EP6. Why Acceptance Is The Greatest Skill Above All Others

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Welcome to the Mind Caddie podcast, the show that helps you improve your golf by improving the way you think all of the ideas you hear in this podcast have been used by major champions and golfers at all levels and brought to you by the coach who taught them, Karl Morris. We bring you some of the most popular lessons found in the Mind Caddie app, as well as discussions with professional and amateur golfers about how they use their mental game to shoot better scores. So you can learn from others and apply to your own game. I'm Ben, the co founder of Mind Caddie. Along with Karl Morris, who has spent the past 30 years working with golfers on their mental games. If you want to learn more, you can download the Mind Caddie app from the app store and access over a hundred audio lessons as well as scorecards and guided programs. Search Mind Caddie on the App Store today. If I were to pick one single quality that above any other would make the biggest difference to your game, to your performance, to perhaps even your life in general. It would be the principle of acceptance. Now, before we go into acceptance from a golfing perspective, it's important to understand that what we're not talking about is resignation. Resignation is, is where you give up on something where there is, there is no hope of a future outcome, a future desired outcome. Acceptance very, very definitely isn't that. But one thing that I do know for certain is that if you can build in acceptance, of literally any outcome of a golf shot. It is the ultimate freedom. It's the ultimate freedom from the, the, the, the tyranny of desiring. Expecting, wanting the result of a golf shot to be exactly as you would like it to be. Also, the pressure of your ego being on the line for the destination of a golf shot to determine your value as a, as a human being, which I know from personal experience is a very, very, very, very vulnerable place to be. If you look at many of the strange, weird and wonderful movements that we see on the golf course, especially in putting, where you see that many people will hit a putt, and it's almost like there's an electric shock going off in their body. I'm absolutely convinced that at the heart of that, at the root of it, lies an unwillingness to accept outcomes. We become so... Emotionally attached to a golf ball doing what we would like it to do for it to be a reasonable shot for it to be a shot that doesn't dent our ego in any way that a shot that inflates our ego. In fact, yet paradoxically, if we can build in a full acceptance of the full rainbow of outcomes that are possible. If you think about it from any, any given shot that you hit, you could hit it left, you could hit it right, it could go too high, it could go too low, you could top the shot, you could miss the shot, there's a whole bunch of outcomes. That even as we go up the levels of the game, nobody is immune. And I mean, literally, nobody is immune from really, really poor shots. I think one of the things that we, we don't realize as a result of the way that the game is broadcast to us. We tend to forget that when we see golf on TV. We're watching the absolute best golfers on the planet. These guys who literally don't do anything else other than play golf every single day, having the best week of their year. We're seeing the best of the best at their best. So we tend not to see the guys missing the cut. We tend not to see some, some of the really bad shots that even the best players hit. I've been at many, many tournaments. And one of the things that always surprises me, not, not surprising me, I've seen it for too long now is how poor some of the shots can be because we're human, there is so much going on in the, the, the movement of a golf club through space and a club traveling well over a hundred miles an hour colliding with the golf ball for a split moment in time for that collision to be entirely predictable. Yet, when we can fully embrace acceptance, when you can fully, um, be okay and deal with any possible outcome, the sense of freedom is truly, truly amazing. It is like literally being released from prison. The prison that we're all in is the prison, the prison of expected results, expected outcomes. That somewhere in our golfing history we go from playing the game from the purest of reasons to what will this shot mean for me in the future. And that may mean a handicap reduction, it may, it might mean winning money on a European tour, a PGA tour, it might mean something to do with selection in the future. I call it playing this for that, where we're playing this shot for something that will happen at some point in a perceived future. As a suggestion with acceptance, this is something that can be part of your training as well is to, to, to go to the, um, training area and hit a number of shots and on a scale of zero to 10, give yourself a mark for how much you're willing to accept the outcome of the shot before you step into it from zero being no acceptance to 10 being complete acceptance. And you'll know instinctively. When you have a 10, because you can literally go in there and sense of freedom as your body just orientates itself through space in the way that it knows best, but without the ego getting involved with an attachment to an outcome. And, you know, when we think of this in life in general, so many of the problems that we have, so many of the issues that we have in life is a resistance to outcome. We don't want the economy to, to fail. We don't want the house price to go down. We want to get a certain job. We want to have a certain relationship. We, as human beings, tend to resist outcomes. And it doesn't mean to say, as I mentioned at the beginning, it doesn't mean to say that you shouldn't aim to play good shots. It doesn't mean to say that you shouldn't have the intention of being successful in your career. It doesn't mean to say that you shouldn't have the intention of achieving. What you deem to be relevant or important to you. But I think the paradox kicks in so effectively when we fully embrace the concept of acceptance. You accept things wholly, 100% as they are. I'm a golfing perspective. If you're capable of accepting any outcome, any particular shot, you're then free to move the golf club as efficiently as possible. But you're also free then to move on to the next opportunity. A lack of acceptance tends to cloud our ability to create the next shot in front of us. So it is counterintuitive this, but it is such a valuable idea. It's against the grain of many of the pop psychology ideas of just visualize yourself doing the Achieving great things, just visualize the best shot that you can possibly hit. Now, all of those things have some value, but if they are not underpinned with a willingness to accept things as they are, with a willingness to accept that the putt may go left, it may go right, it may be short, it may be long, when you are a hundred percent prepared to accept any of those outcomes, if you're prepared to deal with missing, then you can actually hold the putt. Because you can have a real clarity of intention. So it's an intention before the shot and an acceptance after the shot that creates probably the ultimate conditions for your ability to shine through and your body to organize itself in the best possible way. So developing acceptance on the golf course is a truly liberating concept, not just for this individual shot. But for this individual round, this individual tournament, and then to the bigger picture of acceptance of life in general.