It's the Son of a Butcher podcast. We come to you every Wednesday. This week's guest had a chance to sit down and talk to this guy when I was down in Australia. Jonah Oliver. He is Cam Smith's performance coach. But met him just in the locker room and got talking to him about, you know, his role with Cam and everything. But from the minute I started talking to Jonah, I mean, it's just he was definitely somebody I wanted
to have on the podcast. Been doing this for a little of her about a year year and a half now, and I've got to say this was probably the podcast that I got the most out of. I could have talked to Jonah for a couple of hours. He talks about dealing with pressure or talks about performance, but just so many good takeaways that if you're a competitive golfer or a non competitive golfer, if you're just trying to
improve your handicap. Definitely some stuff that I think that everybody that's trying to improve their game and trying to improve the way they perform on the golf course, this is a good one. You're gonna want to take notes, and like I said, definitely one that I enjoyed listening to and one that I got a lot out of. So take a listen to Jonah Oliver. I definitely think
you will enjoy it. All right. So, Jonah, we got a chance to meet last last week in Australia, and you know, just in talking to you and the work that you've done with Cam Smith is his performance coach. I just thought it would be fascinating to kind of pick your brain. First of all, when when when everybody listening here is a performance coach to you? What does that mean? And how would you define that?
Yeah, great question. I'm a sports psychologist, so I define it firstly, so psychologist by training. And I say that just a clarification. There's a lot of people out there who are mental skills coaches, performance coaches, mindset coaches. I'm a psychologist. I went to university to a bunch of training, registered with a medical board, so you know, everything that I do is based in evidence.
What would that be the difference between, you know, because obviously there are the golf has been you know, the main one in golf historically was a guy like Barbarrotella, you know, where breathing techniques and stuff like that, whereas your background is more a doctor background, a clinical background, And that's different than just someone saying, hey, work on your pre sharp routine, work on you know, focus, because it's much more involved in what you do with the training that you've got.
Yeah. Sure, I mean, firstly, there's a whole bunch of people out there doing great work regardless of their background. You know, some people just have a natural intuition. What separates maybe a sports psychologist from others is that we're medically ethically bound by only evidence based interventions. So it's like going seeing a doctor. They're not going to say I think this is a good medicine I made up in my garage. This is based upon you know, science
and evidence. So that's probably the biggest distinguishing factor is that whatever I do, I've come from a body of science. To your first question, though, what do I do for a living? I help people focus on the right thing at the right time. I can't make you more talented. I can't make you any more than what's you know,
what God put in. But you know, most of the time clients come to me and they're like, Jonah, I can I can hit a ball, I can drive a racing car I can you know, I can train well when I'm in the in the octagon, sparring, whatever the sport is, but then they want to do it when it matters, and they might notice there's a change in their performance when pressure shows up or outcome shows up. So you know what do I do. I help people focus on the right thing at the right time.
And one of the things that I'm always talking to all of the players I work with, especially the ones trying to play, is this concept of technique versus execution, and I think regard and one of the reasons why I wanted you to come on and talk. And I find it fascinated talk to people years your golf round isn't specifically golf, And we were talking before we started that,
I think in the last fifteen years. And I think really when the guys at the Titleist Performance Institut Greg and Dave Rose, Greg Rose and Dave Philips, when they got together and said, Okay, we're going to bring in all of these people to try and talk about golf. We're going to bring in people from the medical side, from the physical side, and then from the golf side and get all of these people kind of talking and
being on the same page. I think really since the early two thousands, I've spent more time talking to people that aren't necessarily golf specific people or their background isn't one hundred percent golf, And so you mentioned other sports. One of the things I think that's changed and I'd love to get your input on this. Golf has changed and evolved to where I think it's getting out of the golf specific realm because when I was growing up, my dad was always a golf and you know, a
coach gave lessons, but golf wasn't cool. It wasn't seen as a sport. It was just go out, Ben Hogan, find it in the dirt. You know, there's great stories about people that just think all of this is just nonsense. You know. I know some of the trainers at the Ryder Cup at Glenn Eagles when Tom Watson was the captain, their players were trying to get credentials for their coaches, for their trainers and stuff. And Tom Watson, coming from an old school, you don't need any of that, right,
you don't need any of that stuff. It's just golf and we dig it out of the dirt. How do you see golf has evolved over the last maybe fifteen to twenty years. And where do you see that in the realm of other sports that you deal with, from racing drivers, from other you know, cricketers, from Ossie rules, and then the work that you do with Cam Smith.
Yeah, sure, great question. Well, interestingly enough, I think golf is relatively mature with examining the side of psychology because I think even before we had psychologists working with all tour players like I do, the average the average golfer out there certainly knew that their head at times got in their way. Okay, so I think there was quite a you know, I look at tennis, I look at
for you know, motorsport, I look at golf. They're relatively mature in having people like myself around the athletes and the teams. But to your point, coming in as just a generalist, I work across all professional sports multiple I've gone multiple Olympics and worked in all different sectors of pro sport, is that golf does still have a tendency to drink from a pretty small fish tank, and sometimes that that water can get a bit dirty. Right, So what do people let myself bring in we bring in
the naive question, the informed yet naive question. What I mean by that is why are you doing that?
But why?
What? Like give me or because you did it before, because somebody else did it, Like well have you thought about this or this is what we do in football, or this is what we do in motorsport, or this is what we do in the UFC, And all of a sudden, you see people's brains being much more open
and ah interesting. So I'm seeing a huge appetite now in golf at the pointy end for yeah, being more open to learning from other sports and realizing that just because we've done it this way doesn't mean we need to continue to do it that way.
If you had to define what pressure is, what is pressure? Because we hear that so much. And I remember when Brooks, when I was working with Brooks and he was on his kind of historic major championship run, we were sitting at the house at Bethpage Black when he won his fourth major un I think it was like the fourth majorid one out of like eight or nine that he played in. And then people were like, Okay, he's cracked the code, right, He's figured out how we were sitting
and we're having dinner. I think it was Saturday night and Brandall Chamblie was on Golf Channel and he was like, you know, he's going to be under a lot of pressure, you know, tomorrow and everything, and I'll never forget this. Brooks just looked up at me and he goes, what these people don't realize is the only person or the only thing that can make me feel pressure is me. Right, it's not something that's real. You have to take it in and go, Okay, I'm going to be affected by it.
And he said, if you choose not to be affected by it, the pressure doesn't bother you. So in your mind, we hear so much about what pressure in sports, but what to.
You is that, Well, you've touched upon a lot of it. It's very much an interpretation of a threat, perceived or real. There is real threat. We can't deny hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. So if we see a deadly snake on the floor, our brain is going to have
a reaction to it. Now, if I'm a professional snake catcher, it's going to be a different reaction than you or I. But interestingly enough, that professional snake catcher will still have an elevated heart rate, okay, and some thoughts of death, dying and staying alive. But they just don't give that much power because they're highly competent. They know what they're going to do, they've done it before. They can focus on catching that deadly snake, whereas you and I are
running out the door, right or frozen or whatever. Right. But people misinterpret. They see that snakecatcher walking in competently grabbing the snake from behind the head, and they go, Wow, that guy was so calm and confident. He doesn't even get scared by scary, deadly snakes. The biggest mythology in sports psychology that great athletes don't feel pressure or nerves. So there is an element that we all will respond to an external and an intrinsic threat or pressure or context.
It's just that our relationship to it is very individual. That's why I've got I've got football players who will play in front of a stadium of one hundred and twenty thousand people and they're more nervous because their girlfriend is bringing their friends along and they don't want to play poorly to make her feel embarrassed. Sounds pretty weird.
Big tough meaty ossie footballer who's actually worried about his girlfriend's impression management in front of her friend, and that's what is making him more nervous than one hundred and twenty thousand people and winning and losing a footing match. Right, So it can be very very personal what pressure is. Plus we know that through exposure we can develop a different relationship to it. And that's almost what I spent my life doing is debunking the mythology of pressure.
So how do you go about doing that? And is it individual for each specific player, because obviously I'm fascinated with the players that I work with. They run the gamut of personality yep. Right. Currently I work with Dustin Johnson, who is so laid back, so chilled out, but DJ nobody realizes he's probably the most positive person I know, and he's kind of the living embodiment of what everybody says you should do in sports, but specifically golf, one
shot at a time. You can't control the past, you can't control the future. And then one of my favorite people to work with, who's probably the most negative human being I've ever met, Pat Perez, never thinks he's good enough, always thinks it's it's not permanent. He always thinks he's going to lose it. So how much of how players are affected by pressure come from their own background and their own way of dealing with everything that's happened in
their life. Because I think the great ones, in my opinion, are they They're the compartmentalizers. They're the ones that can put all of these things in boxes at the right time. It doesn't mean it necessarily mean they're probably not dealing with it. They're just able to go, Okay, I'm just not gonna let it affect me at this time. But the background of individual athletes that we are as golfers, how much does that affect how they handle pressure situations?
Yeah, complex question, A good one, and there's a few layers to that. So let's just slow down and walk through a few things at one point at a time. So genetics influences our temperament. So we used to think that temperament was how we grew up and you know,
the social world we were exposed to. But we actually know that that temperament is actually genetically nature versus nurture, correct, Right, That's why you can have two children raised in the same family, and they're really different in terms of their temperament. So there's a bit of genetics. There's epigenetics, which is a whole other thing of people interested in your podcast
google some epigenetics. We down a rabbit hole for a while, but you know, whether your grandfather was a smoker influences your genes right now, Like it's pretty amazing. So let's just yeah, So firstly we have different temperament. Then we have the world we are exposed to, so how we learn our relationship to pressure, And then we have personality as well, so they're all three intertwine. So the biggest thing that we can work with though, is our relationship
with pressure. And you can be you know, a pervasive warrior, you can be perfectionistic, you can be highly strung, whatever terminalism you want to use, can be laxadaisical and as cool as a cucumber, as we say in Australian, you know, really chilled out, but you can still both of those can be major winners world number one and dominate for
a very long time. Okay, So this idea that there's one personality or one temperament or one psychological makeup that defines a champion is absolute mythology.
You don't see any correlation, You don't see any traits that are that you see on a regular basis with great champions and the way they deal with pressure.
Yes, I do how they deal with it, so you can be a little bit more highly strung and just know that's part of who you are. And the techniques that I train my athletes in is very much that how do I make room for the noise that will inherently show up when pressure comes, and don't let it impact my performance. So it's not how worried we get, it's whether we can still play the shot in that moment. If I get caught up in my anxiety story and I start steering it de selling, leaving put short, then
I'm getting affected by my interpretation of pressure. Whereas if I'm able to unhook from it. In psychology we call it diffused diffusion. It's I'm nervous, but I'm able to see it as just thoughts and feelings, and I'm able to pick a target and commit to my normal swing, and therefore I hit the shot whilst having nerves. Now the commentators on TV or say, look, how calm and confident he is now. What they're saying is, look how
competent he is or her. So it's the ability to still play the right shot, irrespective of what story showing up. Some people, because of their experience, their background, their temperament, their personality, how important this is, whatever, will have a different volume or story in their brain about this shot. Okay, they'll have more negative thoughts or anxious thoughts, whatever labels
we want to give them. I don't even give them Labels's call them thoughts, you know, because even positive thoughts can distract us. So my training is how to take an athlete who might get a bit of noise and learn to just make room for it so that then
behaviorally they're consistent. And when you say, what is the overlapping Venn diagram between the extrovert, the introvert, the worry of the perfectionists, the stud who just loves the spotlight, it's all of those who seem to consistently perform well, don't give the noise in their brain too much power. Rather, they come back to the behavioral output that's required in
this moment. So they're very behaviors. One thing psychologists have got wrong, and I read a lot of golf journals and see a lot of people writing articles on the psychology of golf, and they seem to be obsessed with athletes thoughts and feelings. If you actually look at the history of psychology, we're behaviorists. We studied rats eating pellets to touch buttons and pigeons in boxes. You know, Skinner
and Pavlov with dogs, and we're behaviorists. And if you actually look at what is what does gold.
Pleasure reflex to where if you give about something, they'll just keep hitting the pleasure.
But literally, right, what is sport? I've never been to the Olympics where they've handed out a gold medal and said, hey, this is for you because you had the most positive self talk. Right, Hey, you're the most confident. Here's here's here's a green jacket, here's.
The winner, like it's it's for what you do and golf. If it was a stale competition, in a technique competition which everyone thinks it is, Adam Scott, Scotty and Nellie Corter would win. They'd be the judge's favorite because they have the best looking technical golfwey.
Correct correct, So we're going to remember that our job. All of us coaches psychologists. You know, ever is just to help that animal or humans, but that animal behave in a certain way. My job is to help them behave consistently because normally what I see in training is pretty damn good. It's can we now then transfer that into tournament play and not how much you don't change.
The famous quote, and I think it was Roger Federill a pressure pressure is a privallege.
Now do you believe that? Yeah? I do so. Funnily enough, I'm doing a few talks around the world at the moment with people from the military, people in the medical sectors, and the people often hire us and bring us in and I actually challenge my fellows on the stage. I say, I think we're gonna be very careful here if I'm in the and I do a lot of work just so you know, with surgeons, so how do they perform well and focus when there's sirens going off and the
clients bleeding out of what have you? And for them, when there's pressure, it normally means something's wrong.
Okay, I've never thought about that. In the medical world, a pilot would be the scenes pilently feel pressure when something is going wrong.
The same as in the military. We've planned this assault down a valley doing what have you? And then okay, naturally and.
Because it's surgeons pilot's military, because everything is so systematically planned out, it should go according to plan. Yeah, and when it doesn't, that's when the pressure comes.
Correct, correct, I mean, the military are very good at preparing for the unexpected. They do a good job of that. But yes, the point I was trying to make was this, this this tokenistic line of pressure is a privilege I actually think really only holds up in sport. You know, sometimes pressure in sport is challenging because you're on the cut line or your swing's broken down a little bit. So you might say, yeah, look I had a fair
bit of pressure and it was due to adversity. But traditionally it's I've made the Olympic final, I'm in the lead group, I've got my chance to win my first major, you know. So yeah, I do believe that often the better we do in sport, we feel the pressure and we think it's a negative thing. We don't like it. We want to we want to, you know, we want to have it both ways. And I always say it's the price of entry, it's the price of entry. You
want to win that green jacket? Yes, I dude. Then you're not going to sleep well tonight, and you're gonna wake up and not want to eat your breakfast, and you're going to have a few extra trips to the toilet, and you're gonna have a bit of noise in the brain. We know enough about neuroscience to know you're going to have some anticipatory anxiety because you know why, you worry about things you care about, and you've got this wonderful opportunity to go out there and get after something you
care about. But you know what, there might be some you know, pressure that shows up with that. So instead of viewing it as this aversive thing that I wish or hope it doesn't come, it's rather, let's dance. The better I do, the louder you get. My relationship to you is you know you like my shadow. You're gonna follow me round, so you might as well come for the journey. Let's go.
You work with Cam Smith? How did you come on Cam's team? Why do you think you're on Cam's team? And what fact do you think that you've helped him with? Yeah?
Sure, so I joined Cam's team about five years ago. He was about sixty five in the world at the time. I was working previously with Grant Field, you know, Cam's coach, and you know he knew of some of the work I've done with some of the other players and had some good outcomes there, So he'd probably planted the seed in the background. And then we met it at Port
Rush actually had our first went out for dinner. I got to know each other and then we started working not long after that, and then it's been a good little journey. He's the coolest kid.
Right right. I mean, he's so much fun to be around. And I don't claim to know him. Well, I'm a work friend. I see him, I talk to him, but he seems to be very much in the DJ mode. I've just laid back, chilled out. Is he like that on the golf course? Does his my appoint being? Does his personality off the golf course match his personality on the golf course and the way that he deals with all of the stuff that goes with trying to win big tournaments and winning major championships.
Yeah, a question I get often. I think people need to not mistake.
Having a mullet and laid back cool.
Look, yeah, jove your personality and perspective, right, Like, the one thing Cam does so well is he's so quick to refresh, meaning if he's not played well, he'll be annoyed for a little bit, hit the range, fix up whatever he's working on, and then we're not talking golf, we're talking fishing in cars and he can switch off. Right. It's because, you know why, because he doesn't define himself
as a golfer. He's Cam And as a psychologist, I take that really deeply and personally that my job is to help the human and a lot of that is reminding them that they're a whole human that happens to have a job called golf. And when you're at work, you take it seriously, you do it damn well. But when it's done, you're allowed to go and nurture the
other domains of your life. He's still a son, a brother, you know, he's engaged, he's a mate, he's a smart ass, he's you know, that's Cam, and he's allowed to reconnect to those other areas of his life even in the middle of a tournament, because he'll pick it up tomorrow morning when we get to the range again. But what people misinterpret is they see that somewhat Ossie Larican sort of kid and think that that's just how he goes
about his golf. He is one of the most dilled in, serious, switched on, engaged athletes I work with, and I'm fortunate enough to work with a lot around the world in all different contexts, and he's literally some of the best I've ever seen in terms of his application and focus because he sort of has a bit that white line fever. When he steps over the white line, it's you know, he switches it on. I think he's very good at
what I call simple brilliance. Simple brilliance which means what it means he doesn't suffer fool so he only values things that he sees genuine. He makes an impact on his game. He doesn't go chasing shadows and just searching for things. If the swing's not quite where it is, or he knows the things that work, he knows the things he needs to do to improve that. You know, the team around him is very small. It's literally a very small team, and that serves him well. I call
it the margari to pizza. You know three ingredients, right, I'll drive across New York to go find an awesome wood fired pizza and pay it good money than the five dollar pizza that's got all the ingredients. And the meat lovers right, well, I see a lot of golfers
out there with meat lover's pizzas. They're just throwing too many ingredients on and drowning it in sweet barbecue sauce and convincing themselves it's tasty, Whereas it's actually hard to cook a three ingredient pizza that it tastes good because you've got to cook it just right and have the best ingredients. And that's sort of the philosophy I use with him, what Grant uses with him. We only add minimal input that makes an impact.
I always see the players trying to be a three Michelin star cheft and you don't really know how to cook. I see so many players, Jonah, they're trying to get good at everything. Yeah, and you know, and I think a lot of this comes from I think one of the negative effects of the Tiger era and what Tiger did is this idea that you can be Tiger Woods, that you can have all the shots. Hank Haney famous,
You've got to have all nine ball flights. And I see so many players going, no, I'm trying to work it both ways, trying, and they're spending so much time and effort to try and get good at everything, but they're really average to mediocre and sometimes poor at all of it. They're not really great at anything. So I always say, listen, just make great omelets. Great omelets have a couple of ingredients. Doesn't have make a great cheeseburger,
just a couple of ingredients. And if you can make a thousand of those, and every time someone eats them and says, man, that's a really good omelet, can you make me another one? Yeah, I can make you another armelet. And then if you're the omelet maker in the restaurant, eventually they're gonna ask you to do something else because you're so good at making omelets. But if you can't
make a three. And I find it really fascinating that a lot of golfers that are trying to play, when you actually talk to them about what they're trying to do, Like you said, they're just trying to throw as many ingredients into the mix as possible, and they don't know why they're doing that. They don't know what from a chef. I always use Chefinale's. They don't know what flavors actually work together. They throw all this stuff on and you're like,
and that just tastes awful. Yeah, there's nothing cohesive about it. One of the things I thought that was really interesting that you said about Cam is his ability to reset talk me through that. And is that something you've helped him with or is that something that comes from him and comes from within.
Yeah, answers both. Firstly, he was already very good when I joined the team, and he has a lot of the right yeah make up. He's a gritty kid. He's grown up on a really challenging sort of you know, not a perfect golf course. It was tough conditions.
I talked to Grant about that. I love that. Yeah, I love the fact that it wasn't perfect. So many players.
You know, we live in Jupiter, Florida, which is like ground zero for golfers, And there was a kid just graduated from college, went to Division one college, big program, and he doesn't really have a lot of money, and he was like saying, hey, you know, the only club that I can get in and afford to join, they don't have pro v one exes on the range, and I'm not going to get any better unless i can be at a club where I've got prov one excess.
And I'm like the fact that you're thinking like that is so far removed from what you actually need to do to actually make it.
Yeah. Yeah, there's an expression that I've used fair bit. It's not mine, but I love it. It's called you know, it's hard to survive in the jungle if you're trained in the zoo. That's you know, he.
Said that, and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on to talk because that is so appropriate. For so many players they think that the only way they can make it is in the zoo.
Well, we do it as professionals, right, So I just think, for a mode if I say that again for the listeners, it's hard to survive in the jungle if you're trained in the zoo. So why do a lot of Aussies make it in world sport? We bad above our weight where a tiny country twenty million people will get. We seem to do okay a lot of sports, right.
And as we've all found out, it takes a long way from everywhere else in the world to get around to us.
Yeah, now why is that? Well, I think one of the reasons is that we didn't necessarily have great resources. You know, our golf courses were you know, bumpy greens and you'd hardly call them a fairway. You know, in cricket, you know, the conditions were tough. In football, we don't wear pads, you know, and so naturally, growing up in Australia you have to. It's a little bit like the jungle. So then when we go out onto the world stage, it's actually it's almost easier in some degrees. Right, We're
getting a bit away from it. That's a whole other podcasts about how I think in Australia we're now becoming almost too professional and creating these lovely training environments that I see. But yeah, when I do travel the world and I see these youth academies and coaches being so well intentioned, they're trying to do the best thing for their athletes. They're trying to give them these beautiful facilities and beautiful training you know, environments, but they're removing the
very competitive edge of being a ferocious, hungry line. I mean, what does a line look like in the jungle, skinny, covered in scars and hungry. So when that caribou walks past.
It's bam right and will do anything.
Literally to eat literally. Whereas we know the ones in the zoo that have had their main or shampooed and condition and they line they're sort of lazy and fat because another carcass gets thrown over the fence. So we've got to be really intentional with what we expose our athletes too, to the thinking about the ferociousness of that hungry lion. To extend the metaphor, it's not how hard
something is, it's how important something is. You know. It's not how hard something is, it's how important something is. I use a lot of metaphor in my therapy because that's how brains learn, and I always use this one. I say, if I'm playing basketball in the street with my kids and a ball rolls onto the road and a car comes, I'll stand back and let the car hit the ball. I'll apologize and we'll get on playing basketball. But if my daughter runs out to get that ball
as that car is coming, I'm out there right. I don't care how painful, how many bones, I don't care if that car kills me because of how important my daughter is. So we've got to understand that if you want athletes to do hard things, you can't motivate them. It's their own journey, but you can help them connect
to their importance what it means to them. And when I help my clients connect to the meaning behind their career or whatever they're pursuing, they'll endure a great hardship, which might mean taking on the water on the eighteenth, you know, hitting this shot, doing the training even though it's boring and monotonous, whatever like. It just doesn't matter
what the challenge is. It's if there's something of importance at play, we're much more willing to make room for the discomfort, which is right back to what we spoke about earlier in terms of our relationship to pressure. You know, pressure can cause pain, psychological pain, discomfort. Well, if I know my affort is really connected to their why, then they're willing to feel immense amount of discomfort. Cam was so nervous on those final seven holes at the open he couldn't even swallow water.
And it looked outwardly right, you know, the old duck under the water and stuff like that right.
But he was connected to what he wanted to do. We knew he wasn't ever going to compromise on his course management because that's so important to how we go about a business. You know, I'm willing to lose a tournament, but I'm not going to compromise on being the best version of myself how I play this golf course and staying true to that. But calm, confident, free of nerves and anxiety like no, he was. You know, he was human,
He was normal. He was nervous as heck, but it didn't impact the way he went about his place.
You know, Brooks had a chance to win the Masters, and in talking to him, I mean he was devastated. He really was, and I don't think he shows a lot of that hour. He Brooks seems like he's an alpha. Those of us that know him privately know that he isn't necessarily an alpha, but it's advantageous in sports to have other people think you're an alpha. But he said that he felt very strange in that final round on Sunday, that he felt something that he had never really felt before,
and he sure surely didn't the first three days. Is He said that he felt for the first time on the golf course that he was trying to not hit a bad shot, and I said, and he said, I just I And he was really really upset and taken aback by that, And I said, you know what that shows is it shows that you care. It shows that you want to win a green jacket and want to win a Master's and be able to go upstairs in
the champions. But that tournament, I think, more than any for golfers is the holy grail because of everything that goes with it. And I think outwardly Brooks and his persona is I don't practice nothing bothers me, I don't care. And I said, the great thing is after everything that you've gone through to where you had this meteoric rise. You got to be number one in the world, you won all these majors, then you had the perfect storm of injury, whatever, and now you're rebuilding kind of Brooks
two point zero. It should show you that you care and that should be the catalyst that is the second phase of your career to start from there, because I look at what he went through as yeah, I mean I I'd give anything to go back and be sitting there and watching him put on a green jacket. But I think the fact that he had to go through that having had so much success is actually important for the next stage of his career.
Yeah, well, it's interesting. I love hearing that. You know, firstly, you can be super alpha male and still be nervous. You can be super alpha male and still worry. You can be super alpha male and still have you know, tournament nerves about closing out. So that's fine. Yeah, it just showed me that he worries about things you care about, cares about which you identified. Our brain will always orientate to a threat before a positive stimulus. That's normal.
Yeah.
You know, you stand on a tea box, You'll see the water before you see landing spot in the fairway. You'll our brains. If I put a thousand dollars cash on this table and a deadly spider, you know your eyes will always do a rapid seccatic movement to the spider first before you look at the money. Our brains have evolved. Always evaluate threat first. Now we always have a healthy tension between hatred of losing and love of winning.
They danced every single day in pro sport, right, and most really really good athletes have a high hatred of losing, if we're going to be truly.
Honest, four more than they're actually literally, right, Tiger is the living.
Literally and some days though, that just hijacks our focus, now attention more than it, you know, than the desired behavior. So it's all of a sudden where we're focusing on the hazards, We're focusing on the you know, the spots we don't want to have the ball, and all of a sudden we start maybe desailling, steering, clubbing down, whatever it is. You know, we get to that avoidance type play versus just playing our brand of golf. And that's
that's ultimately the work I try to do. And when you said, you know, what have I done with Cam, I would say change his relationship to nerves and anxiety and pressure, where he learned that's okay to feel that way. And when just that alone meant that when those tournament nerves show up, he doesn't see it as an aversive
thing or a problem. If I don't see it as a problem, then I don't need to turn to it and do something with it, right, which then allows me to just keep playing my brand of golf, which means I don't change. So what does Cam do better than most people in the world not change? He stays consistent
no matter the context. We know, I could turn on the television not see the score, you know the score, and I'd be able to see the same course management, same shot, same approach, whether it's a practice round or at the final round of them of the open, right, and so hearing that story you know of Brooks, and it's about, yeah, how much did the course management change or the target selection change, or even just the swing
mechanics change based upon his relationship with what's happening internally. You know, there's one term I will introduce feel list is called meta cognitive worry. Okay, you don't need to remember it, but it's interesting, right, metacognition. A cognition is a thought and what we attend to. So it's you know, a metacognition is the judgment of that. I'll make it really simple. There's anxiety or worry, and then there's the
worry that I'm worried. Right, So you a bit nervous before your first T shirt or something, and then you're walking up to the tee going oh no, oh, come on, come down. Don't you come on, don't be nervous, Come on that chatter. There is metacognition. It's the worry that you're nervous, which means if you have somehow bored into a story that being nervous is a problem, and you're now trying to get rid of those nerves, which you'll
fail at, you've just set your metacognitions on fire. So that's what panic is in sport or you know, losing focus or choking or whatever. It's not actually being nervous. It's trying to get rid of your nerves and failing and then freaking out that you're failing at doing something you deeply believe. You need to change or you can't play golf. So for anybody listening today, it's learn this. You can play your best golf whilst being so nervous if you don't worry that you're nervous. Just let it
be there. And if I just let it be there, it's like music in the background. Just let it be there and bring my attention back to the shot, the target, and commit to that swing. Then all of a sudden you change your story or your relationship to your nerves. A lot of my clients after time say oh, Jonah, well this works great. I don't get nervous anymore. I said, really, you still do tell me about that? So how was
your breakfast this morning? Oh yeah, I didn't really want to eat my breakfast and you sleep, Oh yeah, it was a bit light. And how many times you get the toilet this morning? Yep? A few extra times. And you know, all of a sudden, they're like, oh, what I mean is I don't care that I get nervous anymore? I say, ah, isn't that freeing?
Can you turn your brain off? We always say, I mean, I do that, and I'm sure it's all bullshit because I'm saying a player, I'll say that sometimes. But you'll have players that I work with or we all work with, that you know that they're so in their own head, and I'll always say, listen, just try and turn your brain off today and just focus on hitting golf shots.
Is it possible on the golf course and in sport to turn that constant chatter part of your brain off and perform and do great athletes and performers actually do that? Or is that just a made up bullshit phrase that you throw out.
It's the second part of your advice, that's actually what is the most important. You said, turn your brain off, bracket. You can't do that, that's neu scientifically impossible. But you said, and focus on your golf shot. So what we want to do is we want to shift our attention if I'm focusing on my thinking. So let's first start. Why do we overthink in life and particularly in fine motor controls sports like golf, where you've got lots of time
between shots, right? Is that the benefit of having this evolved frontal lobe is we're really good at thinking, planning, you know, time traveling to what's next in the future, and it's serving us. So well, we're building rockets and sending them to Mars like this. You know, we're eating lots of protein. Our frontal lobe is growing, we're getting smarter and smarter, but we're also getting really good at
worrying and thinking and analyzing and ruminating and all this stuff. Right, So what we have to learn to do is be really intentional with our thinking and focus. So it's about shifting to something of importance. Now, if I can learn that I can't actually think this golf ball into the air, I can't. I can't think a low golf score, right, It's by what I do with my hands and my feet and this club face. So therefore, let go of my attempts to think the golf course, you know, Rather,
what do I need to do here? Back to those behaviors? Right? So for me, yep, I'm getting caught up in overthinking and trying to solve the future through why because I'm anxious and I don't want to fail and I want to succeed. Make room for that and come back to the here and now about my behavior executions, you know. So I always say it's three things. It's not about reducing stress and pressure. It's about building capacity to embrace more.
Physical trainers got this a long time ago, right, physiotherapists and sports trainers got this way before psychology. What happened when with a football player when they tear a calf, you know, twenty five years ago, certainly in Australia, you'd come off the field, they'd put an ice pack on.
It, rub some dirt on it and get back out.
Well they'd restue, Right, let's just rest you for a few weeks and you'd get better and you'd run back out there and a few weeks later you'd tear it again. They say, we didn't restue long enough, so they'd make your rest for six weeks, and then you'd go out and tear your calf again, and you'd have a terrible season and ripen. More recently, thankfully, due to good sports science, they went, the reason you're tearing your calf is your
calves aren't strong enough. So within two weeks of doing a calf tair, you're in the gym now doing weights because they're saying, if you want to be a football player, your calf needs to be needs to be able to handle the load of football, and right now your calves can't handle the load of football. Well, psychologically it's the same. We need to build our athletes up so they can handle the load of professional golf. Not calm down, deep breathe, go to a happy place, be more calm and confident.
What they're playing for millions and dollars in front of the world, doing something that's really hard against a bunch of other guys who are really good. You've got to actually build your capacity for embracing more so, I always using a metaphor of like a cup and a jug, and I say, if this cup's you, and the water as I'm pouring into the cup is your stress. And as it's going up, you know you're on the cut line. Oh you made it. You then shot really low. You're
in the final group. Oh they're doing COVID swabs. You might get ruled out with COVID. Your dog just died, you know. Jonah, I'm about to overflow. I need to calm down. I'm stressed out. I say, have it. Don't be the cup, habit you be the picture, be the jug, pour the water back in the jug. And look, there's a whole bunch of room for more. Humans can do so much more than we give credit. It's just we get so focused on wanting to reduce our stress and pressure.
So we've got to build our capacity to embrace more. Second one, it's not about positive thinking. It's about taking positive action no matter what you think. We're obsessed with positive thinking. The ball doesn't give a shit what you're thinking, doesn't know. So it's not about reducing stress and pressure. It's about embracing the capacity for more. It's not about positive thinking. It's about taking positive action no matter what you feel. And It's not how hard something is, it's
how important something is. And so when I work with athletes, it's okay, Jonah, I'm hiring you because I'm getting too nervous, I get too negative, I get too angry, I get too stressed out. I say, well, you've come to the wrong guy. I'm not going to get rid of any of that because you're human, because you can't. I'm going to increase your ability for sitting with that and not changing club head speed or dcelling or you know, leaving punch short. Let's make sure we're behaviorally consistent.
One of the things I think people struggle with is the time part of golf. There's so much time. I mean, if you think about it's seventy two. I mean, if you shoot even par, we really need you to be focusing for very short bursts of time, right, because it's not.
And the reason why I wanted to bring this up is I thought we were talking about your work with race car drivers and stuff, and I found it fascinating that you said that there are points during Formula one as an example, there's so much that goes into every corner. They're constantly having to change the core there's the forces
on their body, there's the engineers in their ears. And you said that in the long straits, where the car is going the fastest is where you have the reset for the driver slash athlete, and you say to the engineers, that's his time, whether that's five, ten, fifteen seconds, whatever
is that's the reset. You told me that you've got drivers doing relaxing their shoulders, taking a drip of water, stretching the neck out, when the car is going the fastest, when it is arguably the most dangerous, that's the reset. That resonated with me because I'm thinking golfers have so much time in the course of a competitive round of
golf in between shots. What are some tools. Obviously they're generalization and generic, but what are some things that golfers can be doing, specifically competitive golfers in between shots to help them. I remember Brooks when he won his first US Open. He had a shot at Aaron Hills, was on the back nine. It was a really difficult shot. He was right in the mix. I think he was
like tied for the lead. It was a back right pin and the announcers were saying, this is really really dangerous because he missed it this way and he hit a really really great shot and he and Ricky walking up to it were in a pretty big conversation and we flew When we were flying up later that night, I said, where were you guys talking about? And he was like, we were actually talking about where we were going to stay in Thailand and we were planning a
trip to go to Thailand. I'm thinking, where the hell's that coming from?
Right?
But to me, that's an example of taking pressure off by taking yourself out of the situation you're in.
Yeah. Sure, so love that you recognize that. You know, the worst thing golfers do is they try to stay switched on for the round of golf. And then that was run out of petrol, right, run out of field.
Because mentally it just gets.
Literally and I see that, you know in early careers where people will hit a shot tracking it, they're watching it, they see where it lands, and they're just thinking about either the next shot or whatever it is, or the previous shot, the swing mechanics, the ball flight, that they're just not giving their brain a chance to just decompress and switch off. So yeah, definitely, one trick is to know that once you've hit that shot and you've seen
where you know where it lands. It's let's solve that puzzle when we get to it.
And it's a new puzzle, right, Every shot that you have is not part of a puzzle. No, every part of every shot you're going to have is another puzzle that you've got to solve. Because I do that when I play. You know, I have so much thoughts in my head. I have so much information that I go up and I play golf and if one thing doesn't work, I'm trying another technique. So every shot you hit is its own individual puzzle that you're trying to solve.
So I always say I like, you know, depending on the distance of the hole, but it's like, Okay, you're going to think about that T shot because you've just hit it. So tune into that T shot if there's something of meaning to actually learn from it, So hit the T shot you might take, give yourself, you know, thirty yards to actually think a bit about what you're doing and was that relevant to what you and your coach have been working on. You're allowed to have some
swing thoughts and review what you just did. Then it's literally glove off when that glove comes off metaphorically or physically. It's now, let's talk about the trip to Thailand, the restaurant, the you know, the latest video, you movie, you've seen whatever, right, So you know, be courageous enough now use that word courageous enough to switch off. Our anxious brain doesn't want to stop thinking. Think back to when you're in high school or college and you hadn't studied for that exam.
If you you know, like a lot of people, and you're doing that cram session, right, you're sitting out the front of the lecture hall about to go in, and what you're doing is just looping it in your head. You know, you're not properssed, right, and so you don't want to forget it. So you're having to keep looping, keep looping, keep looping through your anxiety. So that's what we do when we're on the golf course. If we're anxious, we think that if I switch off, I'm gonna disconnect
from my golf swing. I'm gonna you know, and it's just a lie. It's just anxiety talking, right, It's trying to trap you. So it takes courage to actually say walk off the tea box glove off, and now let's talk a bit about the Netflix series I've been watching or what have you, and allow myself to disconnect from whatever. And then okay, now we're forty yards out. Hey, let's talk a bit about the wind. Let's talk a bit about what is switching back on as you're getting into
the ball and solving the puzzle. So now the other one is learning to reset and connect to something in the present, which is what I loved.
You said that you should feel like Cam does.
So well, yeah, well he just does whatever. Yeah he does, he does do it. Well. Now there's some simple, low hanging fruit, right Like, it's mindfulness. It's about bringing your attention into the present and being connected to whatever that is. So it's not about calming down, it's about being in the present. There's a big difference people think calming down, breathe in, breathe out, calm down, get rid of the nerves. If I'm breathing in and trying to get rid of
my nerves, what am I then saying about nerves. I'm saying they're bad. I'm saying I need to get rid of them, which will work as I walk off the t box. But then when there's three holes to play, and I'm doing that breath work and I can't get rid of the nerves. What now happens to my focus? I'm trying to get rid of them. I'm trying to get rid of them. I'm trying to get rid of them.
Now I'm having that metacognitive worry. I've lost my focus. So, really, big little hack for golfers out there, don't try to breathe away your nerves because you're feeding a story that nerves are bad. Rather breathe to pay attention. So you might breathe in for four seconds, hold for seven seconds, breathe out for eight. It's really hard breath to do as you're walking into three four, hold for seven, out for eight. So why do I give somebody a really hard breath cycle to do?
It?
Hijacks their attention.
It's horrid, it's hard. It's a task.
They don't have to succeed. Yeah, they can be God, Yeah, Jonah, that was d I couldn't go hey, so what were you doing for three or four breath cycles? I was just getting annoyed at you because I was. And then I was focusing on the breath even more because I really wanted to do it, and okay, what weren't you thinking about? Ah, the fact that I pushed that shot
a little bit right. Okay, so you know, have a sip of your drink bottle, but don't just drink water, feel the cold water go down your throat until you lose where it's gone. To have another sip and see if you can track it a bit further. They're just little simple hacks of bringing your attention to something else, which, yeah,
my drivers will do that in a race car. It's more like one point four seconds as altho they got down the back straight when they're doing three nd and seventy columbs it out, it seems like, but you know that is their time is to disconnect and just being to the present before they go into APEX one. But you know, golf gives you plenty of time for that. So instead of going, oh, golf so hard, because you can get really caught up in overthinking, well only if
you choose to. You can also choose to have some really great conversations with your caddy or your golf partners and well daydream and fantasize about something cool that you're interested in it, right, Like you can be choiceful where you bring your attention to it.
We saw my dad was working with the Greg Norman when he had the epic collapse at the at the Masters, and Greg was always big into visualization, and I think that was something that was a massive strength for Greg. You would track his eyes the way you would see it, and he didn't. He always said that he didn't. He didn't pull the trigger until he had visualized the shot.
And you talking about that on Sunday that day when everything was unraveling, he was taking massive amount of time and afterwards he told my dad, I couldn't see the shot. I kept going to visualizing what the shot was, which had served him well so long and so many times in his career, and he just was standing there kind of hitting control all reset delete. He couldn't see a shot. And that goes to what you said, you're trying to breathe it away and you're actually making it worse.
Correct. Yeah, So we know that visualization is very good for modal learning. It's not good for recreating performance states because it never matches reality. So you know, lots of countries have tried it. You know, the Chinese try to the Olympics and others have tried to recreate. What we learn is if we do visualization to make it really, really sensory and real, it never matches reality. And then you have that juxtaposition of oh, hang on, this isn't
what I've prepared for. Whereas if you're just doing a swing thought and visualizing it, that is really good for motor development. So visualization is great for connecting to swing patterns and embedding modor learning. It's not good for recreating what it's like to walk down the final fair way at the Masters or something, because you won't ever and you don't need to. You don't need to recreate that.
But yeah, if I'm getting tangled in my nerves and I don't like them, and I'm trying to get rid of them and I'm failing at getting rid of them, then you won't be able to visualize because your prefrontal frontal cortex is completely hijacked by all that metacognitive worrying. Yeah.
Lastly, one of the metaphors and one of the cliches of golf is the longest walk in golf is from the driving range to the first t What do you see is the disconnect between what players are doing in practice which they can perform in practice, and then the shift and the change because I have so many players say, listen, my range sessions are great, I hit it great on the range, and then when I go play it feels
like something. I have my own thoughts and but I'd love to get your input on what you think is the difference in how players can access what they do in practice on the golf course when the game has been played.
Yeah. Sure. Two things to that question. One is we know that that term the warp from the driving range to the first t that's more about anticipatory anxiety. So we know that the spiciest or the most challenging anxiety, he is the anticipatory anxiety, and once you actually start playing, it normally abates a little bit, right. So that's just that you know, the build up of uncertainty of how we're going to play. But to your question, really around the transfer and it's I see.
I had never heard that term, by the way, until doctor Gregor Is from TPI. We were talking about a player that was great on the range stuff, and he's like, it's not a technique issue, it's a transfer problem. You're trying to transfer what there was a girl I taught a junior. She played a practice round a big tournament down in Florida, you know, decent player, and she shot you know, one two over in the practice round, and then in the tournament shot almost ninety and the parent
said she needs more practice. I'm like, if she needed more practice, she shoot ninety in the practice correct?
Correct? So what do I see as a you know, like you said, as an external person. I mean, I've worked in pro golf eighteen years, but I'm still not a golf person. I'm a sports psychologist generalist. There is that when a lot of my clients early on are on the range, I see them very internally focused, and
even their coach might even be promoting that inadvertently. So swing thoughts and queueing and using aids and all those things which are very good at the right time, but they're they're still taking your client to an intrinsic place of focus. And then they walk onto the golf course
and where do they focus out there? They're seeing a narrow target, they're seeing a flight of shape, they're they're seeing all the problems, and they're seeing threat threat, threat, threat, you know, and they're not you know, where they were on the range. So do I think we need to well, you need to align it. Some people are going to be more intrinsic golfers. We know that some people are very extrinsic, and that's and both can be very very good.
So there's no real right or wrong per se. But typically in the game of golf, you're still got to be out there solving that problem. So I think it's more about actually how we do train on the rain and making sure it's matching golf. Otherwise I see quite a difference between the two. Like when I see a bucket of balls, I say, no, there's sixty shots in there. Don't see that as sixty balls. There's sixty shots, and let's make sure every single, every single one of those
balls is a shot. Therefore it must have a target, must have a flop, you know, must have intent on what you're to correct, and therefore my swing thought needs to reflect hitting that shot, which then means when I then walk on to the first tee, I'm replicating the same cognitive sort of systems and processes in terms of what am I focusing on and what am I thinking of? So that's the word cognition. And cognition means what am I focusing on and what am I thinking? And my
job is to make sure that it's relatively aligned. Now there's a time and a place to go really intrinsic and get some technical work done. But then it's like, now let's bring the golfer back out into normality of what they have to do on the golf course.
And I always say to players, I think so much of golf. People think they can prayctice away all the issues. And I always say to players, listen, it's a game. That's why they give you a scorecard and they tell you what the rules of the game are. It's not gymnastics, not figure skating. It's not dressage to where there is a sequence of motions and you get extra points for trying something. You know, figure skating, it's all subjective. Golf isn't subjective, right, And I think we practice it as
if it's set in stone that it is repetition. And golf is one hundred percent random, right, The entire sport is random, but people practice it in a way I think that is it's almost backwards.
It kills me, It kills me, which is back to that metaphor, you know, how can you survive in the jungle if you trained in the zoo. And I look and I see a whole bunch of people sitting on firstly flat around ye perfect tea box grass wanting perfect.
And prux grass.
And then I look at the statistics and I say, I wonder how many shots today cam is going to have where the ball is in a neutral position, you know, on a flat fairway with perfect grain in like that I mean, and I mean that seriously, like, actually, reverse engineer, how many shots of golf is the ball and you
on flat level ground? Firstly, like, I don't know the golf exp not me, but I assume there wouldn't be many, Like I don't, like, it's only a handful, right, Normally there's some slope side slope, down slope, up slope, you know, fairways and red even if they're really good, they're still going to have a fair few out rough like And yet I look at the how many reps reflect that? Now, as an outside looking at that sport, I go, Every other sport in the world generally trains for the reality
of tournament play. Golf does it pretty poorly?
Yeah, I mean, I always think as instructors. Historically, we teach potting backwards. We teach technique first, right, and it's all technique from three to five feet, and you do kind of some cursor y long putts to get the speed of the greens, all those bullshit cliches. Yeah, and the last one get the speed of the greens. Most people will go out and have thirty three potts, they'll put poorly, they'll three put a lot from long distance. And what do they do? They immediately go back to
stroke mechanics from three feet, whereas they don't. I've actually started with beginning golfers and not super great putters. Hey, let's put thirty footers, wait, twenty five footers, forty footers, and work backwards. Start there, then work the mechanics. And if you're missing the ball from thirty feet and the ball's going you're aiming at a target and you're slicing it with a putter because you have no face control
or no ability to control the strike. Yeah, then we get over and we work on some basic stroke mechanics of putting.
Work cam and I focus intimately on speed, only on speed basically.
And told me once if your pots always have the right speed, how far away from the hall or is the ball ever really going to be?
And I love what you said. I'm huge on waking the brain up with long lag puts. Give it long distance and be wrong. That's okay, that's waking your brain up to the speed of the green. But if you're hitting a three footer, two things go wrong. One is if you're putting out a hole. What happens with most of those three foot puts They go in right, but you can hit that with easily a thirty to forty percent variants in speed, but your brain isn't picking up on that. It's just seeing it go in for a
short distance. So you think you're putting well, and I'm watching going, oh, my goodness, you're putting horrendously because you haven't woken up your speed yet. And then they go come off around and go, oh, my speed was really off to date, And I'm like, I saw your warm up putting routine and you didn't actually register speed. So yeah, elongate long parts, lag parts duel that get your speed
tuned in. Then if path needs sorting all that stuff, and then do your shorter stuff, because then you should be seeing it going actually like discs and things because it tells you, you know, you blast it through that disc on the grain and you oh wow, I had I have it that too far. So I'm very cautious of golfers using short parts apt holes early on in their warm up because I think you can trick your brain doing.
A fantastic I mean, I've done a lot of podcasts, you know, over the last two years, and I've got to say that this is probably one that I've enjoyed the most, just getting to pick your brain. And you know, I had a Grant on the podcast recently and you can see the way that he thinks about the work that you guys do with Cam is very similar to the way you talk. So hopefully we're going to be back. I mean, I know we are next year, are going to be back down in the Australia and I have
one will get you back on. Thank you so so much for talking to me.
Thanks your tom mate, appreciate it.
So that was Joana Oliver and he is definitely someone whose brain I'm going to pick every chance I get an opportunity, because I got a lot out of that and hopefully you did as well, because he has some fantastic stuff and I don't think it's a shock as to why the working in grant Field have done with cam Smith have turned him into one of the best players in the game of golf today. It is Major championship week the PGA Okill Country Club. It's a cool place for me to come back to you every year.
My uncle was the head pro, my uncle Craig, he was the head pro here for over forty years. And I think the first time I came here, I want to say it was the eighty nine US Open that Curtis Strange won. He won back to back US Opens in eighty eight he won at the country Club and then came to Okill and won his second. US Open. Is a big, big boy golf course. It is a hard golf course. It's a major championship golf course. The
rough is up. They've done a redesign of the golf course, but there are just you cannot fake it around here. You have to stand up, you have to hit good golf shots. If the wind blows for four days, nobody's gonna break part. That's how hard this golf course is. So I think a lot of the winning score to
be dependent on the weather, the rough is brutal. You have to drive the golf ball in play, and I think if you win here on Sunday and you lift that big giant trophy up, you're going to have played some fantastic golf because there's just no way to fake it around o'kill. It's iconic. It's one of the major championship golf courses. They've been US Opens here, there've been PGA's here, there've been Usam's here, There've been Ryder Cups here.
So you will get this week what everyone expects from a major championship.
Hard.
It will be a true test, and I think we are going to get a fantastic winner. I'm looking forward to it. Second major of the year. Let's get it going. Son of a Butcher comes to you every Wednesday. I want to thank everyone for listening, Rate Review, subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. We will see you next week.