Ep 3. Build Your Zone Trigger: Flip the Switch on Demand

What if you could stop hoping to “get in the zone” someday… and actually learn how to trigger it on command?

In Episode 3 of the One Round Away Podcast, Bo Watson and Shannon Shuskey pull back the curtain on one of the most powerful ideas in their entire system: how to condition your mind and body to enter a high-performance state when it matters most.

This is the episode where theory starts becoming practical.

Bo and Shannon break down what the zone really is, why most traditional mental game advice falls apart under pressure, and what actually happens in your brain when you move from overthinking into instinctive athletic performance. They explain why your best golf has never happened when you were loaded with swing thoughts, why “just stay present” is not enough, and how elite performers learn to access flow by design instead of by accident.  

You’ll also learn the role of breathing, kinesthetic mental imagery, and the custom trigger — a specific physical cue that helps train your brain to recognize and repeat peak performance. Shannon walks through how vivid mental rehearsal actually builds confidence, sharpens focus, lowers anxiety, and helps golfers perform better even before they ever step on the course.   

This is the episode that starts showing you how to flip the switch.

If you’ve ever had one of those rounds where everything felt effortless… if you’ve ever wondered why that version of you shows up sometimes but not others… or if you’re tired of fighting your own brain on the first tee…

This episode will show you a different path.

Not more clutter.
 Not more mechanical overload.
 A way to train for trust, freedom, and performance.

Because the zone is not random.

And you may be closer to it than you think.

You’re just one round away.

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📖 Get the Book In the Zone Secrets: How to Get in the Zone at the Flip of a Switch — just cover shipping and it's yours. → https://inthezonesecrets.com/

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📞 Free Coaching Call If you're ready to close the gap between the golfer you are and the golfer you know you can be — let's talk. → https://inthezonesecrets.com/freecall

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

At the end of this episode, listeners, you're gonna get a personal trigger. We're gonna dive deep into that. 99% of the golfers don't even have this or even know what it is. But we're gonna teach you and you can use it this weekend, not Sunday, but this weekend.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

And that's a pretty big statement, man. And we don't make that statement lightly because last week we talked about the six-inch course, you know, the one between your ears, the one that you're playing every single day, whether you realize it or not. You know, we talked about why more swing knowledge was actually making golfers worse. And then we introduced you the idea that there's actually a way to condition your mind and body to enter the zone on demand, or some people call flow state. Not by luck, not by accident, but like actually by design. Today we're actually going to finally pull back the curtain on that. Show you exactly how it works. Hey, I'm Bo Watson. I'm Shay Lichesky. This is the one round away podcast. So let's get into it.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

So let's talk about what is the zone, actually. You know, we we talk about this quite often. You hear about it. A lot of scientists they actually refer to it as flow state. It's not by luck. It can be reproducible in the neurological state in your mind. What does that mean? A lot of times when people talk about being in the zone, they they feel like a time distortion, right? Like it's like time can slow down. You feel effortless, you're in control. And Bo mentioned this in like the last podcast. A lot of times there's no swing thought. You're in the total present moment and your instinctive movement, you're relying on your athleticism and not having numerous different thoughts flying through your head. Your zero self-consciousness.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

This is why we coined a term, as you guys may have heard us say in the last two episodes, caveman golf or cavegirl golf, a C target, seaball, hit ball. And when you think back on any sport, or maybe even like your best round ever, that's always going to be the common denominator. It was just like you just reacted, like time slows down, there's very little swing thoughts whatsoever. You're just reacting, right? Researchers call the state flow state. And to like really kind of get deep into weeds just for a second, basically, what's called brain transient hyperfrontality, it's the prefrontal cortex, it's the part that's responsible for overthinking and self-criticism. What happens is it goes quiet. So, like your athletic brain takes over, you stop evaluating, you start executing, like Tiger had it, Sam Sneed had it. You know, your best round ever had it. The difference between elite players and everyone else is that they didn't just get lucky and fall into it. It's that they learned how to trigger it. And today we're going to show you how.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

So the why the mental game tips fail. A lot of times you read a lot of the mental books and stuff. They they talk about, you know, stay present, trust your swing, be confident. They even talk about positive self-talk. But how do you actually go in to do that? Here's the problem. A lot of these activities, these are thinking in the brain, you're having to go through and do it. But a lot of people do not explain like how to do it, like a step-by-step process. When you say pink elephant, don't think of a pink elephant. Obviously, you're thinking of a pink elephant right now. So you're telling yourself not to think, but it actually makes you think by doing that. And that's the truth.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

Just really quick, like I know we had some plans and we're going to take it a certain way, but just go ahead and walk them through the same exercise that we do with all of our university teams.

SPEAKER_00 3:21

Okay, so the prime example is this. You know, they talk about staying in the present, don't think, and overthinking. And what happened is we actually start thinking. So this is one of the things that Bo was talking about that we do with all of our university when we come in, and we'll have them do some mental imagery. So, what I want you to do now, if you're driving, don't do this, don't try this in the car when you're driving or anything like that. But you can actually do do this a little bit later, and that would be this. I'm gonna walk you through a visualization exercise that'll that'll prove my point as far as like trying not to think. I want you to close your eyes and I want you to imagine and start doing mental imagery of a huge green pasture, but it's gonna have little bunnies running and jumping around. And it's like they're playing tag, they look happy. Now, picture more bunnies, they're all jumping around and hopping and like touching each other, playing tag or little things like that. Now, do not picture a ferocious tiger. So now, open up your eyes. So here's the thing about 90% of the people, when I take them through this in this process about don't think of a ferocious tiger, what happens is they immediately think that, but because our brain has such a negative bias, what we do is we start not just seeing the tiger, but the tiger is attacking all the bunnies. Right? When you when you read these sports psychology books and they say, you know, be in the present moment, a lot of times when we say don't think, we're actually creating a new target and a new space, and we're actually creating more brain thoughts by doing that.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

Yeah, and that's why, you know, one of my favorite quotes is and I picked this up from David, what's your focus on grows, right? So like where your attention goes, energy flows. So this is why it's so critical that we're directing our attention back to like where it's supposed to be. And what we're gonna share today is how we're gonna make that happen on demand more often than not. And so, like when we talk about like the sport psychology and we kind of get to the science of this, you know, essentially we're kind of explaining the flow state. And some of you maybe are high-level performers outside of the game of golf. You know, we work a lot of executives, CEOs, business owners, and many of them come and work with us. It's so cool to see these principles, even in the business world, because like Stephen Cotler, we talk about him in our book, and he's been one of the foremost experts on flow state research. And if I'm not mistaken, I think he's up to how many triggers now, Shannon?

SPEAKER_00 5:57

Is it 21? I'm not sure, but it it's a lot. It's a a lot of different areas. I'll give you a brief example of one of them. One of them is like a very trying environment that you're in. Like, how many of you have played a course where a majority of the fairways are like wide open versus a course that might be more narrow or actually have more hazards on the left and the right? Little things like that when it comes to the environment will actually trigger yourself to be a higher level of focus throughout play versus having a wide open fairways. And there's I know for a fact there's at least 16, but you're right. There's there's about 20 different ways that we can trigger our body to get in the zone, certain things that do that does that. That was just one of them.

SPEAKER_01 6:45

Yeah. So Mahali was basically he's been pioneered or the father of flow research. And then Stephen Collar took a lot of his research, expanded on what he originally found. And so now, you know, there's 16 or 21 different triggers that can activate somebody into the flow state. And essentially, we're going to get into what ours is called, which is a custom trigger, and we'll get to that in a moment. But just kind of want to lay the groundwork and the foundation for the actual flow research and flow state. When you look at it in the neuroscience, one of the foremost experts in this part of the game is Dr. Izzy Justice. One of the cool things that he has found just with uh brain waves is, and many of them actually have found this, is that when you're in flow state, you have what's called low theta and low alpha wave activity. In very simple terms, it just means you have very little conscious level thought activity happening. Essentially, what we're going to do is we're going to show you how to make that on-off switch so that again, we can get the brain into a state where you're operating in what we call a green light state, which there's been numerous research studies that have shown and are coming out every single day, that when you're in that state, you have a much higher chance of having the brain online to perform a very high coordinated swing. That's a very neuromuscular sequence golf swing. And so it requires a high level of coordination. If your brain is not in a green light state, your success rate is going to dwindle dramatically. This is why, again, I'm about to speak from my experience as a coach. I know a lot of like high-level coaches that are listening to this podcast. I learned under the best of the best in the world. I came up through the golf machine, very heavily influenced by Morad, been under some of the brightest names in the world. The thing that we were wrongly taught for a very long time is that we believed that we were to basically practice something so many times that it overrode our brain or negative thought bias. It was basically heavily influenced by the talent code, which was you got to practice something 10,000 times in order to become an expert. The danger in that thought process is that, yeah, you can go out there and just practice and practice and practice. But if you don't have the brain in a state such as, hey, don't hit in the water, it doesn't matter how many thousands of reps that you did on the range or what you've done in practice, if you are going in a red light state in that particular shot, you are very much putting yourself in a very high disadvantage because your brain at that state is operating at about 5 to 15% capacity, which you guys may have heard that term, fight or flight, which we'll get to in a second. You're in pretty much in that fight or flight response, which means your brain is now offline, your coordination skills is dramatically dwindled. Now your chance of hitting a solid shot in that situation is pretty much out the window. Okay. And we're going to show you how to, again, play this game more from a caveman or cavegirl golf. And we're going to show you through our system, what we call a psycho and muscular training. It begins with four elements. Shannon, you want to start the first one?

SPEAKER_00 9:52

Yeah, the first one is definitely creating a trigger in that. But there's there's two things. When we create a trigger, we want to have like a physical movement and a deep breath. And the reason why you want a deep breath is obviously with a lot of the science that's backed, it actually clears the brain, number one, and then do a physical motion, which makes it more powerful for your body to actually be able to react.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

And guys, like what we're not talking about, we're not talking like deep breathing, relaxation, or meditation, or any of that. This is really just again, understanding that your nervous system has two modes. I just said it a minute ago. It's fight or flight and the performance state. It's like, again, it kind of gives some examples. Like when you're standing on the first T and your heart rate's climbing and your hands are shaky, like that's fight or flight taking over, right? And so your body literally cannot perform at its best in that state. And so one of the things that helps with breathing is number one, it shifts your nervous system physically and it can do it so measurably. And so, like when we give you the right protocol, you'll be able to go through those kind of high pressure situations. I love it best. Tiger Woods said it one time, you know, my pre-shot routine is my safe haven. And so, in a sense, like we're giving you a system that's going to become your safe haven. It's like when these high pressure situations arise, like you're able to have this fallback to a system that's going to automatically get you through that. And that's when it gets really fun. So first thing is like a deep breath. And so that's the first step. And then the second thing that you always have to have is what's called a custom trigger. Now, before we get to that, let's start with you know, again, we said this in the last episode. Like when you look at the best players in the world and all world um class athletes and hall of fame athletes, they all had this. Shannon even said in the last episode, many of them don't share this piece until after they retire. And that is the secret of what we call kinesthetic mental imagery. That is just simply getting very real with your visualization. And we're gonna walk you through that right now. So again, this is the key. So the science behind this is actually extraordinary. You're like your nervous system cannot distinguish between what is a vividly imagined experience and a real one. There have been numerous studies, one of our favorite studies was actually the Hallmark study back in 1980. We write we wrote about it in our book. It's called the Swin Study. And what that was, it was a downhill Olympic skier. And what they were able to do is they hooked up these letros to his muscles, and they had him race down the course, like the actual physical course. And so he does his run. Then they had him sit in a chair, he is perfectly still, and they say, All right, now vividly see yourself go down the exact same course, turn by turn, and so he's sitting there completely still, not moving a muscle visibly, but yet over on the graph, I forgot what the actual machine was called. Do you remember what it was called, Shannon?

SPEAKER_00 12:54

The EMG. It was an EMG. Yeah, they connected him up, and what was what was amazing is that his muscles were firing just as much as it was as if as if he was actually physically doing it.

SPEAKER_01 13:06

Yeah, and the reason why this is so groundbreaking is again, this study was like the first of its kind to actually prove you know what we talked about in the last episode with Alex Morrison. You guys remember like Jack Nicholas, the tiger used this, Phil used this, Sam Sneed used this, Ben Hogan used this, Mickey Wright. All the best of the best have used this in some form or fashion in their careers, and it's why it's separated them from everybody else is to the degree of specificity. Specificity There you go. Specificity is going to kill me on that one. It's so funny. We're leaving this in, we're not cutting it. But the what's so cool is that how specific they are and how real they make their kinesthetic mental imagery is one of the hallmark reasons why these players are the best of the best. But it's also the very thing that can literally separate you from where you are right now into your absolute best golf. And I promise you that. It literally can be come, and we don't recommend this, but we have seen many case studies where people they don't even physically practice as much, and yet they still do mental reps and they still see incredible improvement in their games. Like I'll give you one example. One of our case studies, John Norvell up in Michigan, guy is seven years old, comes in, he's only able to play one nine whole round a week. He is not physically practicing. Even at the age of 70, he's getting a master's degree in divinity studies, going through the same thing that we're walking you through right now. And within two months, he goes from high 80s, he's like almost on the verge of wanting to quit the game, not having fun, to his average score of two months later is 75. He shoots his lifetime low round of 71, which he has since beat with a 68 at the age of 71. And it's just amazing. And he does all that without physically practicing and only playing about one nine-hole and maybe occasional 18-hole round here and there. And it's just incredible. And we have many numerous case studies like that. But again, what we recommend is obviously, yes, you do want to get some physical reps in, you do need to practice, but we can show you how to shortcut a lot of it if you put this piece right in, which is the kinesthetic mental imagery, which is one of the requirements of psychomuscular training.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

Absolutely interesting. I want to touch on that too. You want to make your mental imagery as real as possible. When I say as real as possible, literally like all five of your senses are engaged in it. You know, do you see the dimples on the ball, the grass blades? You know, an example is you all you want all your five senses to be active, meaning like your sight, your hearing, your feeling, uh, as well, you know, it now taste in uh is not necessarily as important, you know, or smell. You can like smell fresh cut gas and stuff like that, but you want everything else to be extremely real to your senses because remember, your brain cannot distinct with the neuropathways as far as like what's going on, like it does it can't tell if you're actually physically doing it or mentally do it. We like to coin it like you get all your seven senses involved. Okay, we talked about your five senses, but the other two are extremely important. One would be your emotion, adding an emotion to that as well. But the the seventh one, this is one of the most important ones out of your five senses, and that is actually limb movement, feeling your limb movement. You hear this thing called muscle memory. There's no such thing as muscle memory, it's brain memory, it's coming from sequencing from your brain that activates your muscles every single time. This is how you do it by getting these mental, mental reps and making it real, like in execution, for example. You're seeing your shot shake, you're feeling the contact of the ball. If you're teeing off, that you can actually hear the club swing going through the air, you hear the contact of the ball when it hits, you hear the strike, and then you hear the ball coming off your club, the sound that it makes. You can see the shot shape as it goes, where it lands and how far it rolls, like making it extremely real. And even are you feeling the wind, for example? Are there wind? So you're making it extremely well, you're getting all your sense, your your seven senses, what we call our seven senses, fully activated. But here's the thing sometimes it's gonna take time, and you're gonna have to really work on your mental imagery. You can rate your mental imagery so that you can make it sharper each time, make it more clear that will literally transform your game. So then what can all this mental imagery do? Number one, see yourself being successful, which is gonna increase your confidence, it's gonna increase your motivation. And here's the beautiful thing: you'll be able to learn swing changes like 50% faster with it. Your challenge and your strategies on the golf course is gonna make it even more clear when you come into it. It will help you to familiar yourself with courses as well that you're getting ready to play, doing mental imagery. It lowers your anxiety, it helps you to refocus. You can actually create strength, like we talked about in the previous episode. You know, with Sonder Gout, the girls with with injury rehab, it helps that as well. So, this mental imagery can be used for so many different things that can help your golf game and literally get it dialed in.

SPEAKER_01 18:50

And that kind of leads us now to the next, I would say one of the most important pieces and making that shift and ultimately what we call you know flipping the switch to get you into the zone and having that hyper focus for every single shot, and that is the custom trigger. So you guys heard us talk about earlier with Stephen Collar. He's come, he's discovered with his research there's multiple different triggers that can get people into flow state. And the one that we have stumbled across, or I should say Shannon, accidentally stumbled across this and figured it out when he was struggling, you know, getting his starts off the line and then going from struggling to then becoming a national champion. It started with this custom trigger. The way the custom trigger is explained, is that it's a physical motion that is not already in your routine. That is critical to understand one of the biggest, I would say, mistakes that we see with a lot of people that come in and learn this with us is that they try to make something that they're already doing, their physical trigger, and it's not gonna work because whether you know this or not, you have what's called your myelin sheath. And so that's a neuropathway that is so hardwired, so ingrained, and so inhabit that when you just make that your trigger, it's not gonna have any effect in your brain. So, as you guys may have heard the term, what's called neuroplasticity, we have to create a new neural circuit and a basical trigger to your brain to alert it to know hey, this is a new pathway that means X, Y, Z in a sense. I'm gonna try to keep it really simple. And so when we do this new trigger and we start training the brain to recognize this is a new trigger paired with mental imagery and the reward value. Essentially, if you really want to go deep into this, our system is a blend of what's called classical conditioning and operating. Okay. So for all you science nerds and people that love to research this stuff, that's our system. All right, but let's keep it really simple for everybody else. I'm the Did you just call me a nerd? You called me a nerd, didn't you? Sorry, Shannon. I just had I know you're big on all the research, but I like to be like the other 90%, and I won't like gum down, give me the piced up but like layman terms. Yeah, okay. So here we go. So all you really need to understand is that we have to have a physical truck, a trigger, paired with a deep breath. We gotta also make sure we pair that with the kinesthetic mental imagery. But when we do that, that's 80% of it, okay?

SPEAKER_00 21:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:21

Because we have to have a physical motion. So, what is that physical motion? So it can be literally anything, it could be like a waggle of the hands. Let's just say, let's use full swing, for example. It could be like a squeeze of your hands, it could be like a tap of your finger, it can be literally anything. Like we've had some players like slap their leg as they're coming in a dress. We've had some people touch your shoulders or do like a brush off. We've had some people do their club coming in. I mean, there's so many different ones. And it's not like they're right or wrong. It just has to be something that is new. One of the things that we also get a frequently asked question a lot is man, this is like I already have a really Well-structured routine, like this is gonna like really throw things off. And that's when we say choose something that is very simple, that isn't really changing much of what you've already do. And that is simply just maybe a squeeze of the grip. Personally, that's my trigger right now. I know in a book I wrote about mine at that time was the waggle of the hands, but that has since changed. I have settled with the squeeze of the hands. That's works really well for me. And honestly, a lot of our clients love that one as well. But it can be anything, not saying that's the only one.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

I know I want to give you some direction too. This will help them as well. You want to do some kind of trigger that you can do with all your clubs. Like, for example, we've had some clients use a waggle. Well, here's the thing about a waggle. When you come up to putt, that's pretty awkward, right? Is to do a what I'm gonna waggle my putter.

SPEAKER_01 22:50

Like, you know, you that's that's why something's you're gonna look like the 25 handicapper if you're out there wagging your putter.

SPEAKER_00 22:58

Right, right. Like you might have people like, what in the world this person doing? You remember the term like when it comes to creating something, the the acronym KISS? Keep it stupid, stupid simple. Like literally, keep it simple, you know, just a squeeze squeeze of the hand with your club, right?

SPEAKER_01 23:18

Yeah, it chances keep it simple, stupid.

SPEAKER_00 23:21

Okay, keep it simple, stupid. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

There you go.

SPEAKER_00 23:25

Absolutely. So what you're doing is you're you're creating this trigger, and remember the trigger is is two things. It's your physical motion, which might be a squeeze of the hand, like you know, with your club, squeeze of the hand, but you're doing a deep breath at the same time. So it's like you know, I I hope some of you guys heard that. That was a very deep nose breath, right? And that's generally what we're wanting to do, that because it does clear the brain out, and it makes it makes the trigger actually that much more impactful.

SPEAKER_01 23:56

Yeah. So that's the uh the physical trigger. And again, that you may have, again, maybe one that fits through all, like Shannon said, which we recommend if you can, it'd be amazing. But we do have occasionally, you know, some that might have two different triggers, and very rarely we see three different triggers, one for full swing, short game, and putting. But again, strive to have something that can work for all three phases. It really does simplify things and it makes it a lot easier to remember. Now, last one. This next one is probably the biggest thing that brings it all together and provides the glue, so to speak, and that is what we call the consistent passionate reaction. We labeled the term CPR for short, so it's an acronym. And you guys know CPR stands for what many people would know it as is like you're bringing somebody back to life. If they're passed out or heaven forbid, they're drowned, and now you're trying to bring them back to life, and that's what we think of CPR. So think of like the consistent pass reaction. We're bringing to life your mental imagery, your trigger, and your deep breath. And now we're bringing it all together, basically bringing in the reward. So when I say that, it's an emotion response. The best way to make it also and describe it is think of CPR as like your intention towards your target.

SPEAKER_00 25:21

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 25:22

It's an emotional response towards your target, or it's your intention, and that tends to be the biggest thing that that brings it all together. So let's talk through some of that for a second. If you think back to the original study, Pavel's dogs, remember you know, when they had the bell or the light, the dog has no emotional connection with a bell or a light. Not by itself until they started dropping food after they showed the dog the bell or rang the bell. And that's when he finally, over a period of a few days, he started associating hey, this trigger, right, of the bell or light is now responsible. I know is gonna see food, and that's when he gets all excited and everything, and he knows food is about to drop out. Think of it like this in our system, we want to have the reward of an amazing shot, right? And the biggest thing to making this become real and making that pathway from your brain to your body start happening and making that switch is we have to have a reward value. Like we know we gotta have the amazing shot, but here's the thing we have to have that emotion, and that's where the CPR comes in. We have to make sure that we have that intention toward our target. And there's very many different types.

SPEAKER_00 26:47

CPR is your emotional intensity to the target. It can be a calm, like a sniper's calm, for example. It can be more aggressive because obviously, you know, when it comes to putting, you might have a different emotion that comes to putting that's more of a calm aggressiveness. Versus actual more aggressiveness, like when you're teeing off. It's your determination to the target. You're excited, you're shifted. In other words, like, for example, one of the things in Pablo's dogs, they found out with them, when the food would drop, they would, the dog would also get excited. So when the dog would see, like if you say, Hey, are you hungry? You there would be an emotional reaction with the dog. And so that is what you're doing. It is a consistent, passionate reaction toward your target, whether it's calm, aggressiveness, it's that emotional intensity to the target, is what that is.

SPEAKER_01 27:40

Yeah, and that's where mine personally was a bull seeing red. And so, like when I'm looking at the target, another way to describe it, I played linebacker in high school, and so it's like you're locked in on the ball carrier and you're trying to lay him out. So, like the bull, the bull doesn't care, you know, who's in the stands, he doesn't care about the crowd noise, he doesn't care about what he's standing on or the dirt that he's standing on. He doesn't really necessarily care about the person. The only thing he's locked in on is the crazy red flag that's waving and getting his attention, and that's all he's locked in on. And so he's like charging after that. That's my CPR. Like when I'm looking at my target, that's what I'm um channeling. That's my emotion, that's my intensity that I'm driving towards a target. And again, there's many types, like Shannon said, just giving an idea. So, like when you put all this together, trigger, deep breath, CPR, mental imagery, here's full circle what it looks like. My personal trigger right now is the squeeze of the hands. So, like, if I'm doing a mental rep, which we're gonna now talk about, this is like where when we do a mental rep or go through this and train away from the course, here's how it looks like. Let's say I'm standing on hole one at my home course, I got clear view of the of the hole in the distance, I can see my playing partners, I can see the grass, I can see the tea boxes, and I can see the sky, partly cloudy, sun over to the right-hand side, you know, all the details, right? So that is like immediate. I can see the scene. I'm just painting the picture for you, right? So as soon as I have that scene, I am right there, and I'm walking into the ball after already planned out my shot. Here I am sitting still completely in a chair. I'm looking. That was my squeeze and then my trigger. So those of you that aren't able to see me, what I just did was a squeeze of my hands and a deep breath that you probably just heard. And then I'm looking one more way at the target, but this time I'm channeling my CPR, which is a bull C and red intensity. And then when I bring my eyes back, now I'm actually seeing the club take away from the ball, and then I'm actually hitting the shot. And now vividly I can see the ball flying as it's going towards the target, exactly like what I envisionalized just before I went through that actual mental rep. So that right there was a quick mental rep of me doing a drive on my home course on hole one. And again, it's just like rinse repeat. And the key thing is that I'm doing trigger, CPR, deep breath, and then obviously the actual mental imagery of the shot that I want to hit.

SPEAKER_00 30:22

So, guys, I want to I want to share this too because the way Bo explained it, it can actually be very deceptive. It took him a long time to explain the scene, right? That is something that's automatic for you. You already have your scene that's there. Your literal mental rep is going to take no longer than five to ten seconds. You're not visualizing yourself going through your pre-shot routine. It's literally as if you're at address of the ball. That's all you're visualizing, is at address of the ball, and then you already have the scene that's there, and then you're doing your trigger, the squeeze, the deep breath, and you're getting that emotional intensity that's there, and then you're doing mental imagery literally. If you with your with your back swing going through, you can hear the club, you can hear the strike of the ball, and you and then you hit it. It literally, matter of fact, there was study that was done in Stanford University when it comes to mental imagery. All your mental reps cannot be longer than 20 seconds, but in golf, the beautiful thing, all you're doing is the swing. So it's literally five seconds, three seconds, that's one rep. And then you go back and you do another rep and you're getting another rep. And now remember, it's extremely poor, is what was mentioned in the previous podcast was this. You're only seeing perfect mental imagery of your shot. You're not seeing negative outcomes because what that does is it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. You're only seeing positive. Now, you might be in a negative situation, meaning a deep rough or a bad boker or hitting out of an area where you got to go around a tree or something like that, but you're seeing the perfect shot every single time. So remember that going back to the study that they did at Stanford, they had found that the mental imagery in golf, literally no longer than five seconds, because when Bo would do his mental imagery, what did he explain? Literally, it would only take five seconds. But you want to at least get about 50 reps in. Now you think about, man, that's a lot. Actually, if you think about it, that's not long. Five seconds times 50, literally, like within 15 minutes, you're done with everything, but you're kind of going in and out of your, you know, you're doing your trigger, your CPR, and mental imagery every single rep. Trigger, CPR, mental imagery, every single rep. That is how you get dialed in to when you get on the course to do your trigger, you're not you're not necessarily doing the full mental imagery and everything like that. You're just doing once you come up to address the ball, you're just doing trigger only. And because you got all of those mental reps in, remember we talked about the brain account, you've made all those deposits in your brain account. So then when you come up and you only do your trigger only, you're actually time to withdraw, boom, immediately you are locked in, focused to hit the ball, and you're giving your body the best chance to perform at its best right then and there when you when you swing your club.

SPEAKER_01 33:22

Yeah. So what Shannon just walked you guys through is in very simple terms, training a dog within. You know, one of the biggest mistakes that we see time and time again in our community and our clients we work with when they first start doing this, is that they try to take this and they go out in a course and they do it. It's not going to work. It's just like going to your new puppy that you just got and saying sit. He's what does this even mean? He doesn't understand that command until you do a process of training with treats, right? And then finally, after a week or two, he understands that command. It's the same thing with your brain and body. You have to train it away from the course, okay? Making those brain deposits, like Shannon said. Then when you are actually playing, you do not need to do the CPR, is what becomes automatic. Just like a dog, you know, when he finally sees a trigger, he already gets emotionally excited. CPR, okay from the original study. That's essentially what your brain is doing. You're getting that hyper-level focus. So for many of you that are like, I always lack focus, or I I'm losing focus, I hear it all the time. At people, one of the biggest mistakes or biggest issues in the game of golf for many golfers is they lose focus. This is how you can have the hyper-level focus that you want for every single shot. If you remember to do your trigger when you're playing, yes. And if you've done enough reps away from the course, then we can make those proper withdrawals from your brain account. And then now you got that hyper-level focus for each and every single shot. And one of my favorite acronyms that Shannon comes up with, and guys, on this podcast, you're going to hear many acronyms. I can guarantee it. But one of them, I'll just go ahead and say, you know, in order to win, that's an acronym. It's what's important now. So if you want to win, it's what's important now. It's the very next shot. And you got to be fully present for that shot. And our system will help you get hyper focused for each and every shot. If you do trigger CPR, mental imagery, get that training in away from the course. And then when you go play, you'll start seeing that level of focus that you've never seen before, and you'll start seeing it on demand.

SPEAKER_00 35:35

Absolutely. Over 131 golfers that we work with, well over, you know, and the average improvement was 5.1 strokes in 45 days or less. And when I say 45 days or less, here's the thing: what we just shared, it's not hard work. It's actually easy work, but you got to schedule your time to put in the work. So schedule this time 15, 20 minutes a day, get mental imagery in, get it in. Make sure you get about 50 reps in. That's what they said with the study of Stamford. But we have seen huge improvements with our golfers. And as you know, what we've talked about over and over, the traditional improvement is only 0.1 strokes per year. You know, and then we expanded out. We've worked with hundreds of golfers that generally get a six-stroke improvement at all skill levels. So many of our clients have actually done that. Here's the thing: you got to be all in with getting the mental reps in. Just like, you know, before you were all in going to the driving range to get your physical reps in, trust me, you're going to see huge performance gains by being all in and getting the mental reps in and balancing it out. Because we you've heard us talk about this competition or when it comes to golf, it's 90% mental and 10% physical, then we're helping you with that 90% right now. Sean.

SPEAKER_01 36:54

Yeah, and what Shannon was talking about with 131 golfers, it's actually really cool because when I hosted the very first Consistent Golf Summit back in 2020, we launched on the back side of that the very first ever end zone mental challenge. And what was pretty cool is the very thing that we just shared with you in today's episode, we taught over a few days, and we had 131 golfers go through it. Out of the 131, I think it was 113 that we personally were able to make contact with. And they reported back to us that it was 5.1 strokes dropped on average across those 113 that we contacted and was able to make contact with. Now, since then, like what Shannon said is true. Right now, we're currently averaging 5.94 strokes dropped in 8.96 weeks. And that's across hundreds of clients since then. Um, so again, that includes high handicappers. Yes, I know some of you are like, well, of course, Jimmy, take anybody from like mid-90s down to mid-80s. Yeah, but that's also including our low single-digit handicappers like Thomas, who started with a 78.6, and we got them down to a 72.5 within nine weeks. And then since then, he's a 69.6 scoring average, and that's with about 16 weeks of working with us. So we can help you get to as far as you want to get to. And again, if that resonates and you want to work with us more closely, there's two ways. You can do it yourself, and you can get our book, endazonesecrets.com. You get a free signed copy from us. You can also get it on Amazon. But if you go through us, we give you a signed copy and there's some other cool bonuses and you only pay shipping.

SPEAKER_00 38:26

Yeah, and that's that's for US only, US customers only, as far as the Amazon secrets. But if you are if you are international, please check out in Amazon. You can order it from there.

SPEAKER_01 38:37

Then the second way people can work with us if you're interested and you want to learn more, and you got, you know, we get a lot of questions, right? When we cover this, and you're like, all right, this sounds great. I'm I need a little bit more hands-on, I want accountability, or you know, I got some big goals in my game and I want to compete and I want to win. Reach out to us. We'll put that link in the bottom. It's a free strategy call. Just answer a few questions, and then you can jump on either with myself or our team, and we'll do a deep dive in your game, find out like what's working, what's not. And then here's the thing: no harm, no foul. You know, we'll present some options. Even if it's not with us, we'll point you in the right direction and you'll get the help that you need for your game. That's our heart, that's our mission. You know, again, we're very serious. You know, this podcast, we're not going to leave anything unturned. We've done that in our book. We're serious when we say we want to help 100,000 golfers shoot their new lifetime low rounds, which is why we created this podcast. And uh, it's why it's the name, you know, you're literally just one round away.