#106 - Dr. Gio Valiante - Mastery vs Ego: The Psychology Of Elite Performance

Dr. Gio Valiante is a renowned performance psychologist behind dozens of PGA Tour wins and has worked with golfers like Jack Nicklaus and Justin Rose. He breaks down the psychology behind elite performance, from the difference between a mastery orientation and an ego-driven mindset to why fear of embarrassment quietly sabotages performance. We explore how confidence is built, why success can secretly make you miserable, and how detaching from outcomes unlocks freedom. The throughline: fall in love with the process, pick precise targets, and make fearless swings—in golf and in life.

Timestamps:
00:00 Being A Student
02:54 Social Cognitive Theory 
05:37 Bringing SCT To The Sports World
07:03 Writing 'Mastery vs. Ego In Golf'
10:12 5 Pillars Of Success - Focus On Differentiation 
19:16 Transitioning From Theory To Application
21:15 What You Can & Cannot Change About Yourself
22:55 Focusing On Asking Questions Rather Than Telling Answers
27:11 Recalibrating Your Relationship With Fear
34:39 Enjoying The Moment vs. Focusing On Your Routine
37:48 Detaching From The Result & How Dr. Valiante Does This
40:43 How Spirituality Impacts Performance
45:13 Make Fearless Swings At Precise Targets
47:21 Learn More About Dr. Gio Valiante 

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Transcript

Dr. Gio Valiante is a renowned performance psychologist behind dozens of PGA Tour wins and has worked with golfers like Jack Nicklaus and Justin Rose. He breaks down the psychology behind elite performance, from the difference between a mastery orientation and an ego-driven mindset to why fear of embarrassment quietly sabotages performance. We explore how confidence is built, why success can secretly make you miserable, and how detaching from outcomes unlocks freedom. The throughline: fall in love with the process, pick precise targets, and make fearless swings—in golf and in life.

Tim Doyle (00:07.387)

You're the one who's known as the coach, the teacher, the advisor, but I want to put you in the seat of the student to start. What did you learn from working with Frank Pahorius?

gio (00:18.462)

Wow, coming out with the big guns this morning. What did I learn from Dr. Frank Paharis? So Dr. Frank Paharis was my mentor, just for a little backstory. And we met serendipitously, very randomly. It was my first day of classes at the University of Florida. I was looking for my classroom. was looking sort of following a campus map, carrying books with me and...

looking for a map and I tripped and my books went flying all over the floor. And you can imagine there's hundreds of students rushing to get to class and nobody was really interested in stopping and helping me pick up my books and my papers. And then all of a sudden I see these hands sort of, you know, about 10 feet away picking things up and organizing. And when I finally got organized I went over and it was Dr. Paharis. was, and you he was looking at my schedule. He's like, where do you belong? And I said, I don't know.

He looked at it and he said, very famously at this point, said, he said, you must be one of mine. He was my professor. So then we walked to class together and thus began a beautiful friendship. I took three of his courses over the next couple of years. And then I went to Emory University and became his graduate student. Then we became colleagues and co-authors and research partners and lifelong friends, man. So it's a relationship that began with kindness.

And I think that's probably the biggest takeaway. He always emphasized, know, no one knows, no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care. So he had a real capacity for kindness. He had an immeasurable intellect. I don't have that kind of intelligence, but you here's somebody who, when he took the SAT, he got one wrong and it was a mismark. And he did a, he did a four year PhD in two years. And as an undergraduate, if I remember correctly, he had a triple major.

that he also did in two years. So he was a once in a generation intellect, measurable IQ, but also kindness and everything that he did, yeah.

Tim Doyle (02:21.658)

that formal education was concentrated in social cognitive theory. What exactly is that?

gio (02:26.944)

That's right.

So social cognitive theory, have to sort of understand the timeline of psychology. There are different movements that happen in psychology, the movements. So for example, in in sort of the 50s and 60s, it was called behaviorism. And behaviorists basically, they don't care what happens in your own private thoughts or your emotions. They only care with observable behaviors. So the only focus of psychology

is what somebody does. And this is where you got terms like classical conditioning, operant conditioning, where if a child misbehaves or something misbehaves, you punish it. If it does well, you reward it. And they think that all of psychology is a series of reinforcements, punishments and rewards and reinforcements. What happened is after a decade of that, particularly educators in schools say, hey, this is no way to treat children. Like their inner life matters, their thoughts, their feelings, their dreams.

And so after behaviorism came the humanist movement and humanism is exactly what it says. You put the human being at the center of it. And that was really a really good shift. You had psychologists like Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow with the idea of self-actualization and the fullest expression of human talents. But the problem that emerged out of the humanist movement was it got carried away with like this idea of self-esteem.

And then California started a task force on self-esteem and all it became about was do kids like themselves and do people feel good about themselves? And what you ended up with is a generation of kids who were entitled to feeling good about themselves independent of whether they made any contributions or did anything well. So that was the problem with the humanist movement. And then you had what's called depth psychology, the psychoanalyst with Freud and Erickson about the unconscious mind and

gio (04:26.232)

and longing and dream theory. And then what happened finally, thankfully, is Albert Bandura in the mid-80s brought forth a type of psychology that's very common-sensical, just makes sense, social cognitive theory. Essentially states that the development is an interaction between the individual and the environment around them, and that the mediating mechanisms are his or her thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. So it's common sense psychology.

It's pretty quantifiable, pretty measurable, and it can address a very wide variety of issues that people face with the ultimate goal of people functioning at their highest level. here's your psychology history lesson.

Tim Doyle (05:02.992)

How do you take all of that and then think to yourself, this is perfect for the golf world?

gio (05:11.483)

Well, what made social cognitive theory, there's a component of the theory called self-efficacy. And self-efficacy is essentially operationalized confidence. So forever, going back to like Alexander Dumas in the Three Musketeers where he said, I think he said, person who doubts himself might as well enlist in the ranks of his enemies. He makes his failure certain by he himself being the first to be convinced of it. So the idea being,

We've known forever that self-doubt stinks, right? That when you doubt yourself, it's gonna get in the way of your ability to do whatever you're trying to do. Well, the inverse, the opposite of self-doubt is confidence. And we've always known that as well, but the problem with confidence is nobody had ever brought any rigor to it, any scientific rigor. And so self-efficacy is essentially scientifically operationalized confidence. We know the sources of confidence.

We know how to measure it, we know how to improve it, and then we know how to tether that to performance outcomes. So, you know, once I read social cognitive theory and this research on self-efficacy, I said, well, this is perfect for sports. And at the time I was working with some interesting and really good golfers on the PGA Tour. So we started applying social cognitive theory and self-efficacy and the results were immediate, you to the tune of like 50 wins on the PGA Tour. So it was really cool.

Tim Doyle (06:31.672)

launching pad for connecting social cognitive theory to golf within your education, you write a paper mastery versus ego and golf before getting into the events that transpired because of that paper. What exactly was the content within that?

gio (06:42.063)

Yeah

gio (06:52.613)

So, and I ended up writing about this really in both of my books and it's probably the most powerful idea to emerge out of the research that I had done. In fact, Jack Nicholas has commented on it publicly when he was doing interviews. It's a really powerful idea and essentially it's this. If you were to ask an individual, hey, why do you play golf or why do you podcast or why are you a doctor? Why are you a trader? Why are you an investor?

You ask any individual, know, okay, why do do what you do? And as they start to explore the source of their own motivation, reason why they do things, what you come to learn is people tend to buck it into two different kinds of categories. You know, one's called mastery, one's called ego. And a mastery-oriented person is motivated to master the task itself. They get lost in the details.

There's intrinsic motivation. It's for love of the craft or love of learning. And so it's like the act itself is its own reward. Like the challenge, the pursuit, the growth that's imbued in it. That's a mastery orientation. It's the woodworker who can whittle wood all day long and makes these beautiful creations and, you know, doesn't really sell them. It just loves being a craftsman, loves being sort of an artisan or people who bake for the love of baking.

Now, ego orientation is when people's motivation, it's not actually the task or the craft itself. It's what they can get from it. It's like, why are you a doctor? because I want to make a lot of money. Why are you a podcaster? because I want attention. I want follow-up. Why are you a golfer? because I want to win a trophy. It's not about golf itself. It's about the rewards from golf. It's using the vehicle.

as a means to an end, not an end in itself. So mastery versus ego. And what the research started showing is time and again and again and again and again is the best golfers in the world were all mastery golfers. Like they loved the game more than they loved winning. They loved the game itself more than they loved the score. They loved the game itself more than they loved beating another golfer. So for them golf is about golf.

gio (09:10.882)

That's true of Jeff Nicklaus, was true of Ben Hogan, it's true of Tiger Woods, it's true of all, Nick Fowler, all the greats. And then you can like winning and you can like the fame and like the money, but it's really about the game itself. And when you start going into other achievement domains, that was Kobe with basketball, that was MJ with basketball, you start to realize the best of the best all cluster around that mastery orientation. They follow their passion for love of the game.

Tim Doyle (09:40.336)

think that ties really nicely into the five pillars that you believe are essential for success, because it seems like that sense of mastery, that's different. I don't think a lot of people have that or it's easy for the ego to take over. And these five pillars that you believe are essential for success are talent, work ethic, differentiation, being obsessed with the process and compensating for your weaknesses. And when it comes to

gio (10:08.906)

Yeah.

Tim Doyle (10:09.605)

your journey, what I'm most interested about is this concept of differentiation, which basically means the way that you see things because you mentioned Jack Nicklaus, Jack had said, you he felt like you were really the only sports psychologist worth their salt or worth working with.

gio (10:28.393)

Worth a damn. He told me, he said to the media, the only sports psychology I remember is worth a damn, which is high praise from Jack. Yeah.

Tim Doyle (10:34.991)

But what I find so interesting about that, and I think it goes to the mastery component, is that you're not a sports psychologist. This is not what you intended for. At your core, you are a teacher, a professor, an academic. How do you?

gio (10:51.143)

A nerd. At my core, I'm a nerd. Just go ahead and say it, Tim. Let's just call it what it is. I travel, I read books, I take notes in my notebook the way that I did when I was 19 years old. That's all I do. I'm still geeking out the way that I did at night. I was at the University of Florida in the mid-90s when they had great football team. I have a distinct memory of being in the library on a Saturday afternoon with a stack of books about that high. And I could hear the stadium and the crowds like hooray.

And I was like, interesting. I went right back to my books. So yeah

Tim Doyle (11:24.549)

I mean, how do you think that that academic background has really benefited you in these highly competitive arenas?

gio (11:32.766)

So I think I'm a bit of an example of what the research shows, which is when I go give talks, which I tend to do more and more these days, people want to learn. And I have a lot of answers. And the reason I have a lot of answers is because I read a lot of books and a lot of journal articles. But I did all that because I love to read books and solve problems and learn about the world. And so the fact that people are willing to pay me

To the thing I love to do is the great win in life, right? It's the fact that I've always gotten to do the very thing that I love. You know, and I tell you, I learned this early. I tell you what happened was, I was early thirties. I was a college professor at Rollins College. I just had a big article that about me come out Sports Illustrated. My book was the bestseller in the category of sports psychology. I was living the life. had clients on the PJ tour.

Professorship, just life was dialed in I had two jet skis and a house on a lake and just I was living the let a Jeep I'll never forget I was I was out with some friends from college who would come to visit me and They're like one of my friends girlfriends is now his wife said oh, you must be so happy you're killing it I'll never forget that moment. So it's like I'm not that happy It's like shit me and

I have everything I ever thought I wanted in life, not that happy. So therein lies the first crisis of my life. So what did I do? I moved out to Austin, Texas, probably the same apartment you're sitting in right now. I rented an apartment at the corner of Brazos and Fifth and said, I got to figure my life out. Why is it that all the things, I've got money, I've got recognition, I've got a career, I've got all these things.

Why am I not as happy as I should be? And this is the journey of Siddhartha, the Buddha. And what I learned in the reflections out in Austin, now this is when Austin was cool. It's not like the Austin you're living. When I was in Austin, the saying was keep Austin weird. A bunch of hippies and a bunch of writers and musicians and searchers. We poets is what we were, my generation. what I learned is there's really four things that make me happy.

gio (13:56.059)

I love to read books. I love to work out. I love to have interesting conversations with interesting people. And I love to hit golf balls. That's my therapy, is just hitting balls. like, none of that really costs any money. Books, working out, conversations and hitting balls. So I had to go through my own process to realize like, okay, these are the things you love to do. Just, and there's nothing stopping you from doing them. And then you have to have a job and a career. So I obviously had my professorship.

But really the career that I ended up having, which was I think a really big career, was a function of the fact that I had done the work. I had read everything there was to read. So if I'm talking to a Jack Nicklaus or a Steve Cohn or a Sean McDermott or if I ever ran into Tiger Woods or Nick Faldo, I could go toe to toe with them because I had read everything they had read and I had studied them. And so the confidence comes from the fact that I had done the work and I had answers.

to the questions people were asking, so yeah.

Tim Doyle (14:58.117)

So why don't you think you were happy? Did it feel like you were living from ego up until that point in your life?

gio (15:04.471)

Well, it's a natural progression. It happens. So if you engage something from a master orientation, right, because you love to do it, you're going to get better at it. Well, if you get good at something, you start getting recognition for it. But then the natural cycle is the recognition, the reward starts to feel better than the act itself. It's very, very common. know, there's this very famous parable. It's about an old man with a garden and essentially this old man with a house and a garden.

And he starts waking up and each morning he wakes up and his garden is torn up. And day after day, and as he gets up early one day and he goes out and he realizes it's the neighborhood kids. They're playing football and they're using his garden as the end zone. So what the old man does, goes, well, this is too bad. So one morning he says, hey kids, come on over here. And he says, I'm so happy to see you enjoying my yard, my garden. He said, I love that you're.

playing football, he goes, come here everybody. And he gives every kid a dollar. And they're like, what's this for? He's like, just because I'm so happy, just thanks, keep playing football. So day after day, the kids keep coming. Every day they come, gives them a dollar, gives them a dollar. Then after a couple of weeks, the kids run, they play football for a minute, they go, okay. He's like, kids, I'm so sorry, because I don't have any money. He goes, you're still welcome to play. And use my garden as the end zone.

I'm sorry, I don't have any more money for you. So the kids packed up their bags and left and went home. And it illustrates that what happens is when we get rewarded for doing the thing we love to do, all of a sudden it changes our motivation. Like we do it for the money instead of for love of the game. And when that psychological shift happens, when you start doing something for the outcome or for the money, for the recognition,

It correlates very highly with a high misery index. It's what we call the misery index, yeah.

Tim Doyle (17:04.89)

So how do you work your way out of that?

gio (17:08.119)

Well, I think it's important from time to time to just audit your own thinking and be like, hey, know, well, you know, are my motivations still up here? I doing it for the right reasons? In fact, in 2015, when I stopped traveling with the PGA tour and actively working with golfers, was, you know, I marked it actually on my calendar. It was, was a real moment for me. It's like, man, for the first time in 15 years, like I don't, I don't want to be here. I didn't want to be at a PGA. I'd loved for the...

prior 15 years and I couldn't get out of bed fast enough and get to the airport and get to the tournament. But then just the pilot light goes, I started having kids and I wanted to be home more. So my motivation unconsciously had shifted. But I think it's important for everyone from time to time to just say, check your own motivations. Am I doing it for the right reasons? Yeah.

Tim Doyle (17:56.282)

You've said that the biggest evolution you've made in your career is the transition from the theoretical understanding of how something works to the actual application of knowing how to do it. How did you actually make that shift happen?

gio (18:06.57)

Yeah.

gio (18:11.221)

Well, that's a good question because a lot of psychology is just theoretical. It's in the abstract. And there's a field called applied psychology. They don't do much work and it's not a very big field. But it's a pretty well-known, I guess called a dichotomy in the world of academia, like the theory to practice bridge. There's conceptual knowledge to know something and procedural knowledge to know how to do something. And what I realized is when...

when athletes, there was a lot of athletes back in the day, calling me for help, I would talk about theoretically what should happen. But it's like communism. It's a great idea, but terrible in practice. And so it wasn't enough to tell people, hey, you need to be confident, or here's how to, like, I had to actually start working with people to show them how to build their confidence, how to play with confidence, how to react the right way.

And so it was taking these conceptual ideas and tethering them to the tangible things that, so was like a marriage of social cognitive theory and behaviorism. Here's how you do confidence. So it's not just a thought, it's an action. Here's how confident people react to adversity. Here's the self-talk, here's the resilience. Here are the attributions they make. They don't externalize, they don't catastrophize, they don't always go to...

worst case scenario, confident people tend to be optimistic. So let's reinterpret what just happened. So I started living, know, the way that I wanted my athletes to live. know, so not only did it benefit me personally and professionally, but obviously the athletes and the investors that I worked with and we posted a lot of wins. Yeah.

Tim Doyle (19:55.45)

What makes or breaks you feeling like you're able to help someone?

gio (20:04.86)

Poof. So the way we look at it in psychology, is there's a stacking, right? And you have to know what is fixed and what is valuable. In other words, what can I not change about a person and what can I change? So when we look at the fixed traits, like a person's DNA, well, that's you're not changing a DNA. Personality, that's pretty fixed. You're not gonna change a person's personality. Okay, their beliefs.

Depending on how strongly they believe something, you can chisel away at some beliefs and help that. Habits, all right, you can change habits, that type of thing. And then above habits are just sort of thoughts and feelings and decision, right? So it's a stack order. And what I've always found is people try to change something in a person that's not changeable. You're not gonna change a person's personality. And largely, you're not gonna change a lot of the beliefs they have. You can modify some beliefs.

And so the make or break for me is, know, are they presenting me with a set of problems that I can help? And if I can't, I can't. And if I can't, it's like, all right, let's get to work.

Tim Doyle (21:12.965)

Do you feel like you're able to find that delineation pretty quickly or how long does that take you think?

gio (21:18.289)

Yeah, yeah, it's pretty quick. It's pretty just because I'm older now and pattern recognition. I've worked with so many people and I've seen I've seen so much at this point. So the pattern wrecking recognition clicks in pretty quickly and I'm like, can I can work with that. Yeah.

Tim Doyle (21:35.653)

think the sign of a good teacher isn't simply just telling people stuff, but it's facilitating thinking through questions. How much of your work is grounded in asking your clients questions so that they're the ones that are creating the answers for themselves and feel like they're getting there themselves?

gio (21:55.12)

Yeah, no, that's another really, really, really good question. No one's ever asked me that question. You ask good questions, young man. You should write a letter to your high school teachers and tell them they did a good job. They did a really good job. You ask more thoughtful questions than most. Because really what you just did is you nailed a real pivot point in my career. Up to about 2008 or so,

Tim Doyle (22:03.247)

what I do.

gio (22:22.608)

I was doing what I think a lot of sports psychologists are doing, telling people what they should do. Around 2009, I pivoted the playbook. Instead of telling people, they started asking them within the parameters of good psychology. So I would ask, tell me something you learned last week, and I would get them talking. And then I would say, okay, well, how do you apply that to this week? they'll say, we wanted to go from the conceptual to the procedural. Now you know what you did wrong. How do you apply that this week? What do need to do differently this week?

And then I would ask them to convince me that they're grateful. I wanted to elicit gratitude from them. So was these questions I was asking were elucidating, eliciting from people. It was a process of identifying a learning, how to apply the learning to their life, to do something differently, and then making sure we're going forward. It's like, yeah, you don't have to practice. You get to practice. You don't have to do the program. You get to do the program. You don't have to go to work. You get to go to work. You don't have to...

go to your kids play, you get to it. And all of sudden this underlying approach of real gratitude combined with the commitment to learning and improvement spat out. in 2010, I think my golfers won 10 or 11 times between the PGA and LPGA tours. And so this process of asking questions as opposed to telling people what they should do led to, yeah, lot of success.

Tim Doyle (23:50.319)

I guess balancing that out though on the telling side of things, mean, how much of your work is also impressing upon, especially athletes to look at themselves more psychologically on a core human level and not just as a golfer or just as an athlete.

gio (24:10.538)

Yeah, you gotta be careful there because it's very easy to over-psychologize. Right? And I do find that that happens a lot. Here's the reality. Here's the truth. The truth, according to Dr. Geo, insofar as I know anything about the truth. Here's what I think about psychology. I think a lot of times a little psychology goes along.

I think a lot of, not everyone needs a psychologist and when they do, you don't need it forever. It's like any other doctor. If you break your arm, you go to the doctor, he or she fixes it and then when it's healed, you're good, call me when you need me. And I think that should be true of at least sports psychology or performance psychology whose job it is to get someone to perform.

And then really what you want out of your clients is for them to be self-regulating and autonomous and independent. It's like children. You want your clients to be self-sufficient and autonomous. So what I always say is it's my goal to get myself fired. If I do my job, I'm working with someone and we get them to the point that they're self-regulating, they don't need me. And then I can go help the next person. Now, why doesn't that happen?

Just look at human incentives. know, unfortunately people are incentivized to give more psychology, to give more golf lessons, to just, right? And so it's not the ideal model, but in a perfect world, not everyone needs a psychologist. When they do, they don't need it forever. And a little bit goes a very long way.

Tim Doyle (25:50.852)

recalibrating people's relationship with fear, how did that become such a cornerstone of your work?

gio (25:58.027)

Yeah, that's something that emerged out of the research. So I was conducting a study with professional golfers, sort of the first of its kind study. This is in the late 90s. And I was asking the same 15 questions to every golfer. And what ended up happening was the theme of fear kept emerging in their answers. I wasn't asking about fear. I thought, well, this is weird.

This isn't football or boxing. Why are all these professional competitive golfers talking about fear? It's not like you're gonna get hit. There's no injury. But it was like a universal theme that there were golfers running around playing with this underlying anxiety and fear. And it kept coming out. And so come to realize, what are people afraid of? Well, in the world, in and out of golf and in and out of sports, people are afraid of being judged by others and they're afraid of embarrassment.

And that happens on the golf course. So when I wrote the book Fearless Golf, it ended up being published in like five languages because that idea of fear registers so powerfully with people that it just caught fire. It's like, oh, that's me. I'm not, I'm like being fearful. And then, you know, people on Wall Street and out of golf started reading it and reaching out to me. So fear is one of those things. It's what we call the universality.

of the human condition. Everyone has, everyone is wired for fear and it becomes the main source of their suppression. When people don't achieve as much as they should, most of the time it's because they're being bullied by fear. Yeah.

Tim Doyle (27:38.757)

I like how you pull back the layers on that of what it actually means. like, okay, if we start with fear, what's the layer underneath that? Okay, it's a fear of embarrassment and humiliation. And then, okay, what does that exactly mean? And that you say that psychological pain, when it comes to that psychological pain, especially from a performance standpoint, how can that manifest physically?

gio (28:04.473)

Well, what happens is the architecture in the brain in the limbic system. The limbic system is a very old, very archaic part of our brain evolutionarily, and it's a survival mechanism. And what happens is once it detects threat, it essentially pulls the fire alarm. So we think of a fire alarm. If you pull a fire alarm, a series of events happens automatically. An alarm goes off automatically. Sprinklers come on automatically.

Electricity turns off automatically. A signal gets sent to the fire department automatically, right? To sequence. When the amygdala in the limbic system of your brain detects threat, there's a series of automatic reactions that happen. So what happens is starts out psychological and then it becomes physiological. Your body starts to create epinephrine, norepinephrine, cortisol.

your capillaries constrict, your pupils dilate, right? So it's a series of events. It starts out psychological, eventually becomes physiological. Well, for an athlete, they grip the tennis racket tighter or the golf club tighter. Basketball players, they can't extend their muscles because the cortisol is tightening their muscles. So all this psychology manifests physiologically that eventually shows up mechanically and technically. So it's like, why does the mental game matter? Because it shows up in the mechanics.

Tim Doyle (29:32.942)

Do you think it can go even a step further into injuries? And I'm going to bring some personal experience into this. dealt with terrible chronic back pain and it was a mind body approach that really helped me heal. And I'm of the theory, especially when it comes to golfers, that a lot of back injuries or back pains or people who deal with herniated discs, it's not actually getting to what the core of that.

gio (29:48.1)

Yeah.

Tim Doyle (30:03.181)

can be is that psychological pain.

gio (30:06.553)

Yeah, no, the sort of this dualism is sort of mind-body duality is sort of a false duality because so integrated. It's very common that golfers in a slump get injured at a greater pace. Now, why is that? Because what does cortisol do? Cortisol floods your muscles and tightens them. So now if you're trying to force getting into a position but with tighter muscles, you're putting more strain on the soft tissue, on the ligaments. So yeah.

Yeah, the fact that, and then a cough is like, oh, what bad luck, you know, as if things couldn't go any worse, now I'm injured. It's like, I don't know. It's all the stress and all the stress hormones and all the muscle tension that comes from that and you're trying to force mechanics, of course, it's gonna lead to injury. So yeah, very common.

Tim Doyle (30:52.803)

Does winning feel like relief in golf?

gio (30:57.153)

It depends. If you think about it this way, if your motivation is to make money or to make a putt and you do that, you're going to feel relief. It's like if coming from a place of fear. But if you're coming from a place of love and passion and joy, relief is not what you feel. Right? So the reaction to the event is a function of the source motivation, I'm mastery versus ego.

So mastery and ego, you can think of it, that's the first domino in a series of dominoes, of psychological dominoes that fall, that lead to an outcome. And then that outcome leads to a reaction. So that's the book end. Here's the why, here's the reaction. And the reaction loops back around and influences the why.

Tim Doyle (31:45.422)

Yeah, the reason why I asked that is because when watching sports and I feel like I've only witnessed it in golf, know, seeing golfers win and it feels like they just take a massive exhale at the end, like the gut reaction is just take like a massive deep breath.

gio (32:01.76)

Yeah, 100%, very common. We have to understand though, independent of all of that, golf is a stressful game, And as a tournament unfolds, pressure continues to build over the course of four days. And if you happen to be in the lead, right, that pressure is mounting and mounting and mounting. independent of it all, absolutely there's a big exhale at the end of it. Now, one of the things that I've taught

my athletes to do is we have a process by which we offload stress and tension on a recurring basis, literally after every shot. Think of it like a military plane dumping fuel and offloading too much fuel. We do that with stress and tension so that what's happening is as a tournament is unfolding, as most golfers are accumulating more stress, my golfers are decompressing and offloading stress. So theoretically, and then in reality,

we're getting more and more free as the tournament unfolds instead of tighter and tighter. So yeah.

Tim Doyle (33:05.635)

That's gotta be a competitive advantage.

gio (33:07.272)

It's, if you look at the, over the course of a decade, if you looked at the Sunday back nine scoring averages, my guys led that a lot of times, yeah.

Tim Doyle (33:17.891)

That's fascinating. How does that play into balancing, enjoying the moment and the beauty of experience, especially if you're at a tournament like the Masters, with also being focused on like, hey, sticking to my routine and just sticking to my systems.

gio (33:36.359)

Yeah. one of the first questions I had asked as a young, I call it sports psychology, I was doing research in sports psychology, but I asked, I would ask them, said, Hey, are you competitive? And they would all say, yeah, I'm very competitive. And then I asked the next question, who are you competing against? And I would get different answers from different one person. Whoever's in my group, that's my competition. I'm competing against score. I want to break par.

I'm competing against the leaderboard. I'm competing against myself. Everyone has different answers. They're all competitive, but they're competing against different things. And when you don't know who your competition is, you start playing the wrong game. So if I'm competing, if you're in my group and I think that I'm competing against you, what happens, Tim, is all of a sudden I'm attaching my confidence to how you play. And I have no control over how you play. So all of a sudden I have no control over my confidence. So when you attach your confidence,

something over which you have no control, you by definition have no control of your confidence. So if my confidence is attached to beating you and I have no control over how you're gonna play, well, there goes my confidence. I have no control over score. There goes my confidence, the field. And so what I would teach golfers how to do is to get lost in the process of playing a golf course itself. That if you always play the golf course, you can control the process you've actually, all of a sudden.

That was a really helpful psychological shift. The equivalent in the NFL you'll often see is a quarterback. If another team's quarterback is a marquee quarterback, they try harder. Because the way that the media frames it, it's like, Josh Allen versus Patrick Mahomes. When you realize that they're never on the field at the same time. Josh Allen can't influence what Patrick Mahomes says or doesn't. So Josh Allen should be thinking of the other team's defensive coordinator and executing the playbook.

The equivalent for a golfer is playing the golf course. So essentially what I started to teach golfers, and I think they found it very helpful, golf is not a horse race. It's not one player versus another player. Golf is a dart game. Pick a target on the golf course, hitch a shot to that target.

gio (35:57.149)

And then it's the back of a shampoo bottle. Lather, wash, rinse, repeat. Keep doing that. Oh, but I'm leading. What should I do? Pick a target, make a fearless swing at that target. I'm trailing. What should I do? Pick a target, make a fearless swing, keep playing darts. And so no matter the circumstance, the situation, you can always pick a target and make a fearless swing at that target. And if you do that on a recurring basis and you block out the noise, you tend to get your best performances. So yeah.

Tim Doyle (36:28.043)

Detachment is a big part of your work as well. For you personally and your work, how have you gone about separating your sense of self and your worth from the way that your clients perform?

gio (36:31.162)

Mmm.

gio (36:44.539)

That's a really, really good question. I'm hopeful for your generation, Tim. You are the, in my opinion, you are now the spokesperson for a generation and I think the future's in good hands. You ask incredibly good questions. Yeah, the thing about attachments, psychological attachments, is they happen to us. We don't choose, just like we don't choose to get goosebumps, we don't choose our emotions sometimes. just sort of, things happen and we react.

And that's true of psychological attachments. So what are people attached to psychologically? Well, they tend to be attached to the past, things that already happened. They tend to be attached to the future. what if this happens? We get all this anxiety, we've catastrophized the future. We tend to be attached to other people's opinions of us. And we tend to be attached to like material things like money and our net worth. And so what you have to do to be your best mentally is go through a

a continual process of detachment. Learn how to let go of the things that are holding you back, whether it's fear or the past or the future. And so what I do is every week on a Friday afternoon is I ask a simple question in my own brain. say, what is influencing my thoughts and feelings that I didn't deliberately put there? Because that reveals your attachments. I'm like, this person said that or

someone didn't perform well or, you know, I didn't do as good of a job as I wanted to do and X, Y, And then I just sit with my thoughts and I say, let it go, let it go, let it go. And then, until I'm out, until I'm detached. And what you come to realize is once you detach and you let go of your attachments, what fills in that space is what's called psychological freedom. And all great performances tend to emerge from psychological freedom.

Tim Doyle (38:40.844)

How long does that process take for you? Do feel like you had struggled with that earlier on in your career?

gio (38:47.065)

Yeah, it took an hour when I first started doing it. Now I can do it in five or 10 minutes. It's a form of Ayurvedic meditation where you're just identifying your attachments and then letting go. So yeah.

Tim Doyle (38:58.39)

Do you meditate on a frequent basis?

gio (39:01.965)

I do? Yeah, I'm meditating right now, man. I find my work is meditative because it's contemplative, right? To be fully present with a person in a dialogue, and this is presence, right? And so in that regard, if you're fully present, it's somewhat meditative to me, so yeah.

Tim Doyle (39:05.42)

Yeah, exactly.

Tim Doyle (39:22.422)

We haven't spoken a lot about it so far today, but from hearing you speak in other places, you use spirituality and religion a lot as analogies. Where does that come from for you?

gio (39:36.991)

Well, when you study psychology and you're mining the field of psychology for all the good ideas, what you come to learn is that psychology was born out of philosophy.

So then you have to start studying philosophy. And when you study philosophy and you trace its origins, it back to religion. And so to have a comprehensive view of the human experience, as I have to do, if I have to take a client on, well, I have to be able to understand the context of their life. And if their religious beliefs are important to them, they have to be important to me. So I've had to study religion.

as a vehicle to better understand my clients. the other thing about religion is people tend to throw the baby out with the bath water. So there's so many good ideas imbued really categorically across almost all religions, certainly all the religions that I've studied.

So I do think an exploration of religion and spirituality is a healthy thing for everyone to do, no matter where you land on it. These spiritual leaders have had several thousand years to get the playbook of humanity right, they've got a lot of good ideas. So give an example. You've heard of the term enthusiasm, right? Do you think it's better to go through life enthusiastically or to be sort of

Tim Doyle (41:06.316)

Yes.

gio (41:12.412)

know, bland and with no enthusiasm.

Tim Doyle (41:16.0)

I would say with enthusiasm.

gio (41:19.972)

You want to bring enthusiasm to your work and to your relationships. What's the etymology? What's the origin of the word enthusiastic? Where did it come from?

Tim Doyle (41:33.826)

theology or I'm trying to think Theo I'm trying to think

gio (41:37.288)

Yeah. And, and theos, and theos, right? In God. En is in. Theos is God. It's a Greek term, right? The ancient Greeks. So to approach something with enthusiasm, it's as if God is speaking through you, right? To bring that, like, inspire. The word spirit is inspired. So a lot of the colloquial language that we use is rooted in sort of religious tradition.

And so all the things that we're striving for, enthusiasm, to be inspired, you can trace it back to religious origins. And so it's just a real misunderstanding that modern times has of sort of God and morality and spirituality. It's like, oh, you're telling me that, you know, whatever misunderstandings people have about religion, to not have explored your spiritual self is to leave on the table.

One of the great joys of life. Yeah.

Tim Doyle (42:40.386)

How do you think that benefits performance?

gio (42:44.69)

Because it gives you perspective, right? It gives you perspective. you think that your whole identity is tied to a result or to making money and you don't have money in the proper perspective, like the Bible says, it's easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than a rich man to go to heaven. What does that mean? It's like, listen, if you think of heaven as a place of happiness and bliss, and the Bible is teaching,

It's easier to put a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to be happy. Guess what? I've been around a lot of rich people. It's sort of true. To be rich, is that, more money, more problems? Like you have to have a healthy relationship with money. More money doesn't automatically lead to more happiness. It can, right? Because it's more safety, more comfort, more freedom. But you better develop a playbook so you have a healthy relationship with money. It doesn't just happen automatically.

And so I think what religious perspectives do is they provide a real perspective to navigate the challenges of one's life. yeah.

Tim Doyle (43:52.726)

Your number one golf tip, make fearless swings at precise targets. Where do you see that within your own life today?

gio (44:03.217)

Well, it's interesting. I just had a golfer win last week, kid named Ricky Castillo won in Puerto Rico last week. And I find that remarkable because it's like 25 years from my first win to like this one. didn't even realize it. And so Ricky's the young man I worked with last year. The year before that, John Pack won. And so what's remarkable to me, and I was talking with my colleague, Ina Kimshad about this.

last week, it's like, it's amazing that a good idea is still good 20 years later, 25 years later. Like pick a target, make a fearless swing at that target, detach from the result. And if you could do that, you're still winning on the PGA tour. So yeah, I do think that that idea is as relevant now. In fact, it might be more relevant because there's more noise and more clutter in the world, right? So it might be more relevant than ever. How does that apply to my own life?

You know, going back to your question about religion, like I really like the sort of the Buddhist notion of doing a simple thing well. And what you find is so many people are so busy doing a lot of things, but doing it all poorly. And why don't you do fewer things and just do them better? Right? Depth versus breadth. Do fewer things and do this, do a simple thing well.

And so when I go back to the question, what's my target? It's not a plural question. It's not what are my targets. It's what's my target. Pick the thing you love to do or whatever the thing you're doing in the moment. Fully immerse yourself in it and be present. And that's your target for the moment. And then till you execute on that and then you go pick a different target after. But fall in love with the art of doing a simple thing well.

Tim Doyle (46:00.769)

It's been great talking with you today.

gio (46:03.649)

Tim, we did it, man, after a couple of false starts. I love it.

Tim Doyle (46:07.819)

Where can people go to learn more about you or if you'd like to share anything else.

gio (46:14.273)

They can just look me up online, GeoValente.com or go to my LinkedIn page, our website, fearlessgolf.com. So they can learn about me there. They can reach out to you and say, can I get Dr. Geo's contact information? Right? There you go. Tim, man, I loved it, bud. You're a remarkable young man. I wish you all the best. there's anything I can do, you let me know. All right, buddy, bye.

Tim Doyle (46:30.273)

Awesome. Great talk with you today.

Tim Doyle (46:40.735)

I appreciate you.