Read Golf Flow for Free Online

conscious effort, the habits that we create will emerge on their own from the practice and repetition that we’ve engaged in to help myelinate those circuits. This process is known as automaticity, whereby skills that we initially have to think about go underground and fire without conscious effort (think of how easily you write your name or answer your cell phone—that’s automaticity and myelin at work).
    As we practice, various brain regions work cohesively in a manner that is consistent with flow. This collaboration by the various brain regions, rather than the dominance of any one region, is responsible for the “quiet mind” that is often reported by athletes after they’ve been in flow. Flow is such a mentally efficient state of mind that its defining neural characteristic is synchronicity; the various parts work together as one.

Avoid Getting in Your Own Way
    As you may have experienced in your life, the fastest way to undermine automaticity and internal cohesion is to try to think actively about the motor task that you are trying to enact. When we try to steer our putter face through the impact area or deliberately think about our club position at the top, we are inviting electronic impulses from our cortex, the part of the brain that is available to conscious awareness, into the temporal region, which is responsible for automatic motor patterns. The transfer of these impulses disrupts the coherence between the various brain regions. By the time that these processes make their way into conscious awareness, they typically come out in the following form of a frustrated golfer: “I feel like I am getting in my own way.” What’s the answer? Based on what we know about skill development, it could be as simple as this: Practice diligently and then trust your myelin.
    A more thorough explanation tying into the paradox of control might be this: You’ve practiced your game. Through that practice you have deepened the habits by myelinating the neural circuitry. The myelin has insulated those circuits so that they will fire efficiently and effectively. The various regions of your brain work in harmony and become synched up through the myelination of nerve fibers. When you actively try to control the motor pattern (skill) that you are trying to execute, you interrupt the cohesion between the regions and undermine their habitual manner of functioning.
    After reading this section, you should now have an understanding of why golfers sometimes experience a sense of the mind turning against itself. In reality the mind doesn’t so much turn against itself as it falls out of sync when energizing a different module in the brain—the
thinking
part of the cortex. Focusing on the cluttering details of scores, outcomes, and mechanics energizes the cortex, which is pretty good at reading and doing math but is clueless about hitting a golf shot.
    The actual hitting of the golf shot is primarily located in a different brain module, but the key factor isn’t really which module is being called upon to what extent (just as it isn’t left brain versus right brain, as some psychologists erroneously preach). Rather, it is the cohesion between the modules and across the regions that constitutes mental efficiency and leads to flow. Consciously thinking about and trying to control your golfing motor patterns interrupts the efficiency with which your brain communicates with itself—with your body and your perceptual channels. Simply stated, trying to exert conscious control over your game interferes with your brain’s ability to control it for you!
    So when Adam Scott is effortlessly making nine birdies and is demonstrating total control over his game, he is gaining that control by not trying to control his shots. What is he giving up control of? In short, he is actively giving up trying to control the unconscious—and uncontrollable—region of the brain that learns and executes motor processes such as those used to play golf. When