In this episode, I dig into the one sense you've probably never thought about — the one quietly running your entire swing while your eyes take all the credit. I tell the story of the blindfold drill that makes your contact better instead of worse, and the strange rubber-hand experiment that reveals the real twist: your eyes aren't powerful because they're accurate. They're powerful because they win every argument with your body — even when they're dead wrong.

Then I break down exactly what that looks like when you're steering a putt or peeking on an iron, and I hand you a simple eyes-closed drill you can run on the practice green today. If you've ever felt like you're guiding the club instead of swinging it, this one's going to land. Wait until you hear what starts happening around the sixth swing.

If you've ever stood over a short putt and felt your hands completely betray you — this one's for you. Today I'm getting into one of golf's most misunderstood and most stigmatized experiences: the yips. And what I found in the research genuinely surprised me.

It turns out, not all yips are created equal. Some are anxiety-driven. Some are neurological. And treating the wrong one with the wrong approach doesn't just waste time — it quietly convinces you that you're too weak to fix something that was never about weakness in the first place. Today I break down what's actually happening in your brain, what the science says about each type, and why the hardest part of beating the yips has nothing to do with the treatment.

This episode draws from Lanny Bassham's "With Winning in Mind" to explore how a golfer's self-image quietly controls their performance — and how to start rewriting that story one shot at a time. The core insight is simple but powerful: you will always perform consistently with the identity you hold about yourself.

The practical tool is just two words. After a good shot, say "that's like me." After a poor one, say "that's not like me." Do that long enough, and you stop performing like the golfer you've always been — and start becoming the one you've decided to be.

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This episode is about one thing: tempo. Not someone else's — yours. Ludvig Åberg looks effortless not because he's talented, but because his rhythm never changes regardless of the moment. Dr. Joan Vickers' research confirms it — elite performers aren't more technically precise, they're more rhythmically consistent. Your tempo isn't a flaw. It's a fingerprint.

Find it on the range. Protect it with a routine. And when pressure hits and the music starts to fade — don't go through the motions. Find the beat. And dance.

This episode explores one of golf's most overlooked and surprisingly well-supported mental performance hacks: chewing gum. It opens with my personal observation of Tiger Woods chomping away through his iconic 2019 Masters victory and Collin Morikawa doing the same on Tour, then weaves in the neuroscience behind why — including research shared by Adam Grant showing that gum chewing increases cerebral blood flow, sharpens focus, and reduces stress, especially under pressure. Phil Mickelson's frontal cortex theory ties it all together with the practical on-course science.

The episode then translates the research into a simple, immediately actionable strategy any golfer can use starting their very next round. The central message is that performance edges don't have to be complex — sometimes the gap between a drifting brain and a focused one is exactly two dollars and an orange flavor.

This episode opens with a personal birdie streak at Pelican Hill Golf Club and uses it to introduce one of psychology's most surprising findings — the hot hand doesn't actually exist. Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky studied thousands of NBA shots in 1985 and found that a player on a streak is no more likely to convert the next attempt than one who just missed several straight. The streak is real. The predictive power of it is zero.

The golf application is where it hits hardest. Three birdies and your brain tells you to press. Three bogeys and it tells you to protect. Neither instruction is coming from the course — both are coming from a pattern your brain invented. The key distinction is whether something genuinely improved, or whether you simply started believing the next shot was owed to you. One is useful information. The other is the fallacy. The fix is simple and hard: play the shot, not the story.

Joan Vickers' Quiet Eye research reveals that elite golfers hold a long, locked gaze on a specific spot on the back of the ball for about two to three seconds before and through their stroke — while amateur golfers let their eyes wander between the ball, the hole, and the line. That half-second difference in gaze duration turns out to be the difference between a quiet nervous system and a hesitant one. The eyes aren't just watching the ball — they're telling the brain the environment is stable enough to commit.

The practical takeaway is simple but counterintuitive: stop trying to look at the target during execution and start giving your eyes one very specific job — one dimple, locked, quiet. Golfers trained on Quiet Eye technique outperformed those who worked on their actual stroke mechanics, and did it with lower heart rates and less muscle tension under pressure. The target lives in the mind. The gaze lives on the ball. Get those two things in the right place at the right time, and the shot almost takes care of itself.

City Slickers gave us one of the most memorable lines in movie history — Curly's one finger, one thing. Legendary golf instructor Harvey Penick lived by the same philosophy, giving students a single thought per lesson and nothing more. The reason? The human brain can't manage a committee meeting and still swing a golf club. Researchers call it paralysis by analysis: too many competing thoughts interrupt the automatic muscle memory built through years of practice, and the result is a swing that never had a chance.

The fix is simple, even if it isn't easy. Before your next round, identify the one thing you've been working on — a swing thought from your pro, a feel you've been chasing — and let that be your thread from the first tee to the 18th green. On the range, same rule: one problem, worked on until the body starts to understand. Not five fixes stacked on top of each other. Just one thing, trusted completely. As Curly would say, that's what you've gotta figure out — and now you have.

Is it true that staying balanced with a good follow-through — even after a bad shot — actually helps your next shot? According to neuroscience, yes. Researchers Antonio Damasio and Paula Niedenthal found that your body and brain are in a constant two-way conversation. Slumping and dropping your head after a bad shot doesn't just look defeated — it tells your brain to feel defeated.

The fix is simpler than you think. Holding your finish, keeping your head up, and walking tall sends a different signal to your brain — one that says manageable, still here, let's go. You can't always control your thoughts after a bad shot. But you can control your posture. And it turns out, that's enough to change what comes next.

You missed a three-foot birdie putt — and your brain immediately decided that chances like that don't come around very often. That's counterfactual scarcity: a near-miss that doesn't just sting in the moment, but sends a signal forward that opportunity is rare. And that belief is what loads the pressure onto every close look you get from that point on.

The fix isn't positive thinking. It's a more accurate story. You hit it close because you can hit it close. The scarcity was never real — your brain just told you it was. Stop thinking scarcity, start thinking series.