BUILDING ATHLETES UP DAILY
My podcast will be helping promote my clothing brand and help athletes with mental health issues
BUILDING ATHLETES UP DAILY
Confidence with Elijah Latour
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Owen Klorer the owner of baud and Eli Latour a golf ambassador for baud uncover different ways to increase confidence and what confidence truly means
Hello everybody, I am Owen Clore, the owner of Bond, and this is the second episode of Building Athletes Up Daily. Today we have a special host, Elijah Latour, one of my great buddies. Please introduce yourself.
SPEAKER_01Yo, what up? I'm Elijah Latour. Um most important part of my life is my faith in Christianity. But um part of that is also golfing to glorify God. So I'm an aspiring college golfer who plays junior tournaments all the time.
SPEAKER_00And you just actually recently won a tournament as well, right?
SPEAKER_01Uh yeah, like yeah, somewhat recently. I won a tournament in Maine.
SPEAKER_00Wow. And you were wearing Bod too, weren't you?
SPEAKER_01I was. The final day I was wearing your nice purple polo you gave me. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you gotta repres you gotta represent, you know? Yeah, the hat matched it perfectly. Really? Oh wow. Also, to add on, we have just released our new hat into our store, which is bodware.com, if you didn't know, which is B-A-A-U-D W-E-A-R.com. So let's say you make a bad shot. What is one thing that your caddy could say that could lock you back into your game?
SPEAKER_01Um, honestly, my caddy could say something like it's just one shot. You can make that up on other holes, uh, especially if you stick to your strategy, just hit quality shots. You can find other shots uh everywhere else. Like um, golf is quite a luck game, so like you might lose a shot due to luck, or just you're hitting a bad shot early on in the round, but you're playing an entire 18 holes, and you'll get it back through the luck of the just puff dropping or getting a good kick into the fairway. Something like that that the caddy could say could just like um reduce stress and help me continue playing well throughout the tournament.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so what's stopping you truly from picturing that when you're in uh the same situation, but you're the golfer?
SPEAKER_01Um honestly, I think I get a little too emotionally attached to some of my shots. Like, um, especially if I'm thinking about the score, I'm like, oh, I need to get to 200 par, 300 par or whatever, and then I go miss the miss a green. It's like, oh well, I just blew my chances at Birdie here, I'm not gonna get to 200 par. I think I get a little too emotionally attached, and it's like, well, I have another six holes left if I'm halfway through the round. I have other chances to make birdie. That might not have even been the best hole for it. And I can just say, this is I think um what I need to do more is I can see it as an opportunity, like, oh, I have an opportunity to go save par in a really cool way on this hole. I think that's something I need to work on a little bit, is um the mental game of just recovering quickly like that.
SPEAKER_00So uh I'm gonna ask you this definition. What do you think confidence is to you?
SPEAKER_01Uh confidence?
SPEAKER_00Is it a feeling?
SPEAKER_01You feel? Yeah, confidence is a feeling.
SPEAKER_00It's actually not. What confidence what confidence truly is, it's the knowledge or belief in your actual skill set. So what I mean is most of the time you could say that Hmm, how would I put this? I'm c I'm not confident, so I'm sad. When it's the actual actual the other way around, because being sad could be affecting your true vision of your confidence of your skill set. So you get what I'm saying with there? That's what true confidence is, because the highest level athletes know their actual skill set and know how actually how good they are, because most of the time you're a lot better than you think you are.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I agree.
SPEAKER_00So even going in that to even more ways you could learn how to even build your confidence are first action. So what I mean by action is you say, I'm gonna do this now, I'm not gonna wait any longer. So that's the first part. The next part is skill acquisition, was which is first picking the skills you want to learn, and then start doing them. Now, this is basically like the process of what you're doing. After that, it's evidence of capability, which is saying, Wow, I've really started to progress in this skill. And I've started to learn that I might need to work on this as well. Then after that, you develop the confidence in that skill.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, like confidence comes a lot from like practice and preparation before a tournament.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01One of like a lot of pro players will say, like, when they're cat, like I think Bryson DeChambeau, he's doing pretty well this week in the open. He said when he won the US Open two years ago, that what his caddy said is like he had a really tough shot on the last hole, and he had to hit a good one if he wanted to be able to win this tournament. And his caddy said, Why are you nervous, dude? You've hit the shot a hundred times, you can go do it again. Confidence isn't really I guess like I see what you're saying, it's not really a feeling, it's more of like um understanding that you have what it takes. When confidence is a feeling, it's more of like emotional. If you want to do well, especially in sports, you have to think less emotionally and less uh or and more um technically, like, okay, I should be able to do this, so why can't I?
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And so another thing that could be affecting your confidence in your specific sport is what I like to call the SIS, which is the silent imposter syndrome, which also is called self-doubt. So basically, when you have self-doubt, you basically blind your vision of your skill set, of your confidence. And I want you to lay out that confidence doesn't change, it's the vision of your actual skill set. And one way to truly get rid of self-doubt is look at all of the times, first of all, that have been negative, but the ways you've overcome them. Because most of the time it's going to be very similar to the same like problem that you're that's gonna occur. So, like, for instance, you might be in the trees again, or you might be in the rough again, but you've been in that similar situation. So you just have to look at that situation you've been in before and realize, hey, I've been here before, but I've also gotten out of the situation before.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so like one good example of that is um the last time I won a golf tournament, I was coming down the stretch the last few holes, and I think I was in the lead by three or four shots, whatever. Um I'm on the 17th hole, I hit my drive in the fairway, and then I was in a great spot, and what I did is I kind of pulled my second shot, my approach out a little bit right of the green, and I drew a really nasty lie in the rough, and I had a really tough chip right there, okay? And so what I did is I committed to the shot pretty well, but I just caught the ball slight slightly weird and it came out really soft, it came out really slow. I think I I either barely got it under the green or it stayed short of the green and I had to chip again. I don't really remember, but um I kind of regrouped, I just hit my next shot up by the hole, made the bogey, whatever. What I could do there is I could spiral out of control, make a double on the last, and maybe I'd have to go to a playoff. But um, I was kind of like emotionally shell-shocked a little bit, so my next T-shot, I hit a terrible T-shot. I was way left. Um, there was some shit over to the left that like you did not want to be in, and so I actually went left of that stuff. So I I was I was left enough. It was such a bad shot that it actually ended up being decent. So I went over and I found my ball, and I had a I had a shot, but it wasn't the most ideal shot ever. I had to go like I was in an another tough lie in the rough, and I had to go around a tree to my left, but I also couldn't go too far right or I'd hit other trees, and I had to it was a par five, so I was gonna try and get my shot up close to the green, because then I knew if I was close to the green I'd have an easy chance to win. But instead of thinking like, oh, I should play more conservative than I normally would here, or oh, I should just go for the hero shot. I was more thinking about how do I be creative and put myself in the best spot possible. Like I said before, I should see opportunities when I hit a bad shot to do something cool, and that's kind of how I saw it there. But I didn't think like, oh, I need it for something cool here. It was like I'll just hit my normal shot, it'll it should be something cool, and I can probably get a win out of it, and that's what I did. I hit my four iron up just short of the green. I was in a bunker, and then I got up and down from the bunker for par and won the tournament by like three or four shots.
SPEAKER_00That's amazing, dude. Good for you. So what I want to underlie about emotion is that you aren't your emotions, alright? So picture this there's a stream, and it's all of your emotions. Most of the time, when you're really stressed, you feel like you're in the river, right? Like you're with it. But take yourself out of the river and you're basically viewing all of your emotions. Yeah. So they can't uh fully control you because you're fully centered, you're fully present.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and just like just like a stream, the water comes and goes down the stream. Exactly. Your emotions come and then they're gonna be gone. Exactly.
SPEAKER_00Or there's another way I've put this in this way, it's the three factories. So there's the negative factory, which is all the negative emotions, the neutral, which are obviously all the neutral emotions, and then the positive. All those factories, you are not those factories. You're the person looking out of that factory. Now, some of the time you might think that you are working in the factory, but you're not. So it's like basically like an illusion. But that doesn't mean that you don't have control over your emotions, because you do.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so like if someone owns a factory, they're gonna visit their factories. But when you're in the middle of like a sporting thing, you gotta think more objectively. So you gotta think, oh, I'm gonna take a step back and out and look at all the factories instead of getting too encapsulated by one of them. The negative, the positive, even the neutral. You just want to take a step back and look at all of them.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and you can basically add like a manager, which is like a control beacon that controls those factors as well. But you're not always gonna be able to control those factors because we're human and we're not always perfect as well. Yeah. So what I want to add on here today is these Bible verses. Now, these have helped me tremendously in my journey of playing hockey, so I hope these really relate to you and to our listeners. So the first one is Proverbs 425, which says, Let your eyes look straight ahead, fix your gaze directly before you. So to put this in better words, this verse is the ultimate verse for blocking out the distraction of a like a past mistake. It actually so what it actually does, it commands you to focus entirely on the shot right at hand and not the shot that was into the woods, basically, which we were talking about before. Exactly. So another Bible verse I have for you is Colossians 3 23, which is whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord. So this verse takes the pressure off the score of what other people think of a bad shot. If only your goal is to it's on the next swing to give total heart felt effort to executing the skill, you'll be become locked in, obviously, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. So like uh I've thought of like similar principles to this before. It's like, so God created me with the talent to golf, obviously. I realize I have at least a little bit of talent there. I think um it well, and like in the Bible it talks about not being lazy, right? So I like to think I gotta make the most out of the talent that God gave me, and if I'm half-assing my work on the course and just not giving my full effort in everything that on the course, then I'm not doing what God said, and I'm not glorifying God, which is my ultimate goal, right? So if I just stick to my process of working as hard as I can to glorify God, the results should come with that as well.
SPEAKER_00So basically what you're saying is God plays a giant role in your golf journey.
SPEAKER_01Oh, for sure.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So this next Bible verse is Timothy 1 7. So for God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of the sound mind. So what I mean by a sound mind is fear and panic are emotions that mess up your mechanics, right? In golf. And I'm sure you've dealt with that, which we actually talked about on the 17th hole as well. So a sound mind, which means clarity, focus, and discipline of the mind, this verse will also remind you, Eli, that you have the mental soundness to execute the skill calmly.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, also like in the Bible, or in that verse, it like God's saying we sh He didn't give us fear. Fear comes from Satan. And so in the Bible it also says, it repeats the phrase, do not fear, 365 times. So there's not a single day of the year where you should be fearing. You should always feel confident.
SPEAKER_00So the next question I have for you first is have is there any other goals that you've accomplished, and what were the steps that you took to accomplish this goal?
SPEAKER_01Uh yeah, so I recently broke 70 for the first time.
SPEAKER_00Jeez.
SPEAKER_01So for people who don't like know golf really well, basically there's courses with different pars. Usually they're just over 70 shots for a round of 18 holes, and recently I shot under 70 for the first time. It was at a par 72, and I shot a 69, so it's 100 bars. That's insane. Okay, yeah. So um, yeah, I would say breaking barriers like that are a huge mental gain in sports. Like, I was hovering around that 70 number where I shot 70 exactly, like probably five, six, seven times.
SPEAKER_00There's nothing.
SPEAKER_01Like just before I did it, I shot 70 a bunch of times. Like, exactly. And so now I think it's a lot easier to actually break 70 if I have a chance. Like the very next day after I shot at 69, I shot at 67.
SPEAKER_00Oh my god. That's that's honestly that's insane that you're shooting at 67, though, because I'm still I have the best I've shot at an 18 is like 100. But hey, uh I like to call myself as an amateur golfer. I I mean I've played with you a lot of the times and you just destroy me every single time. It's kind of embarrassing. I always put it into the woods, you know. Yeah, but um I wish I told myself these like different scenarios I could put in my head because most of the time I get down to myself when I play golf.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Okay, so um like a huge thing to breaking barriers like that in sports is like the mental side of it, right? So, like one thing I did that really helped me get to a point where I was shooting lower scores on average and eventually to when I broke 70, is I kind of like in my mind, I kinda like told myself, like, I kind of fed myself propaganda, if you will. I literally like kept telling myself, like, when I'd be on the course and I was tracking my own score, every time I got close to like that two under, three under par number, I would then have a bogey or two and get out of it. I'd like to tell myself, almost like um convince myself that I should be at two under three under par and then keep going under par because that's my where my skill level is. So your mind kind of creates barriers for itself. You almost have to like get yourself out of it by diluting yourself, almost like making you think something that's not true to get that confidence you need sometimes.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And I want to bring this thing up what confidence also is. So there's these two athletes. One athlete, he's actually not confident, but he's delusional because he thinks he's the best player in that entire room. But the person who's confident realizes hey, I developed a lot with my skill set, but I know there's more that I have to develop with. But I have these certain skill sets and I am ready to accomplish this goal. Where he's that person will succeed a lot more than the other person because the other person will be realized, whoa, I'm not truly the biggest person, and they'll fall into self-doubt, they'll fall into other emotions while this other person isn't even thinking about those things. So if you get what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. No, like I don't um I don't always tell myself, like, oh, I'm the best person here, but I kind of convince myself into being like I kind of tell myself I'm better than I am, so that I actually play better. Like I if I tell myself, oh, I can go break 70, even if I've never done it, I'm gonna be a lot more likely to go break 70.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So it's not necessarily saying I'm better than other people or getting like cocky in that sort of sense, but like just uh convincing myself like that I can do it is one of the best ways to help me like actually break a barrier.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and one thing I want to add to that part, because that part was amazing. You want to become a better version of yourself than you were yesterday. Because in one way I actually talked about this before in the other podcast of the shovel method. Of you're adding one shovel to the pile, and that is one way to truly build up your confidence as well. Thank you guys so much for listening. Um Eli will be on a lot more podcasts in the future. So please reach out to him if you have any other questions about how he's been able to Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Uh Elijah Latour golf on Instagram.
SPEAKER_00Um, how he's been able to progress as a golfer. And I hope all of you guys have a great day and become better versions of yourselves. And thank you for listening. Goodbye. Goodbye.