Dr. Nico Darras

short amount of time. Like you said, I didn't come to golf in a traditional way, and Golf Blueprint was the journey of how I went from having never played golf at twenty three to now at thirty working in golf and journey along the way of my education and my background and creating dialed in practice plans because some days I only had thirty minutes, some days I had thirty five minutes, some days I had forty minutes and I needed to get better to close the gap on

the people that I was playing against in a really short amount of time. And I couldn't do that traditionally through lessons. I didn't you know, I didn't have the time, I didn't have the resources to do that at that time. So I needed to find an academic way that I could marry what I was doing in school with what I was doing on the golf course.

wanted to do. To quote card Ale Jones of Ohio State football. You know, we didn't come here to play school. That was very much my mentality as a kid. I just wanted to play baseball every day, all day. That's all I wanted to do from the time I was two years old, and ultimately it was a pretty good player in high school, got recruited all over, got my pick of the school. I was very fortunate and ended up going to University Connecticut my last three years. Got

hurt right before the Big League Draft. Blew out my rotator cuff, my laborum, and my lat and that ended it. And so one day, you know, at twenty two, everything I had worked for for the first twenty two years, my life was gone, taken away and I needed to start over.

but in every sport. To be great, to have a very long career, there is an element of just dumb luck that you just don't get hurt. Sure you just weren't you know. Tom Brady's a great example. Tom Brady never really had any major issue injuries. Roger Federer never really had any major major injury issues. You know, Tiger Woods really throughout the majority of the early part of his career, the Big Tiger Roun my Dad era, the Hank Haney era, there were never any injuries. He just

basically was able to just play injury free. Why golf and why did you pick up golf Because a lot of ex athletes are just obsessed with golf. I've had them on the pod before. They you know, they're they're junkies. Yeah, why do you think that is?

had played college golf, so my sister was fifteen. She had never played college, she had never played golf before, and she went one day to the driving range met a coach and this coach said to my dad, hey, this girl's pretty good, and my dad was like, okay, you know how good is good. Well, they end up pulling her out of high school and she had a college scholarship two years later. So at that time, I had I'd been to the golf course. I've watched her

play golf. I wasn't playing golf. Baseball players at that time. You know, it'll mes of your swing, that kind of deal. So I had probably played at that to that point, maybe nine holes in my life. So we're in Hawaii. I sign up for this nine hole scramble and I get paired with i'd Loane, denounced later the biggest jerk in the club because no one else wanted to play with him. They stuck me with him because you know, here's this new guy who doesn't know any better. So

we played nine holes. This guy's smoking cigarettes in my face, just ripping me. You know, I hit balls out of bounds, I topped him. I did this, and the whole time he's telling me about this. You know club championship that he's going to play in and he's the member guest champion. So I call my best friend at the time, who played college golf, and I said, hey, there's three months until this guy's important member guest. You're gonna teach me how to play golf and we're gonna win. And he

for seas ago. Okay, buddy. So I'm working valet at the time, and if I wasn't valeting, I was hitting balls. I probably hit you know, five hundred ball, who knows how many balls a day. And three months later I shot seventy nine in that member guest and we ended up beating the guy and it just got hooked and that pro laughed. He goes, maybe I should pair him with every new golfer, you know, maybe that's what fifth

people need to do to get motivated to learn. But I just I fell in love with the process of getting better and it gave me an opportunity to improve at something every day. That was my favorite part about baseball, and I have that in golf now.

said you should skip him ahead. Well, what we now know, you know twenty years later, is that third grade is where you learn sentence structure and mathematics, and the basic building blocks of school is third grade. So today I struggle with math. I struggle with sentence structure, basic things like that that created a lifetime of difficulty in school. High school was so hard for me because I could get the math answer, I didn't know how to prove the answer. I didn't know how to get to there.

I could write beautiful sentences, but I didn't know what an adverb was because I never learned it. I had to learn multiplication and division in a weekend when I went from second to fourth grade, and it really created a challenging high school and undergrad experience for me, where I just really had a tough time getting through the basic classes and I wasn't that interesting, souse. I just want to play baseball. But luckily for me, I have wonderful parents. My mom told me she goes go to class,

you have to go to class. So for any student athletes that are listening out there, dude, I showed up to the eight am geography class when no one was there. Did I learn anything? No, But you know what I learned. I learned how to show up. I learned how to grind. I learned how to do something that you don't want to do every single day. And then after baseball ended, I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do. My father's a lawyer. I thought maybe I'll go to

law school. You know, he's a successful lawyer. And as I was looking around for classes, I found a program called Social Innovation from the University of San Diego. And for those of you who don't know what it is at home, it's essentially creative problem solving. Think Google Think. A lot of people from our program went to the three letter government agencies, CIA, FBI, things like that. I went down that road for a little while, got recruited, and ultimately it wasn't for me.

There was a group of high school kids there at the time that were some of the best juniors in the country, and I ended up becoming a pseudo mentor to them, and in exchange, they essentially taught me golf. And so every single day we would play golf after they get out of school and I'd be done with my classes. And it was amazing getting to watch them play because they didn't have the fear of the adults. They played creatively, they played, they tried shots, they hit shots.

I tried to swing as hard as I could for like two years. No one laughed at me because when you were with children and children don't have that same level of you know world lea, I guess anxiety and now they're all playing Division one and they're all, you know, studs. But right around that same time started playing golf and then to get into my doctorate. My doctorate is an education. I studied specifically learning theory and how people can optimize what they're doing through their learning.

of the reasons why you and I connected. I mean, Dave Phillips was like, You've got to meet Nico because you guys talk about the same stuff, this balance between technique versus execution. And I say this all the time every competitive golfer. And we'll get to the work that you do with John Rahm. John Ram's trying to make his golf swing better. Rory McElroy is trying to make

his golf swing. Everybody that plays competitive golf is trying to improve their technique, but there is so much more to getting better than just standing on a driving range and hitting golf balls. Because I think there's also a rate in my opinion, of diminishing return in that too. You will get to it. I think you can overpractice totally. I think a lot of junior golfers that I see who's parents come, they're overpracticed. Yeah, all they do is practice,

They don't fundamentally play the game. And did you notice that coming? I think also you coming from a baseball background and getting into golf and watching how competitive baseball is practiced versus how competitive golf is practiced. I've heard you say this before. There's no other competitive sport in the world that has the approach that golf has.

your guys are where they're taking. The nice thing is, now, with statistics and data, we can look at what you're good at, what you struggle at, what you need work in, and we can emphasize the areas that you're great at to make you better at what you're already great at.

great driver of the golf ball. If someone's got a great short game, if someone's a great potter, whatever that skill is, most people just overpractice the skill that they've got totally.

you know, gir to seventy two percent. The amateur player is playing such a different game that they can make such great leaps by practicing smarter.

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How did that come about? And what is it that you do in the scope of being part of John Ram's kind of inner circle and team.

come work with some of my guys. Dave has an incredible team of not only John Rahm, but David Pooge on Live, Cameron Trengali on Live, Alejandro del Rey on dep World, and Max Rotliffe as well, and it's just such a pleasure to work with Dave, and you know, we met through Dave and I think the thing that I appreciate the most about you and Dave with my work and it ties in is you're both creatives who are willing to look at things from a different perspective.

Because I don't come from golf, I look at it.

from outside of the golf world. Do I spend time talking to golf instructor, sure, I mean we have a lot of time on tour where I'm lucky when I was on the PGA tour and now my guys they have gone to live, but we have a lot of time and downtime to where we're waiting for players. Players are doing other things. So I'm able to sit with Boyd Summer Hayes and talk about golf, talk about what he's working on with his kids, what he's working on with Tony Finow, what he's working on with Taylor Goot.

I'm able to stand and pick these guys' brains. Mike Walker, who's been on the podcast, I'm able to sit and talk to him about Hey, talk to me about the stuff that you and fits are working on. But i think the majority of my influences in the last decade have been non golf related. They've been other coaches from

other sports. And I'm always fascinated at the approach that the team sport concept has versus the individual concept, because I find it really interesting as a coach that you'll be working with a player and let's say they're a junior golfer, and we've all most people that play golf have played other some sort of team sport at some point, right, And I'm always fascinated that you can be working with a player, Let's say you're working on hitting a draw

and they're hitting you know, you're trying to get them to get the path right to left. You're trying to get the ball to start to the right and curve to the right. And if they're struggling, I always say, listen, do you understand the concept right? Do you understand what we're trying to get you to do as a player. So tell me what we're working on. Tell me all of the things that we need to do to execute this. Show me the mimic. Let's go through it in slow motion.

But you'll watch a player hit two, three, four balls completely sideways, almost doing the exact opposite of what they know they're supposed to do what they've been practicing. If that's a team sport, the coach immediately says, can we get someone in here. If you're a wide receiver and you go and you ken't dropping the ball, they will pull you out of practice in a heartbeat. And what you don't do in team sports is you don't go

to another practice area and work on catching. You sit on the bench and watch someone else and there's people fighting to take your spot, and then eventually the coach will come to you and say, okay, do you want to get back in the game and do your job the way that we have taught you to do it, and the way that we have practiced to do it. Somehow in team sports, through no external other practicing, you figure that shit out real quick and you go execute

what you've practiced. Why do you think it's so hard for golfers to find that execution part of it? Because my theory is they just spend all their time hitting golf balls. Yeah, they just that's it. Yeah, and the test for them to see if anything works is going out and playing the game. There's and we've talked about it, there's no other sport in the world where they do that.

lot of times. He's got a great looking golf perfect Adam Scott, the classic golf swingers would win because the judges would look at the aesthetics of what it looks like and say their golf swing looks the best. But John Rahm doesn't have a classic looking golf swing. Sure, he doesn't have a golf swing that anyone is really coaching or teaching. No one's saying, hey, do what John Rahm does, because John Rahm is very easy. Unicornton Johnson

is a unicorn. Colin Montgomery, Freddie Couples, all of these great unique golfers were somewhat unicorns. They had techniques that you don't teach. Sure, And so from an execution standpoint, you get a call from Dave Phillips to have an opportunity to work with someone like John Rahm. For you, that's got to be like, Okay, wow, this is a unique opportunity. Absolutely, And let's be honest. It's always that thing to where Okay, how can I help a player? Yeah, that is already a great player.

doctor Kevin Moore. He's a professor of mathematics. And about three years into my golf journey, I started playing mini tours in Arizona and I was going to read golf books and he said, Nico, stop. He said, you don't know the rules yet, so you continue to break them. And it was the best advice I ever got in golf, being able to bring something to a team where I don't know the rules of golf. I don't know how

you're supposed to practice. I don't know how you're supposed to look at a driving range or a golf course or a hole. Like you said, golf is given us a set of rules and a scorecard. We can play the hole however we'd like. We can hit out.

to the Sean Ryan Show. He has a lot of Seal Team six guys, Delta Force, really high performers. What are they doing? What are they doing that's different than what you and I are doing when we go to the driving range. They don't have a day off, they don't have the ability to have a bad day. A bad day for them has real consequences. A bad day for me, I shoot seventy seven. It's a very different mentality. And looking at them they gave The military gave me

so much confidence in something called operant conditioning. It's essentially where you can take someone off the street. You can take a civilian who's seventeen or eighteen years old, put them through buds, and in roughly two years they can become a functioning Navy seal. Who's to say that in sport we can't take someone off the street and turn them into a world class player. The military has already shown us it can be done through training, through.

gotta dance with the date that you brought. Every one of us wants a better swing.

are just practicers. They don't fundamentally know how to play golf. Sure and through technology, through science, through data, through all of the things that are available on social media, all of the things you can watch, you can work on your technique. Ad nos, you work on techne forever you can find anything online to work on.

a Tuesday afternoon. My heart rate's going to be the same as somebody is coming down with the chance to win. One of my favorite clients, doctor Lonnie Malo has been with us for basically since the beginning his goal when he started with us was to break a hundred. He had to play with his boss. He's an er doctor and he had to play with his boss in I'll never forget. It was the end of September and it was June, and he said, I don't know how to play golf and I'm terrified. His Masters was that round

with his boss. It didn't matter to him. He has no aspirations of being a you know, world beater, world number one. His Masters was that round. He ended up shooting about you know, ninety eight or whatever it was. And this year he played in his club championship. Next year his goal is to compete in the club championship. And I think that when you sit there and you look at what your own goals are and being realistic

about them, it's okay. If I never play in the Masters, career will still be a success because I'm trying to be the best player that I can be next week, next month, next year, five years from now. Who's to say I can't.

the tools. I mean he is a he's a joy to watch play golf, and he plays golf in a way that is incredibly simplistic, like he really does play golf in them people is form where I think people would think that it would be much more complex. The way he plays.

highest levels of the game. There's stress, there's financial there's you know, all the expectations of trying to be the best in the world. And I try to create games that are enjoyable, that are engaging, that are you know, taking what they do well already and make it a little better. And then hey, here are some areas that we need to work on. Let's try to have a little more fun doing that. And so for me, I look at children as the greatest model of learning. How

do kids learn? They play? Kids play. When we become adults, when we stop playing. You know, I'm a serious person. I need to have serious you know, I'm gonna grind. What does that even mean? Are you not gonna enjoy? You're gonna stand there and hip balls till you bleed, thanks man, Like I'll take anyone else against that guy in the field. Right The children are out there learning. My have a four yeal niece who I get to

watch her, how she learns, the questions that she asks. That's, in my opinion, my role with players is taking them back to when they were a child and how they learned, how they had fun, and more importantly, judgment free. Us as human beings are egos and are the stories that we tell ourselves. The stress that we put ourselves under It can become very constraining where you don't want to take that risk. John's always willing to take the risk.

I will always say this if I ask the same question to all of my guys, everyone you know, seeing Tory Pine's the eighteenth hole, and I always give them the number two fifty five because it's a weird tweener number, like maybe it's a five five iron lay up, maybe it's a you send it hit three wood. And a good question to ask yourself is you're tied for the lead, your opponent just hit it in the water. What do you do? Who are you? Do?

you're gonna do if you haven't trained it. We go back to our level of training under stress, under duress. Something we spend so much time on is our heart rate. All of our guys we monitor their heart rates when they're playing because we know that when your heart rate gets up, your decision making changes, your physical body changes. Your hands. Everyone's felt it. Your hands go a little numb when you're putting. What is that sensation?

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the technology out there. You know a lot of the guys on the PGA tour used the whoops during the pandemic. They gave everybody on the PGA Tour a whoop, because that was one of the ways that they were looking at seeing which guys were coming down with COVID. The Nick Wotney that that famous story Nick Wotney. He shows up, he doesn't tell positive at Harbortown, he's not feeling good. He sees Roy McElroy in the parking lot. Roy talks to him a little bit about it. He said, look

at your whoop data. I'm not feeling good today. They looked through that, they found out that he had contracted.

Physical things start to happen. And I called the buddy of mine who was a Green Beret, and I asked him about this, and I said, hey, have you guys researched this? And he turned me onto this amazing research from someone within the military who monitors all the Special Forces heart rate and he told a great story. He said, one of the final tests they have, they give you essentially a paintball gun and you know, they're like not real bullets, and they put a hood over your head

and a scenario is presented in front of you. It might be a woman holding a baby, it might be you know, two pertend terrorists. And they said, the first time everyone's heart rates through the roof, it's one sixty. And then you know, they shoot, They shoot the paintball gun at whatever's in front of them, and they said, by the end they're able to calm down. Hood comes off. They assess, they assess, they pull the trigger in the

right way, and it just clicked off. This idea in my mind that what if I test everything on myself. I am my own crash test dummy. For those of you who follow me on Instagram, you know I'm doing this every day all day. It's it's it's every day, all day. And so I just monitored my own heart rate and I put myself in and tournaments had said, well, when I'm hitting balls in the driving range, I'm out about eighty. When I play a tournament, there's no consequence.

So there's really no thought process. And I'll let players sometimes go through that to where they'll hit three, four or five shots, and a lot of times I'll start filming without them realizing they don't know what I'm filming, and I'll say, listen, watch how fast you just hit the last five balls. Sure, now tell me what you were thinking, tell me what the object of each shot was, and you can't because you're in that drowning phase. Right. I think golfers more than any other sport you get.

Everybody goes through this. Tour players go through this, but the average golfer that's listening, we all go through that phase of where you feel like I've lost it and now I'm drowning. Oh yeah, And the more you feel like you're losing it, the more you feel like you're drowning. You're in quicksand and you're just in your arms around that boat is sinking. So you were saying the heart rate.

Most people in the range, they hit a bad shot, there's fifty of them in front of them, they just grab another one.

I was doing burpies on the driving range three years ago by myself and everyone would giggle. I didn't have any PGA tour clients. I wasn't on your podcast. I was some four handicap in Scott's Arizona, you know, trying to play in my club championship. I was willing to be different because I didn't know that was wrong. I didn't know the So.

feel like I haven't been practicing. Things go wrong, I think I always say, and it's something I've been saying for a while now. From an American football standpoint, competitive golf is the two minute.

a chance, a lot of time for Patrick Mahomes. The greater the quarterback, the less time they have there are people are more surprised if they don't score, then they are right.

we're gonna win. Well, that's exactly we were more surprised if we lost, like no, no, no, no, this is we're gonna beat you. We are the team that's worked harder. We've done it, We've done the reps. And if you here's a funny story going back to what you said about competitive team sports. I was a freshman. I was scared to death. Our biggest rival in college baseball, think Alabama, Auburn is Long Beach State, cal State Fullerton. I'm zero

for two. On Saturday, I get the start because one of our guys got hurt, so I get the start. My first two at bats were terrible, I mean awful. As I'm walking up to bet, my head coach puts his arm around me in the on deck circle and he looks at me. And what do you think you say to a scared freshman who is there's thousands of people there. You say, hey, you can do it, son, You know you can do this, Nico. He looked at me, he goes, do you ever want to play here again?

And I turned and there's a video of it somewhere. My eyes are like saucers. He goes, get a hit. I rolled one over the five to six hole and I got a base hit. And he comes up to me and he goes, I told you, And you sit there and you compare that to golf, where as you said, you hit a bad shot, and then you go spend you know, a week on the driving range working on my te technique. Golf, the ball doesn't move, so we have so much time to think and evaluate and ask

ourselves why did the ball go there. I'm not that interested in the why. I'm interested in competing. I want a dog who gets in there and competes on their worst day. Everybody in professional golf, every Mini Tour pro can shoot sixty three.

it's the barriers one hundred ninety, yes, eighty seventy. If you're trying to break one hundred for the same for the first time, pretty much everybody that's in your handicap level is the same.

course that everybody is going to get into. I think one of the people always ask me why Brooks is so great in the majors, and I always say the same thing. And I say, because Brooks doesn't expect everything to go well. He expects there to be turbulence, He expects there to be he expects to make bad swings. Sure,

he expects to hit bad shots. I think so many people go into playing golf thinking, Okay, the way I'm going to break one hundred and ninety or eighty for the first time is I have to do all of these things perfect and the stars almost have to align. And I think that the way that you've come up with a way to try and gamify practice is something that I think can help so many people. So circling back to John, what were some of the practice games

that you came up with? When you're looking at a guy like John Rum, who's good at everything, how do you go, Okay, what can I get him to practice? From a game standpoint? Give him games? Because I've seen you for around all the majors. You come up with a list of games, sure, based off of the tasks that he's going to have to control. So at AUGUSTA, you identify the shots that he's going to have to hit the type of conditions that he's going to be playing.

Insure firm greens, not a lot of landing areas, slopey, slopey, all of those things. So you come up with games and you say, okay, here are the games. See if you can now achieve these tasks or tests in practice.

because he's so talented everything. But I work really closely with Dave John's I almost throw John out because he's such an anomaly. He's so gifted. He's so gifted. So if we were going to speak more generally about regular I guess tour pros, I would work with first a player, sit down them, learn who they are. Who are are you going for it on eighteen or not? At toy it's okay if you don't, it's okay if you don't.

And then working with Dave, working with him to identify what are they doing in their swings, because I need to understand what is the technique that they're trying to do. And then my job is down the line of saying, all right, let's make some fun games. Augusta is a great example. Backfoot wedge on thirteen. You might need to hit a backfoot edge on thirteen, not something that you

can do on a flat driving range. And so for most people you go to a flat, you know, municipal driving range, they don't have the opportunity to hit a backfooter off of the rough or you know, hit balls out of the wodship exactly, hit balls out of a wood chips or you know, fair way bunkers, whatever it might be. And so if you're listening at home, your golf course could turn into a practice facility on the

rounds that you play by yourself. One of the things that I do for all of our guys is we look at their golf course and say, all right, the first hole at Floridian, let's call it, it has a fairway bunker left that how far do you think that is in.

maybe you hit two. Obviously this is assuming that you're in the afternoon and not holding play up. You might hit fairway bunkers out of the one on the left. Then you might find a green. Say the second green has a really good slope, you might work on putting for an extra three minutes on that putting slope, Say the third hole you find a chip shot and you hit one extra chip shot from there. So now, if you're playing alone, or if you're playing with one friend

who's motivated that eighteen whole round, look, you can't. The thing that I think people mistake is every round can't be your lowest round. It's not a thing. You're not gonna shoot your lowest score every single day. Some days are gonna have to be days that you work. Maybe you use a half set, maybe you don't use a driver. One of the most common things I do with our guys is I take their driver in the three it away,

I make them hit irons. Why because then they have to hit long irons into par fours, something that is uncomfortable, especially for the guys who are playing in the wind. In Florida. We're lucky here where it's windy, But for my West Coast guys, Arizona guys, I mean Pooge. He plays at the ASU two. They don't have wind, so for him, hitting a four iron into a par four is like all right, Hey, I gotta work at this.

They're hitting driver sixty driver, you know, fifty six into everything, And so as you're thinking about practice, take the veil off of every round has to be my lowest score. Some days you can just improve and it might be working on your extra putting. On every day on every green you drop an extra ball and you just work on lige putting. That's enough.

golf course for specific shots. So I think everybody you would watch where they would go putt from, you would watch where they would go chip from. You you would watch what they would talk about off the tea with their caddies saying, Okay, what are we going to hit here? What is my strategy here? Right? That to me would be a very very accelerated learning process totally for a lot of for a lot of golfers.

around the edges right there, fairways tend to be fairly wide. Sure, the greens tend to be somewhat flat to maybe a little bit slopey.

There's shots there that I don't have elsewhere that if I played that club every day, I would need to get a seven wood because there's par fives that I need to hit it high into. But for the tournament golfer, the thing that amazes me the most about the high level player. I'm a pretty decent player myself, but I need to have seen in a place a few times to understand the strategy to you know, where do I hit it? The best players in the world to show up and shoot sixty five. It is just a different

It's a different game. And for those of you listening at home, that's okay. If you're not that guy. You shooting seventy five in your club championship might be your goal. That might be your process goal. Your outcome goal might be breaking eighty. You know what you should do. Go play the easiest course you can do, shoot seventy nine and you did it. Does that mean you broke eighty. It's your own decision, right, That's that's that kind of interesting. I talk a lot about with our guys, and we

can talk about it about process and outcome goals. In outcome goals, I want to break eighty. Is that a good goal? Maybe? But I want to break eighty at my home course. Me shooting eighty at Bayhill this year when the greens were you know, thirteen in rock Hard, that'd have been a hell of a round. Me shooting eighty at my home club here, Hey man, I'm not losing all the money like I am having a tough day, right, So that's an important thing that I think people should differentiate

as well their own games. Score is important, but you want to enjoy the game and play it for a long time.

you're practicing golf, you're trying to improve. What are some good practice games that you can play on the range at your home course, regardless whether you're hitting off of a mat, regardless of what the driving range looks like.

six birdies around? Why I make six berties? I drive four par fours? You know, like it's not this isn't a thing, right, So Number one, you have to self assess what are you good at? Why can't you break a hundred? Darren may our friend down at the Grove, amazing guy, works with Keegan the Grove guys. He has one of the best things. How far do you hit a driver? Distance right now, whether you want to deal with it or not, is a predictor of golf success. So that's a first question. Do I hit it far

enough to compete? And I'm not talking about three point fifty, not that many guys hit it three fifty and even less guys hit it three fifty in play. If I'm an amateur golfer trying to break a hundred, can I hit it too forty in play? Can I hit a driver two hundred and forty yards in the air.

him and I went, wow, my threewood does stink. I hit it in the water all the time.

have a family. If I'm a father who has two kids and works forty hours a week and I'm trying to be a loving husband, I'm probably not going to be at the range six days a week, am I? Yeah? I hope you're I hope you're not. You know what I mean. But you can ask yourself. When I was doing my doctorate, I had thirty minutes. Some days I had a lunch break. I brought a putter. I put a putting mat in my office and I would sit there and I would roll putts for thirty minutes. That's

what I would do. So then you have to sit there and you have to say to yourself, Okay, what can I do with the time that I have? And you talked about expectations, be realistic. I'm not going to be world number one this year, probably never in my life. That's okay. What are my real, clear process and outcome goals. My outcome goal might be I want to qualify from the City Amateur. Great goal, fantastic goal, you got to

shoot seventy seven, you know, whatever it is. My process would then be, in order to qualify for the City Amateur. And I'm a father and I got two kids, I got to ask my wife if she'd watch the kids for an hour once a week so I can get to the driving range and I can get that extra hour in, take her on a date, get you know, bring home ice cream, do something, process and outcome. And then finally, it's really just learning to play the game. And I don't mean on Instagram watching golf tips. My

dad love the guy to death, great father. He's an eighteen handicap who watches more golf tips than any human being on the planet. Dude, the guy has more sets of clubs. He shows up, he's gonna, you know, screw in the light bulb and then squish the bug. And it's like, Dad, you know why you're an eighteen handicap, I said, because you think you carry it two forty and he carries it two zero five. That's why. Because he thinks he can fly the bunker on the right,

he can't. He swings hard and he quack hooks one into the water. So it's understanding your gain and more importantly, your goals. Your goals don't need to be being world number one. Your goals can be being the best player you can be, whatever that means for you, and setting those clear process goals processes everything to me. Obviously, this is what I do. You don't need to buy golf blueprint. You can, if you'd like, create a plan for yourself.

Claude talked about it. Hey, here are the shots that my golf course needs. I want to break ninety. I know I got to hit that five wood on the twelfth hole. That makes me uncomfortable. Spend ten minutes at your practice session hitting that five wood. Have a plan showing up to the range so that when you're there, you don't have the cognitive fatigue, which is so real in golf. If trying to plan what do I do next? The guy next to him's hitting driver. He's hitting it

pretty far, man, I bet I could hit it farther him. Okay, fine, But is that your everyday plan? Is my question.

And then the next game they went out and won a preseason game, and the coach came in and said, that was who we are we played our brand of football? I think everybody can look at their own game and say, Okay, what do I need to do? What does my game? What am I good at?

Rory McElroy. The elite players are saying, okay, where am I deficient? Tiger was the best at that. Tiger was when when he turned pro. I watched for ten years at a ringsight. See, Tiger was a shit wedge player. He was a terrible bunker player. Tiger turned all of the weaknesses into strengths. That's really hard for a twenty

handicapper because they don't have a lot of strengths. So find out the things that you're good at sure, Right, we're not talking that you have to be an elite level, but you're gonna look at your game and say, listen, there is going to be some part of my game, yeah, as a twenty handicapper that stands out more than the others, whatever that strength is, and then do everything you can do to play to that strength.

it was the best day ever. Her making a birdie on a par five was that it was more elation than I feel, you know, making a hole in one. I'm sure it's it's it's it's it's relative to your level. And I think that people at home need to understand that. Watching the guys play on tour on perfect manicured greens that roll out of twelve every week with physios and teams. Look, you and I work on the teams. We know what

these guys have behind us. Joe who works as a computer sales you know it guy and then goes out and plays a Saturday game, isn't getting massage and chiropractic And you know you're not on the range behind him, Like, hey man, you're you know, one degree inside.

not birdies. Yes, everyone thinks the one hundred shooter thinks I'm going to break a hundred if I make more birdiees.

When you think they're gonna make bogie. They find a way to make the seven footer for par. It's not making eight birdies around. Yes, when guys shoot sixty two, when they have the heater going, they're going to make everything insighte.

and the fist pump will be very different. And the interaction between when the player goes over to the caddy, the fist pump, the high five, the slap on the back for the ten footer for par is very different than the ten footer for Birdie.

four is a par five. Bryson had a fascinating thing about calling Augusta a par sixty seven, and he got roasted for it. He got crushed for it, but it was an interesting concept. Him saying to himself, it's a par sixty seven.

my girlfriend, don't four putt? I love you, please three putt, make the three footer for your third putt.

have two plans. One of them's forty dollars a month, the other one's one hundred. We're always working to make it better. But if you sign up for that, if you sign up for the one hundred dollars plan, it's called the Players, you'll get a customized practice plan based on our algorithm. And then the classic plan, which is forty is our algorithm's best guess. That's the best way to describe it. The tour business is an entirely other thing.

If you play on the PDA Tour and you work with Claude, great, But I don't work with other players, if that makes sense. But for the average person at home, I would say, you don't need to buy anything today to get better right now this afternoon, I hope you listen to this, and I hope you took away Claude andize takeaways on how to improve for free. Those don't cost you any money. Going to the driving range with

a plan costs you nothing. All you need to do is think about your golf course, think about the way you play the game, and more importantly, how you want to play the game. That's hugely important. If you want to play the game like Bryson, do it. If you want to hit irons like Tommy Fleetwood do it. If you want to hit you know, bunker shots like Tech, whatever it might be that's going to keep you coming

back and keep the game engaging. Golf is meant to be fun, and I think that sometimes amateurs forget that you might've shot seventy five one time and that's incredible. Just because you shot eighty to day doesn't it's not a bad round.

you will. If you're trying to lose weight and you go to the gym five days a week, you will see improvement. Sure, right by just going by just doing show up, show up, will you will see some games. But I think the games that I think everyone listening can can benefit from is saying, Okay, I've done my technical work today. I've worked on the technique aspect of my game. Now let me go spend some time on playing playing golf, playing on you know, a jungle gym,

which is the driving range. Your driving range could be the equivalent of going to a park and seeing a jungle gym and saying, Okay, I'm going to play on the jungle gym. Yes, but then I'm also got two of my friends, So now we're going to see who can climb to the top of the jungle gym the fastest or take the most difficult route to go. You're

learning so much. One of the most fascinating things that really changed for me learning is I was at a TPI seminar with Greg Rose and he was talking about, you know, failure as being a big part of the learning process, have to fail. And he was talking and so he said, to any he said, we see this

with kids. He said, anybody in the room have very young kids just learning to walk, and they raise you know, people raise their hands and he says, okay, did anybody in the room's child go from crawling one day to just standing up and walking and didn't fall? Sure, And someone will invariably, very proudly raise their hand and say, yes, my son, little Timmy just got up one day and started walking.

So I think what you've come up with is a way that people can say, Okay, I've figured out I'm working on these singles going to work. We're always going to be working on parts of your technique. You can always drive it better, Yes, you can always groove your path more into out than out to in. But then you have to spend some time saying, Okay, I'm a hundred handicapper, I'm trying to break a hundred. I'm trying

to break ninety. Let me put myself in game situations that are going to help me do that.

these guys. They're failing everything, fail all the time. I am willing to fail because I'm willing to learn, And as you said about the child, that kid is learning how to learn, and they're learning how they walk, how they crawl, how they fall, how they get back up. And I love the idea of the jungle gym. Look at the way a kid looks at the jungle gym versus how you and I do. What do we see when we look at that? I look at a golf driving range as the kid in the jungle gym. I

look at it with endless possibilities. It doesn't matter where it is. I go to different driving ranges every day on purpose to just look at them differently. As how do I, like you said, how do I make this more difficult? Hit Ball's out of dibots, you flush it, hip Ball's out of divts, hip ball's off the dirt. It's fricking hard, you know learning, it's learning, And more importantly, I think that people need to be kinder to themselves when you're learning a new skill. I am constantly trying

to be a beginner. I recently restarted jiu jitsu. I'm a white belt. I am out of shape. I get choked out constantly. I'm the big you know, doctor Nico Darris at the golf course, you know, country club guy. And then I go to jiu jitsu and I'm just Nico, the white belt who doesn't know you know how to do any moves. It's important because I'm learning how to learn again. I'm learning how to fail and being okay with that. The day that I stop failing is the day that I stopped learning.