Emotionalizing the Good and Factualizing the Bad
EMOTIONALIZING THE GOOD AND ‘FACTUALIZING’ THE BAD
by Dr. T. J. Tomasi
Keiser University College of Golf Senior Faculty and Director of Research
Memories are our past experience captured in knowledge units that find a home in special docking receptors located in the brain. The more receptors the experience commands, the stronger and more resilient the memory. The question is how do you tag an experience as save-worthy; i.e., how do you control what’s stored in your brain? The answer is by emotionalizing what you want to remember so that in response to the emotion, your brain bathes the memory in ‘recall chemicals.’ For example, due to these chemicals, if you are like most Americans, you are not likely to ever forget where you were on Sept. 11, 2001 — it’s permanently docked in your memory receptors. However, if an experience is not marked for permanence, neural housekeeping erases the receptors to clear space for new memories – you forget.
Taking Control of the Mental Side of Your Golf
The takeaway here is that there is a tagging process that you should make part of your swing routine for every shot: You must treat the good and the bad outcomes differently, sending the former to permanent memory and the latter to a temporary holding pen, where they are labeled not as a failure but simply as fact. This is called short-term memory, and it will hold golf facts like bad swings and faulty decision making only long enough to target the problem during your next practice. If you use this tagging system as part of your shot routine, failure becomes fertilizer – instead of your rounds of golf being packed with self-defeating failure, they are packed with information about how you can get better.
Note: I remember rushing to the range at the Canadian Open years ago to watch Jack Nicklaus practice after his round. There was an instant crowd of more than two hundred that materialized as he strode through the ropes to a pile of balls on the practice range. As we jockeyed for position, he took out a four iron and struck four shots, then, as abruptly as he arrived, he left the range — much to the disappointment of us all. I talked to his caddy later, and he told me that Nicklaus often did this when he missed a shot during the round – in this case, it took him four balls to create a positive memory (what I call a Track of Excellence). The ‘fact’ was that he hit a bad four-iron during the round; the intervention was a practice protocol structured by that fact. The Track of Excellence (ToE) was laid down, or reignited, by his hitting four perfect four-irons after the round. The emotionalized Track of Failure stored as a fact that came with the missed four-iron was wiped away, leaving the mental slate clean for the next round. Nothing was carried forward to future rounds but ToEs.
Takeaway 1: To be the best you can be, you must (a) tag the good that you do by giving yourself your own personalized ‘YEAH’ – a short burst of emotion, and (b) tag failure as helpful information that will direct your progress. You should use a routine before every shot that helps emotionalize the good swings for permanent retention while treating the bad as info about a problem to be fixed at the next practice session. Strict adherence to this good/bad tagging process allows you to stockpile “tracks of excellence” while minimizing “tracks of failure.” Failure is a heavy weight to carry with you, while success is no burden at all. Ask a player to describe their best round ever, and they say, ‘It was sooooooo easy.’ The memories of good shots are strong when you emotionalize the results, thereby creating lots of receptor space to store the good swing outcomes. By conscious intervention, you have made warehousing your successes a priority. You deal with bad outcomes as facts so the engrams of the bad are weak with only a few receptors allotted to them — and these will be swept clean after the next practice session has made them irrelevant.
Takeaway 2: Remember the tagging process will run out of control on its own if you let it. Watch most golfers whose tagger has run on its own, and you’ll see that they do it just the opposite; i.e., they emotionalize the bad by getting mad/disheartened, etc., and they treat the good outcomes as facts that just are – After hitting a good shot they mutter to themselves “That’s more like it given all my effort!”
Takeaway 3: Satisfaction is the weakest of all emotions when used as a tagger. Either get hot-happy or hot-mad, but nobody does hot-satisfied well.
Take Back Control
To counter this anti-good-golf tagging process, you must take control of your brain by using a swing routine specially designed to ensure a steady buildup of good golf memories. In your new routine, every shot has either a good outcome that subsequently becomes a part of your performance history or a bad outcome that guides your near-term practice routine. Either way, by knowing how to run your own brain, you win.
If you’d like to study with Dr. Tomasi and other PGA Master Professionals, contact The College of Golf today.
