The 4 Stages of Flow State in Golf...and Life! with Stephen Baker

play golf. It's not how we want to perform in a lot of these scenarios, whether it's forming at the poker table, whether it's making a speech. Lots of studies incidentally, on jazz musicians in flow states. They go into a very relaxed state. But what they're doing is they're executing their skills in a very relaxed brainwave state, and you just slip into it, and it's the kind of thing where you come out of it and you go, wow, that felt so easy. And yet I was performing so well.

I was used to playing. I suppose my first love in sport was soccer, of course, but you know it's not something you can just say, oh, I'm not in court tomorrow's let's go and play a game of football. You need a lot of people to do that. And I got into golf. It was really through my father in law, who was a very good golfer. He was a scratch golfer and he got me into it and I was fascinated, because I'll be honest with you, at first,

I found it so hard. You know. I was used to sports where I could just instinctively, you know, I could see a ball, I could make connection with it, and I couldn't really believe how badly frankly I was playing with a ball that was stationary. I mean, how how can it be this hard? But it was. But it soon bit me, and yeah, I really got into it. I moved to a part of the world here where there are some beautiful golf courses. You know, my local

course is a wonderful links course. I love links courses. Just down the coast from me, there's a great course place called Burnham and Barrow. Further down the coast there's some wonderful courses in Cornwall and then up in Scotland. Scotland is golfing heaven. And you know what I really love about it is you can you can build a holiday around going going and playing golf and everybody has a good time because you're usually in beautiful parts of the world. So yeah, that was really how I got

into it. I'd love to say I was a wonderful golfer. I'm a modest golfer, but doesn't stop me enjoying it a lot, and it doesn't stop me being fascinated with how to improve, which kind of ties in with what I do generally in terms of mental performance across the whole range of fields.

execute because of my emotions. And definitely the old one of the old traits of you know, you hit a bad shot and then you go immediately and hit another one because you're still mad about the last one. That's something I've eradicated.

And I joined one of these organizations, did well within it, and then I became a poker coach. So I then became one of the people who coached the players who came into the organization. And one of the things that I really realized was I love coaching. So that was number one. I love coaching. I kind of look back on my time as a lawyer when I had a law firm, and I realized that actually I really enjoyed mentoring people within the law firm. And helping them be better.

But the other thing that I realized was I was really fascinated with the way psychology worked. One of the things that happens in poker is we again. You'd think it's a bit like golf. You think we'll wait anek, I've got time to make a decision here. How can I make a bad decision? But it happens all the time in poker. People can immediately and I experienced this myself. Well, they can say, right, I know what I should do here, and yet somehow I've come away not having made the

right decision. And I was really fascinated in that it tied in with what i'd work The field i'd worked in within the law predominantly was clients who'd had psychiatric

and psychological injuries. So you have to become very familiar with psychology and psychiatry to understand how the brain works so that you can cross examine experts and that kind of that love of coaching plus that interest in psychology really led me down the path of coaching, and that's that's why I'm doing what I'm doing today.

I can still remember it's like an image in my mind coming up to a shot on my home course and thinking, you know, as my mind I could hear the thoughts going through my mind about, oh my goodness, because because to the right was the sea is the sea, and and I developed a slice and as I was walking up to this shot. My mind was going, don't slice it, don't slice it, you know, and and it's like,

guess what, you know. It's it's when when somebody says, don't think about pink elephants, all you can think about is pink elephants, right, And.

And this is actually something we know from the study of flow states that something that happens in a flow state is it's quite a mouthful. It's called transient hypofontality,

and it means that the prefrontal cortex is actually downgraded. Now, the prefrontal cortex is associated with with, you know, the logical thinking part of our brain, the decision making part of our brain, and we might think, well, why would we want to downgrade that, We want it all engaged, But it's definitely true that we can overthink when we're actually performing in sport, and that part of our brains

also associated with ego and emotions. And one of the things that happens in a flow state is you let all of that go and you just do But you have to train the brain to get into that state.

That's that's the difficulty. We've probably all experienced flow states from time to time, but what we now know is we can definitely do things to get there more often, and that's useful whether you're making decisions at a poker table, in a in a you know, courtroom, you know, in a business negotiation, or on a golf course.

just learning how to hit a ball. Is you know, the strategic part and the mental part. So yeah, I do get obsessed with this kind of a topic, but I think it's really really helpful for all. Now, you were talking about flow state. You know, when you're getting into the flow state, you really don't recognize it while you're there. It's almost like a post mortem. It's always like, oh, I was in a flow state, Then how did I get there? How did I fall out? How do I

get back? And I think that's primarily what we're discussing today, right.

we are put under pressure, we actually do produce. And this is true in a whole realm of fields. You know, as I say, I work with I work with knowledge professionals, I work with sports professionals, and very often what we are focusing on is this question of, well, why am I not producing the skills at the level I am

capable of. So if we if we sort of gave ourselves a scale of zero to one hundred on our golf skills, yes, there's work to do with your you know, your professional, your instructor, your coach, who is going to work on actually hitting the ball well. If you get to the point where it's like, you know, I can hit that shot well nine times out of ten in practice, but I get to the course and guess what, it's nothing like nine out of ten. That, right there is

is the mental game. And when somebody says, oh, you know, why are we bothering about the mental game, Just learn to hit the ball better, that's it's missing the point. In terms of what you say about flow states, Yeah, you're right, this is the whole point, it's actually a very relaxed state of mind. Your brain actually goes into

a relaxed brainwave state. It's often an alpha state or a THET brainwave state, rather than a really deeply focused state in the conventional sense, you know, the kind where you're you know, if you're solving a math problem, you might be scrunching up your eyebrows and your you know, the lines would come onto your forehead. That's not how we want to play golf. It's not how we want to perform in a lot of these scenarios, you know, whether it's performing at the poker table, whether it's making

a speech. Lots of studies incidentally on jazz musicians in flow states, and again it's very they go into a very relaxed state. But what they're doing is they're executing their skills in a very relaxed brain wave state, and you just slip into it and it's the kind of thing where you come out of it and you go, wow, that felt so easy, and yet I was performing so well.

And we've learned more about the brain in the last twenty years as a result of modern brain imaging techniques, and we kind of knew in the previous two thousand years, and what we actually know now is how we can actually manipulate our environment and the way we prepare to get into these flow states more often. And the great news is it's actually extremely efficient to be in a

flow state. Involve huge amounts of hard work. It does involve. Look, you know, if somebody said I've not practiced a bunker shot for two years, If you put me in a bunker and I was that person, I'll it'd be very hard to get into a flow state because my mind will recognize the fact that I've not got the core

skills to perform. If I've done the right kind of practice and I've done the work around getting into a flow state, I will be able to relax and be much more likely to reproduce what I do, what I'm capable of from the training ground on the actual field of play. And that's what happens in a flow state.

You are able to relax. And we've seen it with great sports people, right you know, we think about I was thinking before this podcast of moments where I've thought of great golfers and you see them in flow and it was a shot Fred Couples played. I think it was years ago in the Masters, and he hit it and he just went oh baby as he hit it, and that was just like that was flow. It was just pure relaxation, just doing his thing, not overthinking. You know,

you took Ernie L's to be easy. Everything looked effortless, right, and that's how Yeah, and that's what we want to produce. Whereas a lot of a lot of people bring tension to what they do, be it round of golf, making a speech, pearing. You know. Again as a lawyer, you know, used to be involved in a lot of negotiations, but you want to be relaxed. That conveys authority. So this is what this is what the training I do with clients in whatever context tries to bring about this state

of relaxed focus. So it's the ability to zone in on what you want to do, but without bringing all sorts of thoughts which are unhelpful into the moment.

for but they'll have got that down. So like for us, it will be okay, I'm going to basically have some core skills in terms of the way I drive the ball, the way I hit my iron shots, the way I hit the ball out of a bunker. I'm going to get that, and I'm going to get it to a point where it feels I've at least got something which

is reliable and repeatable. That's that's unavoidable work. Then there's release. Now, this is the interesting thing, and this is the lesson I wish I'd had when I started playing golf, I you know, when I went to the driving range, I just wanted to hit as many balls as possible. And one of the things that the brain does is it wants to break every now and then. So let's say I do it the way I should have done, which was okay, let's just focus on a particular technique that

I want to integrate into my swing. Then step away, step away, go for a walk, go and have a cup of coffee for fifteen minutes, and the brain will subconsciously work on integrating that it's learning. And you only even need to think about You only need to go away and say I just need to think a bit more about this. The brain will do it. This is really vital for a lot of skills. It probably seems

more logical to apply it to knowledge professionals. I mean, Albert Einstein used to after he'd done his working the lab, he used to go on late Geneva and go fishing, and he actually found he had his greatest insights there. This was this release phase of the flow cycle in operation. The brain goes into a more relaxed state and it actually knits all that you've been trying to work on together,

So that's really important. And then there's the flow phase itself, and what happens in the flow phase is there's huge amounts of dope men and Europe and ethrine driven to the brain and they drive this state of effortless focus. And then also important is the recovery phase, and there's lots we can talk about there. There's physical recovery, but

there's also mental recovery. Again, I tend to do talk about this in more detail with professional athletes, but it's definitely applicable to people you know who are working, for example, in a knowledge profession, and I think a lot of people just work extremely hard and don't understand the importance of giving themselves proper recovery to allow themselves to get into a high performance state. Again, so those are the

four phases. Now, what that actually looks like for an individual very much depends on what their life looks like, but that's something we work on. I then use one of the tools I do use, and I know you've had other podcast guests talk about hypnotherapy, but I use hypnotherapy to help integrate these skills into the way people approach whatever it is their challenge is. So you know, if it's a round of golf, I will get them

to visualize being in a flow state. They have experienced probably moments of a flow state in their life before, and we will leverage that to get them back into that state on the golf course. We'll do other work to make sure that everything's aligned to achieve that, but we'll also engage memories of having been in that state, even if it's not in a golf a round of golf. I mean, if somebody says to me, I've never been in a flow state on the golf course, I'll say,

have you ever been in a flow state anywhere? And they usually will have been, and I will use that memory to transfer that state of mind to the golf course.

the driving range, obviously there's no pressure to perform. That's why, like when I'm when I'm warming up for putting before around, I'll ask my playing pardon, let's let's have a little competition here, just to put a little bit of pressure on these putts, because if I put four in a row and one of the four goes in, I'm like, oh, okay, I'm ready to go. Well really yeah, you know, so we want to try to find the time. You know, golf is even the best golfers in the world make

bad shots. It's about how you recover from them. That's that's the point. But I don't know do we want to There's two things I want to go after. One, I want to talk more about the recovery phase, but also you talk about, you know, professional athletes, professional poker players, professional golfers, how they get there on that flow state.

I want to know how do we as recreational as amateur, no matter what our skill level, whether we're an eighteen twenty handicap or we're scratch or one or two, can we get there?

and they will be performing at their level. Okay, so they will be performing at a level commensurate with their skills, because that's what we're talking about here. What we want to do is at least perform and a level commensurate with our technical skills. And what very often happens for a lot of golfers is that they fall below what

they're capable of, you know. In other words, to come back to our example of the person who hits nine out of ten good shots on the range a particular type of shot, and they go to the course and they're not hitting it with anything like that frequency. So we can definitely prepare the recreational golfer to perform at their level. Now, they have to still do the hard work if they want to improve their game to take it to the next technical level, but mentally they can

do working. It can be very time efficient by the way, you know, I mean when I work one of one of the most common kinds of clients I have. I do have professional sports people, but I also have clients who are in business or in a professional line of work, and they also are extremely interested in sports, so I do. I've got a client now who's very keen golfer. He's a lawyer and he loves his golf, and we will do work on that because that is his big passion,

it's his big outlet. I've got clients who are into tennis. Same thing. Very common one for me given my background is I've got clients who are maybe in business, but they love poker. And what I do with all of these clients is work on basically ensuring that we've got techniques that we can build into their lifestyle. And it's a busy lifestyle for most of these people, which they can they can transfer to their passion, their recreational passion. And the good news about this is that, well two

good pieces of good news. Number One, you can be time efficient with this stuff, and secondly, these skills tend to transfer to the other things you're doing in life.

So if you can get into flow states when you're on the golf course but you're not a professional golfer, you can actually use these same approaches to perform better in your business because they are skills which transfer I've mentioned jazz musicians, I've mentioned professional poker players, tennis players, golfers, people in business, traders you know, I act for a number of people who are crypto traders and four x traders, and being able to perform in a flow state there

is important. So these skills are very transferable across all of these spheres. And the good news is they, as I say, you can do it in a way which is extremely time effiicient. It has to be. It's slightly different. Obviously, if somebody is a full time professional sports person, they've got all the time in the world to prepare themselves,

and it is their business to prepare themselves. But it's definitely true that you can develop techniques to get into flow in a way which is extremely time efficient, even if you just you know, are playing around on a Saturday.

playing my game. In other words, if I am hitting that shot ten times well on the range, I will be hitting it nine out of ten times well on the course. That's what it looks like for me. I won't be hitting it as far or as accurately as a pro, but I will be getting out of my own way. I won't be overthinking. I'll just be in that state of flow. So it can look and feel. Certainly, it can feel exactly the same as it would for

a professional sportsperson. Because flow is essentially a person experience, you still will perform on a level which reflects your your actual technical skills. But the good news is, you know, as so often isn't the case, we are actually at least performing at the level of our technical skills. You know. That's that's the point I'm making here about close states that one of the things that happens is you perform

at the level of your capabilities. And so often when we go to the golf course and when we're playing in that situation where it matters, hitting that shot matters as opposed to I get five more to get it right on the range, you know, don't We don't play at that level when we're on the course when it really matters, But when we're in a flow state, that's exactly what we achieve, and that's what we want to do, right.

All that practice is designed to produce a shot which we're proud of on the course when it really matters, and that can be achieved for the recreational golfer in just the way it can for the professional golfer.

was so comfortable. Yeah, that's why, because I was just there and not getting my getting in as you say, as doctor Joe Parent says from the very first episode that we did I help golfers get out of their own way. We get in our own way.

say that that that's your bet noir. Being in a bunker is is something where you're you're not feeling comfortable. So obviously number one you've got to work with your your coach, your technical coach on being as good as you can be. But what we will then do, having done that work is I will get you to visualize

being in that situation and being comfortable with it. So part of visualization, a really important part of visualization, isn't just seeing everything going great, because that's just not the way life works and it's not the way golf works. Right, you know, you will hit that ball in the bunker sometimes, and what we will do is get your mind to be comfortable with facing that situation and you know, maybe even playing a bad shot, you know, because that's also

going to happen. Hey, you know, you sit down and watch any great player, they will hit a bad shot sometimes. And what we want is is for the mind to already be comfortable with the idea that Okay, that's gone. I now deal with the next thing. And you can definitely improve that state of mind by actually using these techniques, by using a combination of what we know from flow states and what we know from hypnotherapy, what's happening there in those moments where things go wrong, and playing it.

I do remember playing a round of golf with a good friend of mine, and he was one of the most calm, chilled guys I've ever known. And I remember him being in a bunker and I was across, I was on the fairway watching him across in this bunker. He was turning like a different shade of lead as he hit multiple shots and they weren't coming out of the bunker. And that was, you know, a classic case

of an emotional hijack on the golf course. You know, your your subconscious is just like, I hate this, this feels bad. And what we want to do is mentally prepare for those moments so that we actually can keep that same state of mind, so even if you are in a difficult situation, you can train the mind to actually say, hey, we've got this. There's been lots of

examples of this from sports psychology. I mean, a really well known example is Michael Phelps, the swimmer, and one way he was prepared by his coach was the coach used to break his goggles so that the goggles and then make him swim we've broken goggles. And it turned out for one of his Olympic races his goggles were actually broken, and mentally he was then not just technically prepared as to okay, how do I keep swimming straight and quickly, but also mentally he was already in the

zone where it's like I can cope with this. I've been here before. So one of the things I do with clients is prepare them for the difficult things that can happen. I do think hypnotherapy is an extremely powerful way of basically getting the mind prepared for that. I know you've had Dr David Spieger on one of your podcasts, and you know he can talk at some length about the what's actually happening at a level of mural structures.

But effectively, what we're doing is we're teaching the mind to learn how it's going to respond to these challenges. And with this kind of approach I use with clients, you can prepare your mind for those difficult moments so you won't be kicked out of the flow state.

produce strong physical reactions in our body. So if you've ever got really angry or upset, you might feel attention in your shoulders or your chest, and the amigdala recognizes that. The brain recognizes it, and it tends to then send a message to the fight, flight or freeze mechanism in our body, which is in the mind, which is really part of our evolutionary programming, and it says, hey, this

is this is a threat, and we then respond accordingly. Now, fight, fight or freeze was a very useful evolutionary program, you know, kept us alive as a species. It's highly unlikely to be particularly useful as a response on the golf course. You know, we are never going to be in a situation where we need to fight, fight, or fly or freeze. What we want is a much more calibrated, calm response. You know, yeah, I found myself in the rough. That's

not a fight, flight or freeze situation. But we have to train the mind to recognize that, because that may be the situation if you're playing a money game or you're playing for whatever stake's the matter. You know, it may just be a four ball where there's a little bit of private stake. The brain might still go to that over exaggerated response. And what we what we have to do is train the book the mind to say, hey, wait a minute, there's a better way of dealing with this.

And this is something that comes across in lots and lots of contexts. You know. One of the things I work with a lot of clients on is fear of public speaking. There's been some amazing studies. It's showing that people are more scared of giving a speech than dying. It's crazy, but that is that's an emotional hijack. Nothing terrible is going to happen, but quite often we are

wired to respond in that way. And some of the problems go back to the way we I mean, particularly childhood experiences you might have had to have given a think of a client who had to give a talk in a classroom as a child, and the teacher was unplayed and classmates were unpleasant about it, and so they had a lot of difficulty at a point in their life where they had to give a speech. They found it hugely stressful, and what we had to do was unravel that and teach their mind a new way to

thinking about it. Because it's really important for us to be accepted playing a good shot on the golf course and not letting your partner down if you're in a if you're in a four ball, you know that still matters to us. And it's no good just saying to somebody, oh, come on, put it all in perspective. What we have to do is train the mind to say, hey, let's just create a good way of approaching how we're going to deal with this situation. And you're not going to

be able to just do that on the hoof. You're going to need to prepare for it mentally. But the good news is there are ways of doing it. You know, Daniel Goldman's book around Emotional Intelligence really is saying there is a better way of approaching many many situations in life where we have an instinctive emotional response. We can retrain that response.

that's a difficult feeling because it's the same thing. You know, think of those guys in the Ryder Cup, you know, and you know final holes, and you know you've got to make that put You're you're not just looking after yourself, You're you're basically it's hard. I mean look, even if it was just you, you don't want to be known as the choker, you know, So even then there's an element of how do others perceive me? But again, this is what we want to achieve when we go into

a flow state. We get all of that out of the way. We don't want all of that extra stuff on our shoulders. We just want to We just want to play, We just want to hit the shot, and we want to be able to get all of that out of our heads. And that's what happens automatically in a flow state. And through this combination of I mean there's multiple leavers I use within the coaching I do, but it is the flow states, the hypnotherapy, some body to mind techniques like breathwork, my other mind to body

techniques like meditation. It all sounds like quite a lot, but I find the right balance for clients and something that they can fit into their everyday lives. Yeah, but the good news is that, you know, it actually does not take that much effort or time to actually achieve this. It just takes a little bit of consistency in a little bit of planning, and with that, you know, you can get all the benefits.

be difficult. You've got to try and build your skills to the point of unconscious competence. There's there's no getting around that. And it's going to be impossible to get into a flow. As I say, you know, if I now go into let's imagine I haven't played a round of golf, will practice my bunker shot for a year. Guess what if I then try and get into a flow state and I find myself in a bunker, I won't because I haven't gone through the struggle phase of

actually improving that technical skill. No amount of mental magic I can do with the client is going to overcome the fact that the client's conscious brain is going to say, don't tell me to be relaxed here. I don't know how to play this shot. I haven't practiced it enough, so you have to do that work. The release phase is something you can do at the practice ground, and I would recommend it. It is just stepping away. I

do this. I play tennis every week and my coach, you know, I will say to my coach sometimes just give me five minutes. I've hit a number of serves. Give me a few minutes. And I actually find that beneficial, firstly physically to recover, but secondly just to let me my brain just compute the way I've been hitting those serves. That's really important. The same you know, when you're practicing those shots. It's not a case of let's get the most out of what. Let's say you've paid for an

hour of tuition with your golf coach. It may be that it's a really smart use of time. Maybe golf coaches feel they can't do this, but I would say it's a really smart use of time to say to somebody, right, you've been hitting that shot for the last ten minutes, just take it easy. Let's just you know, sit here, have a chat, have a cup of coffee for a minute, and just let that all percolate effectively in your mind. That's kind of what the re release phase looks like,

the flow phase looks after itself. That's the whole It's natural. Recovery will be something that you will do after the event, whatever that event is. What happens in a flow state, and I think I've touched on this already, is and a mental and neurologic level, what's happening is huge amounts of dopamine and europin ethrin are being driven to your brain, and those are extremely expensive neurochemicals for the body to produce. So when we're talking about recovery in the context of

flow states. We're not simply talking about physical recovery. We're talking about the recovery of the ability to regenerate these flow neurochemicals. So things that are really important. This is going to apply to any of your listeners who are working extremely hard in a knowledge professional environment. You know, they're working in an office, and a lot of people just work, work, work, and think, I'm going to have to solve this project. I'm going to have to solve

this problem I'm working on. But what's really important is that they, after maybe some concentrated time working on the problem, they actually step away and they do things like go and have a sauna, go and have a massage, make sure you do not compromise on sleep, go and do some light exercise. You know, all of these things are proven ways to regenerate those neurochemicals, and they then start the flow cycle again. They then help you get back

into float. Without recovery, you don't get back into flow. That's why it's a cycle. It restarts where a lot of people, where a lot of people who really want to achieve a lot in whatever field fail is. They work hard, they get into the flow state, but then they just say I've got to keep working. I've got to keep grinding. And what you do need to do is recognize the importance of recovery in starting that flow cycle all over again.