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All right, let's get into it.
Hello and welcome back to the show.
Thank you so much for tuning in this week.
We've got an interview.
We've got a conversation.
We've got a chat that Ben had with Laura Ionello.
She's the head women's golf coach at the University of Texas.
She won the NCAA championship at Arizona in 2018 when she was coaching there.
And she is now building a program at texas.
Now golf is one of the most mentally demanding sports in the world, and you can sub mentally demanding with mildly infuriating, if you so chose.
Every shot matters mistakes, compound and, unlike most sports, you're not competing against an opponent that is across from you.
You are competing against yourself.
Laura has become an expert at helping young athletes master their minds under pressure, when every moment is measured, when comparison is constant and when the gap between intention and outcome can often create anxiety.
What makes this conversation valuable is that the mental game Laura teaches isn't just about golf.
Of course, it's about how any of us can develop mastery in high stakes environments where mistakes feel like they compound instantly.
Whether you're an entrepreneur, a parent, a creator, an athlete in your own field, this is about learning to stay present, let go without being careless and compete without comparing yourself to everybody else around you.
So without any further ado, let's get into it.
You are in Texas, you're in Austin right now and you are at when you say your golf course.
What is your golf course?
Well, I'm at the University of Texas and luckily, the University of Texas, we have our own golf course.
So it's called the University of Texas Golf Club.
The college I went to did not have its own golf course to say the least.
It was, that's so awesome.
So that is if I get this right.
That was one of the big things.
That kind of like pulled you away from Arizona was just to be at this.
A university like Texas that is, the entire athletic department is so committed to excellence.
Is that kind of fair to say?
A hundred percent.
To pull me away from Arizona, my alma mater, had to be something special.
And the people at the University of Texas the other coaches that I get to, I guess, have this walk with, as well as the resources, the facilities was a calling of why I needed to be here.
Yeah.
And you get to maybe run into Matthew McConaughey, so you never know.
Glenn Powell, hello.
Hello.
Amazing.
All right.
So give me a little sense of Let's maybe start off with.
We've framed this up for people a little bit, but you've had a lot of success individually as a golfer in your golfing career and then as a coach at University of Arizona and now building the program at UT.
Give me a little... And obviously, you are... It's multifaceted, right?
But why is for people that don't that are listening and have a sense of golf?
But why is golf like one in your sense?
I think of it as one of the purest mental sports.
I don't know if there's a sport that requires so much wrong words, but mental toughness, mental clarity.
I really this idea that you can be essentially a a scratch or a a subpar player at your local club, but you go into a competitive setting and the wheels can fall off really quickly and it makes it so much more challenging.
If I kind of said that, golf is one of the most mentally pure sports, what's your take on that?
It is.
And even more when you get to a very high level of play, you know, with the Scotty Schefflers and like our player, like Farrah O'Keefe, who's ranked seventh in the world and being able to manage their mental game, because golf, that's it.
You are playing your own golf ball.
You're playing with your own clubs.
You're managing your own game. there's no teammate to pass a ball to, or there's, it's nothing.
It's you're literally intrinsic for 18 holes.
College golf is a fun environment because it's the one time in your life that you actually get to be on a team, but yet you're still completely out by yourself.
And so I think something that we really try to work with our players because golf is such a mental game is making sure that they're in control.
Can they identify when they're losing control?
And when they have lost control, did they have the management skills of themselves through self-talk, body language focus, physical actions to get them from?
You know, like that red zone of lost control to in control?
And, you know, on the pro side though, luckily a lot of players, they have a caddy.
They have a caddy.
That also kind of not necessarily is just someone given numbers and giving course management, but literally is probably a mental performance coach on the golf course.
So the amateur level the, the amount of training that should be going into these athletes, on the mental side it's just as important as the physical.
That's awesome.
I've actually never thought of that in terms of the caddies acting as mental performing coaches.
But yeah, it makes so much sense.
And what an advantage if you have somebody that can kind of pull that.
If this is at all levels, particularly the level you play at golf, is that recognition that the true opponent is internal, as you said, like your self-talk, your attention, your emotions and the mental work is as much as the physical.
What does the mental work look like?
What is the actual nuts and bolts?
What are the things that you're doing with your athletes to help them when things start to or even before, and hopefully they don't spiral?
Right.
Well, gosh, I've read so many books.
I mean your book this summer really, really hit me hard with, just you know, chasing excellence, finding those behaviors that we can help our players.
And that's pretty much how I tagged you in my Instagram posts.
But I think the biggest thing is what I'm doing is I have my own coach.
I think coaches need coaches and always working on that.
But then with our players honestly.
What we're doing, especially at the University of Texas, is we have a mental performance coach.
We have someone who's working with us.
We actually are working with Brian Kane right now, on his MPM program.
And honestly, the best thing that we're doing.
It's our off season.
November December, January is the time where we actually get to dive in, have team meetings, talk the real talk of pressure expectations, all those things that's really hard to talk about.
And one thing that we do is we have a lot of drills that are just going to help our skillset, like identifying when we are in a red zone, like what are some things and routines that we can build.
You know, is it?
You know, if you notice you're in a red zone, you need to find a physical action where you're putting your glove in your bag, you are taking a deep breath, you're finding a focal point.
And then boom from there.
You're not taking your first step forward into the next shot until you have a routine of you know, maybe a verbal trigger like okay, next shot.
Those type of routines, those type of drills are really, really helping, I think, our ladies elevate and be ready for the LPGA or professional golf.
I'd love to hear more about like pause there for a second.
So those routines, those rituals, if somebody isn't feeling like they had just a because in golf, like that idea of every shot matters, can be paralyzing.
And I like that idea you said of like losing control and how do you regain it?
Some of those rituals and drills are is when they maybe first explain like what a red zone is, but when they find themselves in a red zone it's football season.
So everyone's thinking like inside the 20 yard line, but then it may just like kind of go a little bit deeper into that in terms of like, what does a drill look like?
How do you practice that routine of glove, self-talk, reframe, first step?
Can you just build that out a little bit more?
What may start with what is a red zone?
Okay.
So a red zone in golf is when you find yourself spiraling, or you spiral to the point where you I mean to the extreme of throwing a golf club, kicking your golf bag, but like on a higher level, a red zone would be that negative self-talk where you're literally telling yourself that you suck, you should quit the game.
Like, what are you doing?
Just all of those negatives form.
Like red zone is... you've lost absolute control of all pieces of yourself, right?
And so then, so what we do here at Texas is, you know, in the off season, we'll go out and we'll play, and we'll simulate competition, we'll simulate pressure, we'll do drills.
And so we make the ladies identify, okay, like, what are you feeling at this moment?
Okay, so here's our routine.
Here's, everybody's such an individual where everybody has to build their own routine.
You know, for one of my players, The first physical action for her would be putting her glove like recognizing first, first and foremost, you have to recognize the state that you're in.
If you can't recognize and if you're in denial of when you're in a red zone compared to the yellow, compared to the green, then you're at a really lost place and God help you.
But the first thing is identifying when you are in that space, when you are in that red zone, then one having a physical action to change that behavior.
So for some players, it might be cleaning the club.
Like you're not going to put that club in the bag until it's done cleaning, right?
The physical action.
Then I think after that You have to have some form of slight breathing routine or you need to take a deep breath, a focal point.
You know, maybe you need to just look at your golf bag, or you need to look at a tree in the distance.
Breathe, have something to release.
Because you're identifying you're in a red zone and you got to get out of it, right?
No good golf happens in a red zone.
That's what we talk about.
Like, might as well just carry your bag into the clubhouse and quit for the day, because there's no chance of playing good golf in that state of mind.
So you go from physical action to a focal point, then breathing.
And then from there, you have a verbal trigger.
We like to have a verbal trigger.
So something you would then say to yourself, self-talk, like, all right, let's go get it.
Next shot.
Or it's different for everybody.
You're like, hook them horns.
I don't know.
Everybody's got their different thing, right?
Yeah.
But to me the being able to identify and then quickly having a physical action of glove goes on the bag at a certain time when you know then you're going to regain control or cleaning your club or something like that.
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So good.
That idea of it starts with a recognition.
If you're in denial, you can't move forward at all.
What are the things that you use to help people recognize that?
Because if it's a third shot in a row that they...
I don't know, put in the water, it's pretty obvious that they're going to be pissed off.
They throw their club.
That's a pretty big red flag.
But what about when it like there's that little bit of creep, there's that little bit of drift, and maybe they're not in the red, but maybe, whatever the color is before red, they're orange where they're like not the little bit of self-doubt creeping in.
How do you get your athletes to sort of recognize and be aware of that sort of drift away?
Oh, that's a good question, Ben.
I mean they just have.
I don't know if there's a certain way for us to be able to actually get them to understand it.
They have to be so self aware of where they are.
But they also have to be very aware of, like when they're in control, and what does in control look like?
What does in control body language look like?
How does like, I, we literally practice walking.
I was talking to my my player the other day.
I said when you're feeling good and you're doing your thing, I said how do you walk?
And she literally showed the team, like, this is my walk when I'm playing good golf.
So I think you, first and foremost, you've got to identify when you're in control.
What does your behavior look like?
What does your self-talk look like?
What are you doing in journaling and making notes on, are you more target focused?
Are you more self-talk?
Do you have one swing?
I don't, everybody's different.
So I think the biggest and foremost thing you have to do is be able to absolutely identify when you're in the green zone, when you're in that go zone, that in control, because then you're instantly going to be able to recognize when you're not.
Yeah, it's awesome.
When you're doing this and you're working on people's response to pressure and you're simulating pressure, how do you go about doing that?
Because I think giving people an opportunity to do this, I think of it as the parallels to real life.
Training people in the gym, cool, you became a better gymmer.
It doesn't count for a whole lot.
But if we could use the gym as a training ground for life, holy smokes, this thing becomes so powerful and so transformative.
What is the things that you're doing to simulate pressure?
How do you go about doing that when it's probably just manufactured?
But unless you kind of put them in a pretty good simulation, you're probably not going to get what you want out of it.
What's that look like?
Yeah.
One of the biggest shifts in mindset that I've seen And it comes from Brian Kane and working with his program is making sure that of course we are that.
That saying right that one percent better every day.
But with that, what comes of?
That is like with my women.
I want them to look at every time we tee it up, every time that we are practicing, every time that we're competing.
It's an opportunity to do something great or to do something that has never been done before.
So every tournament that we tee it up, that is the most important tournament in our life.
The day that you go to the gym, that is the most important day of your gym.
It's not the day of the CrossFit finals.
That day in that gym is the finals of the CrossFit championship or the comp train championship, or whatever it is that you guys are doing right.
But like so, like that's where in your book Chasing Excellence too, it really got me to like we all have these end goals.
We all have these big telescope goals.
But if you don't dissect those into small goals and make sure that every day, if you're not seizing every day and making sure that you feel the same pressure every day, like the compounding effect of added pressure, added expectation.
When we do get to the national championship, we'll be there.
And so I want the women to know like when we play in Los Angeles in February that tournament, it's a great day.
You could have the course record or we could have the lowest team score in Texas history.
There's something great that could come from today.
So let's go into it as it's the most important competition, the most important day.
Yeah, we call it like the maximizing minutes when I was working with the athletes.
And I really like that idea of if you go light in practice, then competition is this other thing that it feels so much heavier.
It feels so much more... consequences to it.
But if you bring that attention, that effort, that meaning, that power to your every day, to maximizing every minute, competition doesn't feel that different.
I think that Gino Ariema, the women's basketball coach at UConn, talks about this a lot.
It's like the practice needs to be so much more intense. than the game.
And then, if you're doing that all of a sudden, the thing people miss is that gives you the opportunity to truly work through the mental frameworks.
It gives you an opportunity to work through the mental toughness.
If you keep that as something separate and then you only kind of like get into these high pressure situations in game time.
You haven't put in the 10000 hours to become that master.
So it's really important, not only for high level athletes that, like you're working with, but for anybody that's going to the gym all the time, is every single moment, if you have this idea of where am I in that green?
What are the zones?
You have green, what?
Green, yellow, red.
Green, yellow, red.
Yeah.
Where am like, if you're always kind of had that awareness level of where am I in this green yellow red, and then all of a sudden, once you pop out of green, do you have that like level of intentionality, that level of awareness?
Are you recognizing the shift?
Whatever it is your body language, your thought patterns, your actual language, your actions, your gut feel, whatever it might be so that you can try to work towards bringing yourself back towards green.
We call it work back towards center.
That's a really...
What an awesome opportunity.
The opportunities are everywhere, right?
They're all the time.
So I think it's really important to have that high level of intentionality, no matter whether it's the championship game or practice or just walking around and going through class to class and being with your peers.
Mm-hmm.
So you've got a chance to do this a couple of times now, but when you move from Arizona to Texas to take over this new team, what's your thoughts on like culture building?
How do you think about creating not just a?
Because, as you said, golf is an individual sport, but you compete in a team.
The team wins or loses.
So it does matter.
What is the team?
The team format is just like individual play though, correct?
It's not like Ryder Cup style or how does it go?
So there's a.
We always travel as a team, five women play and then four of the scores.
Four out of the five accumulates the team score.
So it's and it's super competitive.
Like women's golf is really, really elevating, just like many women's sports.
So it's it's intense.
Yeah.
So when you're thinking about building that up and it is intense, it's super competitive and it is the best four scores, it's a team.
What are you thinking about doing in terms of building a culture for your team?
Well, as for like for my time at Arizona and for my time in Texas, I would say, when it comes to building a strong culture and leading women as a coach, for me, you know it all comes down to making sure I know my mission and then I have a vision for that.
And then it does that align with like, my core principles, you know?
And so, like I always like to say, my core principles at Texas is we have this saying Texas, fight right.
That's our thing.
So Texas fight, fight as being our women are going to come.
They're going to be super focused F for in fight.
Then we're going to come to the playing field every day with a level of intensity.
We're going to have a G growth mindset.
We're going to continue to learn and get better every day.
We have H.
We're going to give our full heart into everything that we do and then we're going to have we're going to be a good team, we're going to be good teammates and have good teamwork and work together.
I think that's at arizona it was a little bit different, but we kind of make sure that.
Why i coach is because always going to be making sure that i'm giving the best to women so that they can be the best athletes And the best women mothers, just people in general.
Like that's my mission.
Like I don't coach.
I'm a golf coach.
I'm not a football coach.
So I'm not doing this to be a gazillionaire, but I'm pouring into people.
I want to build these young girls and I want to help them be great women on and off the field or the golf course.
Right.
And then I think you know when you, when I think about my vision.
My vision is to be the to win the first NCAA championship at the university of Texas, and women's golf, men's golf, is one four.
So it's like, we, that's, you know, I want to win the sec championship.
I want to graduate my student athletes.
I want to make sure that my women are, are prepared for the next stage of life.
If it's professional golfer or working for Charles Schwab.
I make sure that they have these like a strong mental toughness mindset right.
That these kids need today.
And then into that, get 1% better, right?
That's my vision for that.
So it's like just making sure that absolutely everybody has an MVP.
They know their mission, they have their vision and then they know their principles that define them.
I love that.
Yeah.
So much what we talk about as well, that vision, mission, principles, and so on.
And I really like the Texas fight and F-I-G-H-T.
And when it ends with that T, that team.
How do you navigate this sort of like weird dichotomy of like you want your team?
It's kind of like the pie is only so big and I want to get my sliced And if somebody else gets a bigger slice that means less for me.
Meaning you want to be there to support and help your team grow and be better.
But if someone on the team is shooting a 68 and you shoot a 70, they're ahead of you.
They're better than you.
And now you might not be one of those top five.
How do you create that team dynamic when it's sort of, it seems like, unlike basketball, right?
Which if your teammate gets better, they get better at passing the ball.
It means more opportunity for you.
If they're better at defense, it means that it might create more offense for you.
It's like there's more...
If your quarterback's better and you're a receiver, that helps you.
In this sense, it seems like the better that teammates get around you might mean less opportunity for you.
How do you navigate that sort of dichotomy?
Yeah, but to your point, that's one of my biggest recruiting pieces is the top five people that we surround ourselves with is really what sums us who we are.
And so you know if I have nine women on the team, And so that means four women are usually staying home where the other five are playing.
And so something that we do is we identify elite mindset.
We identify elite behaviors.
Golf is a very statistical sport where you know, we're knowing about our, Our strokes gained, putting our fairways hit and blah blah, blah.
So you can flat out see stroke average, everything.
The best players on the team are this, this, this, this.
You're down here because your skills, your stats are down, down, down, down.
And something that we do to encourage a team culture and a cohesion is we've started everybody sharing their habits.
Like James Cleary says in Atomic Habits, it's all about stacking habits.
And so... if maybe one of your teammates is doing this habit, we share.
So we share on an app with everybody and everybody sees the habits that they're doing, which has been really, really helpful.
We just started this process actually.
And so therefore we also have accountability buddies.
Every teammate on the team has one other teammate that is accountability buddy to check in on them.
And if, If they're like marking red on all their habits, like that person's going to check in on them like yo, what's going on?
You doing OK?
Because I think the most important thing about a team is, of course, having the same vision.
The same vision, the same mission.
Everybody's going to have their own core principles.
But I think also there's a human effect where you actually do need to know that, like your team is there for you.
They care about you.
You can trust them.
That is huge.
And so I think that is something with sharing habits and having accountability.
Buddy has really, really helped to make sure that the team is working together, learning from one another because like, you'll never not go to the gym, the gym or to go lift weights if you know somebody's going to meet you there 5 30, you would never let that person down right.
So it's just, it's all kind of that same principle.
What are some of those habits that people track?
Well, even though shockingly, as a D1 athlete, it's simple.
Lift weights an extra three times a week besides training in our team time, right?
Mobility work, getting a 15 minute stretch in before bed.
One of them is A podcast, like a 15 minute podcast per day.
Another one would be make sure I get 160 ounces of water.
Another one would be getting 10,000 steps a day, which golfing it can be.
Me, it's not hitting the snooze button.
Like, you know, I've got two kids.
I got to get them up ready to school.
And I'm like, I want to sleep 10 minutes so bad, but not hitting snooze.
Basic life stuff that will make us better.
Me, it's more protein.
At 45 years old, I'm like it's so hard for me to get 100 grams of protein in a day.
But it's in my habit share and I'm working on it.
So little stuff, little stuff.
Could be making your bed.
Do they choose their habits, or is there like a list and you see how many of those things you can get?
So, to start off, we were as coaches.
We're kind of directing them like OK, we're going to listen to this two minute podcast every day.
So everybody's got that one.
But I would say majority of all their habits.
We are self-driven, you know, but I think it's been great because I think they are learning from another.
You know I have like the ninth girl on my team looking at the habits of my number one player on my team.
And they're like, oh, wow.
She does this.
Oh, I should do this.
You know, so it's also a way they're learning from one another, which has been really great.
That's super cool.
What's the app that you got?
Is it just a regular habit tracking app or is it something that you guys created?
Oh, it's Habit Share.
It's Brian Cain.
Brian Cain had us do it.
Got it.
Love it.
How long you guys been working with Brian?
A couple of weeks now, he has worked with Jim Schlossnagel.
Jim Schlossnagel is our amazing baseball coach here at the University of Texas.
And I had listened to Jim talk and I've gotten to know Jim and he's always referencing Brian K, So I was like you know what?
I said, I got to look into this.
But Schloss has been working with Brian for 20 years now.
And even though he doesn't work with a lot of golfers, he works with just a lot of professional baseball players.
And baseball, you don't think is an individual sport, but it really is.
You know, when you're a pitcher on the mound, sorry, you're by yourself.
Or if you're in the batter's box, you're by yourself.
So in the fact that I have Jim Schlossnagel here as a resource to kind of lock arms with and learn from him and how he's done things has been great.
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You know, I went and I just gave a talk to a baseball team last week.
And one of the things I talked to them about was when I went out and worked with the Navy SEALs.
They brought me out there to talk and work with them a little bit.
You know, we were swapping, no pun intended, war, that's the wrong word.
We were swapping methodologies, right?
And I asked them, I was like, what's the hardest evolution you've ever had to go through?
And you expect what you've seen, right?
You expect, like the log PT, the cold, the sleepless nights, hell week, the obstacle course carrying the boats, like All of this stuff that is just so physically brutal.
And they actually said it was the hardest evolution was after BUDS, which is the trial phase.
And it was what they call the night swim.
And the night swim is where they swim.
I forget the distance, but a mile or two at night through the San Diego Harbor out to a buoy.
And once they find that waypoint they have to basically take a 90-degree turn and swim another three-quarters of a mile to their destination.
And if you miss the waypoint, you basically just swim out forever because there's no place to go.
And it's nighttime, so they can't see anything other than their finning with their masks on, and they're just staring at their wrist, which has a glowing GPS.
And the reason it's so challenging is because it's 100% mental.
There's no physical aspect to it at all.
And Being in the dark for those hours and hours by themselves, essentially.
Yes, they go with swim buddies.
But, just as you said, when you're in the batter's box you're by yourself.
Golf, yes, you're on a team, but when you step into the tee, you're by yourself.
Yes, you're on a team with team buddies, but you're swimming by yourself.
You can't see them or hear them staring at this glowing watch.
And they also know that as they swim through the harbor underneath where the aircraft carriers are, the great white sharks hang out underneath, on the other side of these aircraft carriers, because the current doesn't pull them away.
And in the middle of this swim, they'll get, they said, bumped up.
Something will bump up against them that is bigger than a human.
And the way that their mental storytelling spirals out of control is so bad that it can cause these panic attacks, and it's really hard.
And the analogy I gave to the baseball team was like, baseball is the night swim of team sports.
It is the only sport where you are basically out there by yourself, with nothing but your thoughts, for minutes and minutes and minutes and minutes between action.
Mine is pitcher-catcher, right?
But if you play right field and it's not your turn up in the inning, you might go 25 minutes without doing anything other than standing in the field.
And if you made a mistake in the previous inning— what is going through your head and it can just destroy you unless you have which I love, your little protocol of like.
Recognize the action or the physical action, the breath, the focal point, the verbal trigger, that idea of we're going to proactively take these steps to recenter
That's such a cool thing that is the same as golf.
Golf is even like baseball times four or five, I think, because I can imagine somebody that hasn't hit a good shot in a hole or two, or has a bad hole, gets up and then just like if they have that sort of negative mindset, they're in the red.
No good golf happens in the red, as you said.
That ability to recenter makes it so, so important.
Are there other things that you do to help people sort of I don't know if it's recalibrate or have a short memory, something that allows them to, as they get up to, they might've gone through the protocol, like you said, but then they do address the ball the next time and they still feel something.
Is it still that same thing just as a different way?
They step back and kind of take a couple more practice swings or what is that protocol when they feel it again.
Yeah, I think you just have to continue to stick to your process of getting out of red back to the green.
I don't have any magic words as a coach, but I said, sometimes you just have days where it just you can't get yourself out of it mentally.
And that's okay.
And I tell my women that, you know what?
We're going to shake off today.
Give yourself grace.
And tomorrow we will do it all over again.
Right.
And the biggest thing for me with women, or even just with my own daughters, is just give them a hug and be like we got you.
It's going to be OK.
And that's why we got four other ladies on this team that are fighting.
But a big thing that I love is that I preach to my women that confidence is not a feeling.
It is a choice.
And so therefore, like nerves and excitement on the first tee are awesome because you feel alive.
And it means that it's something special, you know, just before you start any competition.
The nervousness that to me is not lack of confidence.
If you think it's a lack of confidence, then you are doomed, right?
But like making sure that they know that confidence is a choice and that I always say ABC always behave confidently.
It's a Brian Cain thing as well where I think that's the best thing that we can do as coaches is give them a hug and just remind them like hey, you know what great performers do.
So Zap out of it and get out there and go to the next hole and you got this.
That self-talk, just reinforcing all those things like put your shoulders up high, head up high.
As a coach, we can only control so little, right?
But we can be that little voice of reason of like, you know, you've got this.
Yeah, I love that.
You said some cool things that I want to just kind of like double down on a little bit, because it's easy to kind of just go yeah yeah yeah, yeah.
I actually think that of all those, the hug, it sounds like nothing.
That hug I found to be is like one of the more powerful things, which is I love you for you as who you are, as a person, not as a performer.
And so many people, especially high level athletes, have this perfectionism mindset which is like A lot of it will stem from it's kind of this weird dichotomy, right?
One of the reasons that people become such high achievers is because they associate love with accolades, awards and attention right.
That's how they got it as a, I need to do, if I do well, I will get affection.
If I don't, I don't.
And when you give people that I was working with Matt Fraser, who was one of the best athletes in our sport for so long.
He's like whether I win or I come in last, I get the same hug and the same feeling coming off the floor from my wife, Sammy.
Like it doesn't matter.
And knowing that allows me to compete so much more free than there's already the pressure of this.
There's already this feeling I have.
And oh my gosh, If I don't get this, I've seen it the other way, which is athletes get off the floor and then their family comes up to them.
And the first thing they said is what went wrong?
What happened?
What happened is such a common response when it doesn't go right.
And that just if people understood how much influence that had and you as a coach, whether you're doing it consciously or subconsciously is so powerful.
That idea of I'm going to reward you for the person you are, not your performance.
But in my world, I just worked this CGX camp in Dallas.
It's a top 25 for junior golfers who want to play division one golf.
And that's funny.
You said that because one of my things that I told parents, because I do think reflection is really important on performance, but parents sometimes when they're talking to their junior golfer, they only are, like what happened today.
Or what were you thinking on that hole?
Or how could you hit that shot?
What were you thinking?
And so-
Another thing is just keeping the conversation on well, better, how.
I talked about this extensively with these parents this last week of making sure that the communication you have is what did I do?
Well,
What can I do better?
And then how can I make improvements?
Or what can I do to make sure that I grow from this experience?
And it doesn't matter.
Kobe Bryant always said he had the same emotion whether or not he won the game or he lost the game, because it's like you have to reflect and take things from both.
Love it.
Yeah, absolutely.
The other thing we're saying is kind of how to like recenter is breath, but also body language.
And I think that's so cool because what I've found working with these athletes and also from working with the SEALs when I went out there, there was so much like overlap in terms of like our approach, their approach.
The biggest difference was and this was, I'm trying to remember, seven or eight years ago how much emphasis they put into breath.
And we were not doing that.
And when I came back it was a huge thing I put into practice was this intentionality understanding that breath is bidirectional, right.
If you get stressed anxious nervous fearful, which would then lead to panic or anxiety, your breath gets short and shallow in your chest.
Mm-hmm.
When you're relaxed in the parasympathetic state and ready to perform at your peak.
It's in your belly, it's deep, it's diaphragmatic.
Well, it works the other way as well.
If you breathe from your belly, it puts you into that rest and relaxed state.
If you breathe from your chest, it puts you into that state.
So that understanding of how we can kind of like, maybe like biohack your way back into a calm state is so cool and fascinating.
There's one of the sympathetic sigh.
Are you familiar with this?
It's kind of been like Huberman's talked about this, but it's the double inhale with an exhale.
It's like the fastest way to put yourself back into a rested state, which is this full inhale.
But then you go again and then
This double inhale.
And funny enough, the breathwork coach, I've worked with about three different breathwork coaches.
The one we work with now, that's like 80% of her practice.
Every breathwork session is double inhale.
And you double inhale, exhale for like 40 minutes in a row.
And it's crazy what kind of state it puts you into.
But it's inhale, inhale, let go.
So it's belly, chest, out.
Belly, chest, out.
With this little...
And like three of those, it's amazing.
I think Humor actually talked about this when he went on like a late night talk show as well.
That's so cool.
And then body language as well.
Body language is the same thing.
If you feel crappy, you're going to slump shoulders, shuffled feet, head down, eyes drooped.
If you're proud, it's chest up, shoulders back, proud gates, eyes up.
And it's like, well, you can buy out.
That's bi-directional as well.
Mm-hmm.
Really cool that you.
I think golf is just so fascinating in terms of this, the mental aspect of this.
Do you have any take on lose?
You talk about Kobe Bryant, same response winner or loss.
This kind of like a post game, what did you do well which, and so on.
Is that your, your, how you kind of like work through like losing in general?
Like losing, it can be really hard for athletes, yet every athlete experiences it.
Like every single one goes through this.
Do you have a framework or do you have a thing that you kind of work through with your athletes in terms of what losing means and how to deal with it?
Well, we get together with our athletes after every tournament and we dissect, right?
Just like the well, better how.
But I think, as for the losing, the one thing, that we really, really hit home and we get the group together at a tournament, after the final round, actually after every day, we get the group together and we make sure we absolutely talk about the wins of the round.
Like congrats, Lauren Kim.
She shoots a 67, you know, Pharaoh Keefe.
She shot even today, Angela, you birdied two of your last three holes.
Right.
And everybody like cheers for them, claps for them.
But then I think you do have to dissect like Cindy shoe.
She's ranked 30th in the world.
She just won her first college tournament, like a month ago in Hawaii, and so meeting with her, you know she's on cloud nine.
She's thinking I'm, I'm ready for pro-life, I'm good, but like it's great.
Because then we talk about what was the difference Cindy, you know, what was the difference between you winning this week?
What were your behaviors?
What did you do?
We really really focused on like, reflecting on her mindset, like what were you thinking?
Did you keep your phone in your golf bag?
Phones are the biggest distractions ever.
Were you in the green zone?
Were you able to notice when you went into the yellow zone and you quickly got back into the green zone?
So I think it's all about making sure you absolutely reflect on every performance.
Even if you're just in the gym and you're having a weight session that day, like journal, reflect on it, be like okay, you know, like I got better at my my squat today, my single leg squat, I don't know, you name it and just like, just notice.
But you have to make sure you also recognize the accomplishments and make sure you you build yourself up and then also reflect on maybe I didn't have my best day on my deadlift and that's okay, like.
So tomorrow are going to have a plan in so much of like our days, our PM routine dictates our AM routine.
And I'm just big on all of that.
So it's all about reflection, all about diving in and just making sure that they they understand the wins and the losses and the importance of reflecting both.
So, so yeah, that's phenomenal.
I, that idea of the journaling is so, so great.
And that idea of like doubling down and bringing awareness.
I think it's so great.
The awareness to the wins and what you did well in the practice and the habits and the mindset you did leading up to that is so cool.
The uh.
One of the things I've shared before is that I wish that I, when I was a competitive athlete and I certainly was a lot better as a coach than an athlete whenever I would do well.
This is such a bad habit.
And it's like, I wish I had this awareness level.
Whenever I do well, I would pass it off as like a, I got lucky.
It was an excuse.
Like the events lined up for me, right?
Oh, the competitors had a bad day.
Like I just got lucky.
And whenever I had a bad one, I would internalize it.
And I would go like, damn, like, yeah, you're just not that.
And I was doing the exact opposite of what I should have been doing, which is internalizing all of the goods and the positives.
That's how I compete.
I'm one of the top athletes in the sport.
I can handle hard things.
And then anything that went awry, didn't line up with expectation, and go like oh well, that's a one-off.
That wasn't like me.
That was just unlucky.
Whether they're doing it that specifically or not, that journaling aspect of that reflection and bringing awareness to the thought patterns I can't overstate that enough.
When they journal, do you give them prompts?
Do you give them ideas of what to kind of focus on?
Or is it kind of like just have a journal, write down things after training sessions and matches?
No, no.
It's in our stats reports.
It's literally identifying the well better how, and then it's a discussion, and then they take what they want after that to journal.
But it's so true though.
I tell my team all the time.
I did play professional golf and I would say I was a much better athlete than I am a coach.
And what pains me to this day is I look at my time when I did play on the LPGA tour and I literally look at myself as if I would have had a coach like me who was preparing them for like the red zones and the drills to get back.
Or I think about I valued myself worth so much with whether or not I played well or not, or I made the cut or I made a check.
And I look back and I'm like God.
If I would have had someone like me, I know I would have been great.
I would have been better.
And I probably wouldn't have been a golf coach because I would have made more money.
But, but then again, you know, I feel like there's a time and a place and a calling, and this is where I'm meant to be.
And then I have two small daughters.
And so a thing that I live by too is, if You know, if I was dropping my two daughters off to a golf coach, if I was dropping them off to myself, would I feel safe?
Would I feel comfortable?
Would I feel confident that they were in good hands?
Because I also look at it as I'm taking care of someone else's pride and joy their daughters, right.
So I need to make sure that I treat them as if I was coaching my own.
Such a strong perspective, like zooming out a little bit and realizing that it's a little bit more than just your backswing, your putting your chipping.
It's about, you know, building people and playing that role for people.
Laura, thank you so much for joining us.
This has been awesome and all the best of luck to you and Hook Em Horns for the rest of the way.
Thank you, Ben.
I appreciate your time and we'll keep following and keep writing books.
I can't wait to read more and more.
I love it.
Thanks so much.
Thank you so very much for tuning into the show this week.
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