and it was almost like, you know, I got a spiritual side to matters when you know, I thought, this is this was my next path. This is the I

couldn't do anything about it. And I remember a lot of that was from I had, you know, I played a few weeks before that, The Travelers, and I played Ricky Founder, who that time was one of the top ten in the world, and I matched him shot for shot. I played unbelievable. I think he shot sixty six. I shot sixty seven in the last round. We were one of the PGA two a Live ats feature groups, one of the first ones they ever did, and so it was a pretty special day. But I remember I told

about two three footers on seventeen and eighteen. They went in, but it didn't feel real comfortable. And I remember, you know, I finished top twenty. I think top twenty five had a nice check and I got a flight that night and I was sitting on the tarmac and my part rate was still one hundred and twenty or so. And this was three hours after i'd hold those parts, and I said to myself, Man, I don't know, I don't know if I want to do this anymore. I don't

like the way it makes me feel physically. And then there you go. Two three weeks later, that was the end of that. That matters would take it out in my hand. So when you understand that you could, I think you can move on quicker in your next path. Your next part of the journey is I wouldn't know, maybe it's not pre ordained, but you're now guided to the next step of the journey.

I've read so many golf books over the years of doing this podcast and talking to various authors, especially books about the mental game. There you mentioned earlier anecdotal, they're you know, telling you how to how you know, they're really how to books on how to work your mental game, how to prepare yourself, how to work your pre shot routine and your post shot routine, how to get yourself

out of a death spiral in your head. What I really enjoyed about this book and made it so relatable, and is why I was compelled to finish it is that it's a story. It's a novel, I guess, about a player who is a very good young player but struggling with his head and finally gets some coaching, and as he's going through it, you're going through it with him, so you feel what he's feeling, as opposed to being

told what to feel. I really enjoyed that approach on the book, and I highly recommend it for anybody who likes reading about the Metal game, who likes discussing the Metal game. I think the book is really good and it's not a hard read and it's not really long.

lot of this anyway, but I need something. I need something to justify this twenty dollars and you know you can finally find, you know, a chapter or something. They would say, Okay, I can take something from that. But that's someone who is one hundred percent all in on

the mental side of the game. If you're someone who's being pushed, dragging and screaming to the mental side of the games, you don't want to do it anyway, because you'd rather hit balls, and you'd rather get a new driver, and you'd rather get a new partter and more coaching. You know, you want to give them a reason to want to read and get something out of it and want to keep going beyond the first page and the

second page and the third page. And so I think a story helps to do that because you know, as human we can we gravitate to emotion, and we gravitate to experiences, and we gravitate to putting ourselves in the position of a character. And so I wrote this originally for teenage competitive golfers to help them because they the tendency is the last thing they go to try and get better at. It is the mental side of the game,

and most of them don't bother with it. And so it actually it kind of dovetails nicely and with the PGA coaching man or the ADM, which says about fifteen sixteen kids, you know, if they want to be competitive, should get a foundation in the mental side of the game. And so the character, the main character, Jack, obviously reflected that. So, you know, I thought originally it was kind of a

niche book because teenage golfers and golf psychology. I can search all day and I'm not going to find too many books about that, or certainly not too many books that are worth a read. And so then I started thinking, well, I've taught a number of junior golfers, and you know, they're tough to teach because they are you know, they're finding out about themselves, and they're emotional, and you know, maybe they don't listen very well.

a wedge to piss you off. They're trying their hardest. But when they're not mentally and emotionally focused and in the right spot and understand any kind of plan of what it is they're trying to do, they're going to make mistake after mistake after mistake. And so I would talk to and they would be pissed at their kids by they would say, hey, look, I'm spend all this money on lessons. Why is it he keeps making these

dumb double bogies? And I said, well, you know, I've been trying to help him with the mental side of the game, or I've been trying to help him with the preparation side of the game, and he doesn't want to listen and he doesn't apply it. I try my hardest, but if he can hear it from you as well as me, that may help him or her be a little bit more focused on how they go about the game.

And more importantly, it gives the parent a little bit more empathy of what their kid is going through, because, as I said, the kid wants desperately to please their parents. And you know, when things go wrong and they don't know why things are going wrong, it can get so frustrated. And when the hormones are raging and you're trying to get through school and you maybe got a boyfriend or a girlfriend, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on up there. And so I think this really helps

that relationship as well. And so you know, there was a chapter in the book with a you know, as juniors,

they've all experienced this, they've played badly. They've got to get in the car and their dad's driving or their mum's driving, and you get that horrible, uncomfortable, silent journey back home because the kids in the back simmering about he shot eighty five again, the parents in the front thinking I've just given up another half a day to watch this and I've spent all this money on lessons, and the two kind of talk, and you know, the

kid Jack gets everything off his chest. The parent shows some empathy and shows and says, why don't we try this path with this wise older pro that I think can help you. And so now you've got teenagers, now you've got their parents. But these lessons also pertain to anyone with a pencil in the hand, whether it's a dog fight at the weekend once a month, whether it's a club championship, whether it's playing in the little corporate

day or a scramb or whatever it is. We can do better when we go out and play with a pencil on our hand. And you know, we work really hard during the week and we want to desperately do well and perform well. We're r on the golf course. But when we beat ourselves at all times, it makes it so hard. And so a lot of people I teach. I teach a lot of successful businessmen and business women, and I say, look, if you run your business the way you run your golf game, you go bankrupt. You

have no plan. You've got to have a business plan in whatever limited time that you have. We understand you don't have time to practice hundreds and hundreds of balls a week. So we've got to use the game that you have and set yourself up for the most successful the most success you can possibly have. And it basically all starts from before you ever moved the golf club.

If you can give yourself that great business plan before you move the golf club, you've got a chance for success based on whatever level of talent that you have.

I volunteered to be a college coach for three months just to learn a little bit more about how to deal with kids and what they go through and what they experienced. So I got to experience every single character. The only character I wasn't was the nick, the antagonist, the one that was a little bit too for his boot. So exactly, yeah, I was even you know, Matt, He's best friend. You know, you've just got to have those those relationships, those close relationships with people. But I think

there's I want to say there is. And I think this is a big part because of podcasting, where now we get wisdom talked about a little bit more than we that we maybe have over the last ten twenty thirty years, you know, to get better, you know, the last twenty years. It's all about where you have lessons. You do this, you hit these numbers, you do this on track, man, you hit this line on a video screen, and you know, to be honest, for some people it works.

For most they don't have time to really change anything fundamentally, and so you can have this great lesson, but you know, after you've hit your bucket of ball, you're probably not going to hit another bucket of balls correctly until you see the next lesson. And so people, I think get frustrated and they're paying always money for a swing lesson.

And you know, yeah, my numbers look better and this line looks better on the screen, But I keep shooting the same score, and I keep hitting the same shots, and I keep making the same mistakes. And so now there's a lot more podcast involved with wisdom and an experience and turning fives into fours and a different approach to be able to help you score better. You know,

the short game, the chipping, the put in. If you want low hanging fruit and you want a swing lesson, you want a lesson that's the lowest hanging fruit you can possibly have. You just get good fundamentals chipping, you're going to shave a tonne straps of your twenty handicapper. I find it really hard to get someone to commit to that. They want swing lessons, so they hit seven fairways with their driver, hit two in the trees, and

they want to hit none in the trees. Well, you know, if there are a fifteen handicapper and they hit none in the trees instead of two in the trees in the big scheme of things, they're probably going to screw up the next shot and the chip in the part and they're going to shoot the same And so why not if you're going to miss fifteen greens, learn how to chip and part and so, ye know, just by

using just common sense. And you know, we call it analytics, but it's just common sense of if you miss a load of greens and you don't chip very well, or you're leaving a lot of you're leaving a lot on the table. You if you have forty parts every round and you only hit four greens, you're leaving a lot on the table there. And so we can look at things differently that you know, we can I like to do playing lessons where I like to see someone on the golf course and you know, most.

golfer in the mental game. And we talked to a lot of mental coaches in a wide variety of you know, from mindfulness to brain functionality, right, and it seems to be our wheelhouse, although I do like to cover, you know, an eclectic mix of golf stories and golf people, but it really we really have focused on on the mental

side of the game. And one of the lines is that you have in your book that really jumped at me because I've not read it anywhere else, but we've been saying it on the podcast forever, and my audience right now, if they've been listening a while, they know where I'm headed with this because I learned it from a listener and been saying it. Not only do I say it for every round I play, but I've been

saying it on the show hundreds of times. We say, never follow a bad shot with a stupid shot, but you enhanced that for me in a way I never really realized. And on page fifty six, at least off the pdf that I was reading, the worst thing you can do is follow up a poor shot with a dumb shot, trying to make up for the previous one. That was in AHA moment for me.

golf because you see the value of a point. So if you're a fifteen handicap and you don't have a very high quota, you know you can maybe finding three or four holes where in the past you would have played a dumb shot with a three would out of the rough trying to get it on the green, and you learn that, you know, maybe a five iron and then pitching on from forty yards maybe an easy way

to make a point. What happens is we get in a cycle of and that's what I'm talking about in the book of is just the cycle of you know, the way a round of golf unfolds or shots unfolds. So you have a shot, you know, I want you to have a nice, productive athletic routine. So if you do that athletic routine, the chance says, ah, you're going

to hit a decent shot. And then after you've hit that shot, you can kind of pack yourself in the back, or you can say, oh, that wasn't very good, and then you can objectively look at it and say, what could I have done better? You know, maybe I didn't have the right club there, and I really should have hit the seven instead of the eight. Okay, well, there's a little reminder for the next time I'm in that situation.

And then you spend the next four minutes walking to the next shot, and you're in a good mental space, and you know, you enjoy talking with your playing partner. You're looking at the trees and the houses and the birds and then whatever else. And then as a result, you're in a good headspace for the next shot. You produce a good routine, you hit a decent shot, and so the cycle continues. The cycle also continues the wrong way, where you don't have a routine, or if you have

a routine, you don't do it very well. You hit an awful shot, you tell yourself how much you suck. Then you stew about it for that five minutes to the next shot. You're trying to figure out all these swing thoughts and all these things that one coach told you five years ago. Another coach told you last week.

comes from how do you practice? If you have time to practice, you know, learn from what it is you practice, and learn from what it is you can do on the practice range, because if you if you if you try and hit a shot that you don't try on the practice range, you shouldn't be hitting that shot because you don't know if you hit it or not.

What was what really brought that to my mind, to the forefront of my mind when I when I did that volunteer coaching for a local college, I had a kid that was was showing a bit of promise, was paying attention, and he got to a tooment, was playing really well, and he got to the seventeenth I think, a part three, and I was following it on golfstat and he was two or three under power I think, and he makes a six on the path three. And I called him after I said, man, what a great

round of golf. What happened on that path three? He'said, oh, man, it was you know, you know, it was a thirty mile hour wind into me and it was a path three, and you know I had to hit that punch drawer in there because you know, the wind was coming you know, into left or right really hard. And I said, you know, you've never tried to hit that shot before, have you? He said, no, no, but but it was the shot that it called for. I remember distinctly said that was

the shot that it called for. But if you don't know how even the start of how to hit that shot, and you pull that out in the talent when you're playing great man, it's not a good it's not a good idea. So we pulled it straight out of bounds and made a triple and it just we're in an unbelievable round with one poor decision. And so we got on the range that next week and I just said, look, you hit this beautiful, solid drawer every single time you

hit this great shot. It's a strong shot. You know you have you can take the spin off because you hit it so strongly through the wind. You didn't need to try and hit that shot. And then the next time we had a big wind, we went on the practice range, went straight into the wind. I said, just hit your shot and it was amazing, went through the wind. And he said, yeah, and I see the validity now.

I think you were right. But there's so many just simple lessons there that you know, if you read it, you will put yourself in the positions that Jack faces, and you will see yourself and you will see the decisions you make, and you will see the decisions he makes. And say, ah, yes, I know exactly what he's going through. I can't wait to read the rest of this book because I know we're going to get the secret to

what to do next. And you get that, and then you see him put it into practice in the big tournament at the end of the book, and then a college coach comes up to him, congratulates him and tells him that's exactly the kind of things he's looking for when he's recruiting. So it kind of puts a nice bow in it at the end.

supported on this this one. Play the course, not the competition, really important note message, right because we're like so worried about oh my god, they just birdied the hole and I boge, you, what am I going to do now?

other people are doing. And you know what it would mean if I had a good result here all of those things we're always facing, and if we're a fifteen handicapper, we're facing you know, my buddy's laughing at me because I've just top one. You know, we want to get our mind one hundred percent focus on the next shot as well as we possibly can.

it into practice. And that's ultimately what we want. We want to take it from the practice range or the indoor hidden map to the golf course. That's why we practice, that's why we hit balls indoors, because we want it to work on the course.