TULSA, OKLAHOMA - MAY 19: The Wanamaker trophy is seen on the first tee during the first round of ... [+]
You can learn a lot about golf by watching one of the majors like the 2022 PGA Championship. But you can learn even more about success in life by watching press conferences with the tournament’s leaders.
Mito Pereira held the lead at the end of the third day. But he nearly fell behind after making bogey (one over par) on four of five holes in the middle of his round. Pereira turned it around over the last six holes to sit on a three-hole lead.
When reporters asked Pereira how he held it together, he said, “It’s all mental.”
He’s right. The mind game is so important in golf that most professionals employ mental coaches on their teams. Jason Goldsmith is one such coach, a sports performance expert who co-wrote Take Charge of You with YUM brand founder David Novak.
Goldsmith has coached many top 50 golfers, including a former world’s number one player. I caught up with Goldsmith via Zoom a day before he traveled to a professional golf tournament to work with some of his clients.
Goldsmith says pro golfers—especially world-class champions—have learned a mental habit that entrepreneurs and leaders should adopt to propel their career success. It’s a mental strategy called “reframing.”
Turn Setbacks into Possibilities
According to Goldsmith, “How we frame a situation in our minds makes an enormous difference because the only thing we really control is the attitude we bring to any given experience.”
By reframing setbacks or perceived failures as opportunities to improve, your brain and body will respond in a way that will move you closer—not further—from your goal.
When most people suffer even a minor mistake like hitting a bad golf shot or fumbling through a PowerPoint slide, the negative voices in their head kicks in. Goldsmith describes the voices as the ones “that tell us we can’t, we shouldn’t, or that we’re not good enough.”
Left unchecked, those negative internal thoughts will derail even the most promising careers.
Professional athletes have the same thoughts, but they don’t feed them. Instead, they cut them off by immediately switching their mindset and reframing the unwanted outcome as an opportunity to improve. For example, Mito didn’t see his stretch of bogeys as a failure. “I was putting well. They just barely missed,” he said. By not indulging negative voices, Mito said he could maintain his confidence even though the outcome wasn’t what he had hoped to see.
Tiger Woods is an expert at the mental game and teaches his son, Charlie, the art of reframing. Woods noticed that once Charlie would get frustrated over a poor shot, he would replay it in his mind, allowing it to unravel the rest of his advice. Woods then offered Charlie a master class in reframing. Woods replayed the conversation for Golf Digest:
“I said, ‘Son, I don’t care how mad you get. Your head could blow off for all I care just as long as you’re 100 percent committed to the next shot. That’s all that matters. That next shot should be the most important shot in your life. It should be more important than breathing.”
According to Goldsmith, Woods was teaching his son that even feelings like frustration or anger are not setbacks as long as you see them as an opportunity to grow and to learn a better way to deal with those inevitable feelings.
Turn Nots into “Not Yets”
One of Goldsmith’s favorite reframing techniques is to add the word yet to the end of a sentence. If a golfer tells Goldsmith, “I can’t make the shot. I’ve never made it from this distance,” Goldsmith recommends one simple change to the sentence: I’ve never made a shot from this distance—yet.”
“One small word has changed the equation,” says Goldsmith. Just because you haven’t done something before doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It simply means that you haven’t done it—yet.
Think of doing something outside your comfort zone like giving a presentation in front of your class or your business peers. Instead of saying, “I’m not comfortable at public speaking,” change the sentence to: “I’m not comfortable public speaking—yet.”
In many ways, public speaking is like a sport. It’s a skill anyone can refine with practice and the right mental attitude. You can improve your public-speaking skills dramatically as long as you avoid a mindset that holds back your progress.
Adopt the mindset of a champion athlete. Turn setbacks into possibilities, reframe disappointments as opportunities, and turn your nots into not yets.
