What you are thinking, what shape your mind is in, is what makes the biggest difference of all.
—WILLIE MAYS
Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course: the space between your ears.
—BOBBY JONES
Oftentimes an athlete will go into a performance nosedive. In sports psychology, one means of investigating what happened and why is to retrieve the equivalent of the black box and voice recorder.
I slid the video into the slot and pressed the play button. The major league pitcher seated in my office recognized the figure on the big-screen TV—it was himself. As he stood on the mound and delivered a warm-up pitch, then another, the sights, sounds, feelings, and emotions of that unpleasant day began coming back to him. On the screen, the leadoff batter stepped lightly into the box. Settling in, bat waving back and forth, he turned his eyes toward the figure sixty feet, six inches away.
I then asked the pitcher what he was thinking at that moment, just before the game began.
“I didn’t have very good stuff in warm-ups,” he began. “I was thinking ‘I hope I don’t walk this guy.’”
What else?
As he spoke I almost could hear the dread rising in his voice, like water in a flooding basement. “He’s really quick. If he gets on, he’ll probably take second. Our catcher’s arm’s not that great. If he steals second there’s a good chance they’ll score, and we haven’t been very good coming from behind …”
“Listen to yourself. Listen.”
The pitcher grinned sheepishly. At the time, he hadn’t been aware of his negative thinking. Now he was hearing himself, in his own words, laying out a scenario for defeat. And he hadn’t thrown his first pitch! Is it any wonder he performed poorly?
Then, I asked what he could have been thinking.
The pitcher studied his image on the screen. “I’ve got good control of my fastball…” One positive thought led to another. “Even if I walk him, I can keep the ball down and get the next guy to hit into a double play … Don’t worry about the batter … One pitch at a time … Just focus, relax. Hit the mitt…”
We all have conversations going on inside our heads. I call it self-talk. Every athlete hears two competing voices. One is a negative critic, and the other is a positive coach. Which voice we listen to is a matter of choice.
Golfer Arnold Palmer kept this saying in his locker:
If you think you are beaten, you are
If you think that you dare not, you don’t
If you’d like to win, but you think you can’t,
It’s almost certain you won’t.
If you think you’ll lose, you’ve lost
For out in the world you’ll find
Success begins with a fellow’s will.
It’s all in the state of mind.
Life’s battles don’t always go
To the stronger or faster man;
But sooner or later the man who wins
Is the man who thinks he can.
Like our beliefs and attitudes, our thinking can be a powerful ally. How we think affects how we feel, and how we feel affects how we perform. My job is to help athletes think clearly and use their minds effectively by teaching them to turn their negative critic into a positive coach.
One day I was at Yale Field in Connecticut, visiting the Mariners’ Double A club, the New Haven Ravens. One of the young centerfielders was struggling in the batting cage. “Mack, I’m never going to get this,” he said between cuts. He shook his head. “I don’t have a clue.” His negative critic was hard at work, shouting into his ear with a bullhorn.
“Let me ask you something,” I said. “If Ken Griffey Jr. thought like that, how good a batter do you think he would be?”
The question stopped the kid.
He knew that if Griffey thought the way the minor leaguer did, the Mariners’ slugger wouldn’t perform well either. The kid’s thinking was hurting him more than his swing. He needed to change his thinking, or at least give his mind a rest. Ted Williams offered some sage advice: “If you don’t think too good, then don’t think too much.”
Just as we have irrational and unrealistic beliefs, we all are guilty of distorted and dysfunctional thinking. Atlanta Braves pitcher Tom Glavine said, “I went through the ‘Don’t do this’ syndrome at certain times in my career when facing certain batters. I told myself not to hang a curve ball. Sure enough, I did. Now I focus on ‘Do this.’ It’s a significant difference.”
I worked with a professional golfer who listened to his negative critic. Like the pitcher, he watched himself on video. What was he thinking on this shot? How about the next? After listening to his negative narrative, I asked who would be a positive coach for him. He said Ken Venturi. As we returned to the video I asked what Venturi would tell him.
“He would say I’m good enough to do this … I can hit this shot … Just trust my swing …”
Tiger Woods has a positive coach with him at all times. During the last round of the 1999 PGA Championship he faced an eight-foot par putt on the 17th hole. He had to make it to keep the lead. Sergio Garcia was one shot back. As Tiger stood over the ball, he said he heard a familiar voice. It was the soft voice of the man who taught him to play golf. That man wasn’t in the gallery. He was several miles away, in a hotel room, watching the tournament on TV. “Trust your stroke,” the voice whispered. “Trust your stroke.”
Tiger heard and trusted. The putt fell. At the victory party that night, Earl Woods’s son said, “I heard you, Pop.”
Which voice do you hear? Which is louder, the negative critic or the positive coach? You can choose to listen to the voice that offers and reinforces positive thought. It has been said that thoughts become words. Words become actions. Actions become habits. Habits become character. Character becomes your destiny.
Mental training teaches you to think clearly and use your mind effectively. Just the way you learn not to swing at bad pitches, you must learn not to chase bad thoughts. Learn to turn your negative critic into a positive coach.