Entry 25.7

So far in our miniseries on growth, learning and maturation we have discussed two of the three ways these happen. First, how the choices we make in the face of pain and hurt can cause, delay or negate growth. Even as far back as when you were learning to walk, this occurred. Young you stood up, let go of the couch and lifted a foot. Even if you didn’t fall the first time you tried, eventually you did. Sometimes those spills are spectacular to watch but painful. Even as young as you were, you made a decision. Most of us, probably were in the delay phase. We didn’t stand up crying after a face plant and immediately try to go again. We waited a bit until we calmed down and then made our next attempt. Some of us may have hopped right up and fought through the pain. But doubtful. What we know didn’t happen is that you decided that walking was stupid and that you were going to crawl for the rest of your lives. At least I haven’t seen any of you crawling around. But now let’s look at growth, learning and maturation through a third lens: cognitive psychology.

Recently my research and study into how to help players enjoy the game more and score better has led me down a road into cognitive psychology. I have taken several courses in psychology before as part of my degree in Criminal Justice: Introductory Psychology, Abnormal Psychology and Forensic Psychology. Cognitive psychology is the study of problem solving. While my college level psychology courses were taught by educators with doctorate degrees in psychology, most of my research has me learning cognitive psychology from people with doctorate degrees in economics. Two of my favorite classes I took while at Methodist were Macroeconomics and Microeconomics. I took both of those courses with Dr. Josiah Baker which if you have taken a class with him, you know he is not the professor to take if you are just looking for the easy A. It wasn’t the information he taught that made me enjoy his classes, it was the way he challenged me to think that I liked.

When we look at problem solving, we must discuss some of the pitfalls. First off, we must look at heuristics. Heuristics are basically shortcuts that our brains take to solve problems. Instead of wasting a bunch of time and energy trying to solve problems that we have seen before, our brains learn to recognize patterns in problems and apply answers to those problems that work. The better we get at recognizing these patterns and applying answers quickly, the more intuitive that we get. Intuition is the ability to recognize something immediately without the need for conscious reasoning. Intuition is what allows firefighters and chess masters to quickly solve problems. I use these two fields because they have been researched extensively when it comes to intuition. A chess master didn’t start at as such. They started out at beginners learning how each piece behaves on the board. But as they continued to practice, they begin to see patterns based on the arrangements of the pieces and understand follow on moves that can happen based on those patterns. These are the professions where the “10,000-hour rule” reigns supreme. The more you practice, the better you become at recognizing patterns and what solutions can be applied to solve the problem quickly.

Some cognitive psychologists also put golfers into this category. And maybe it is my ego as a golfer and golf instructor that say that golfers do not belong in this category. I just think my insider knowledge about the randomness and amount of luck that is involved, even for the best players in the world, that makes me say that. You see there are two kinds of learning environments, one that allows intuition to reign supreme and one where intuition just doesn’t work. The first learning environment is a kind learning environment, where situations are governed by stable rules and repetitive patterns, feedback is quick and accurate and work next year will look like work last year. Sounds similar to golf, until you hear about wicked learning environments. In wicked environments, the rules may change or not exist, patterns don’t just repeat, feedback could be delayed, absent or inaccurate, all sorts of complicated human dynamics are involved and work next year may not look like work last year.

This is why I think golf is so hard. The practice facility is a kind learning environment for the most part but the golf course, especially in competitive golf, is most definitely not kind. The issue is that spending so much time on the practice facilities builds intuition that deals with the problems that we see there and so we look like a great golfer in that environment. As soon as we step on the golf course though, a great deal of that intuition is worthless. Bounces matter, there’s slope, leaves, pinecones, there are no second chances and sometimes you have no idea why the golf ball did what it did. That’s why I have been trying to add more wicked environments to the practice facility. A short game golf course that changes every day, an uneven lie station, a fairway bunker station and hopefully by the fall, a station from the trees. It’s also why I am trying to move more and more of my lessons from my Swing Lab to the golf course. At the PGA Show, David Orr, described the learning environments perfectly. First you have the Lab which is a safe and controlled environment. Next you have the Zoo, or the practice area. The final area, the Wild, is the golf course. Hopefully that picture clears it up for you. We try to make the Zoo look like the Wild, but the rules are different. That’s why some animals just can never be released from the Zoo back into the Wild. It’s why my cat showed up on my back porch last fall skinny as a rail weighing half what she should. It was obvious she had been a house cat who got loose. Bones could survive in the Zoo (house), but not in the Wild.

Now that we have addressed why intuition isn’t the greatest fallback for golf and why the learning environments we use are incorrect for optimal learning of the problem-solving skills we need, let’s look at what we can do. There are two basic problem-solving skills. The first is procedural and can be akin to intuition. It is quick and easy. Doing multiplication tables is procedural. We use the same steps every time to calculate the answer. Once you understand how it works, I can swap the numbers out but since you know the steps, you still get the correct answer. We as human love procedural problems. Simply because we are lazy. In his book Learning, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, calls this side of our brain System 1. System 1 is lazy and always looking for the easy way out. It tries to help us conserve energy and time by using intuition and procedures to solve problems. But it screws up… a lot. Two big ways that it does so is by changing the question and using the halo effect. When System 1 is asked a question it doesn’t know the answer to, instead of flipping to System 2, the slow methodical side of our brain, System 1 will just change the question to one it does have the answer to. So, it gives us the wrong answer because it answered the wrong question. The halo effect is applying a blanket answer to similar problems. Think of recent news. We have had two airline crashes that resulted in 73 deaths. So, people start deciding to drive instead of fly. But US Transportation Department data shows flying is safer than driving a car or riding a subway, train, bus or motorcycle… by a lot (Per 100 million passenger miles, airline deaths were 0.003 and motor vehicle deaths were 42 in 2022). The halo effect is worthless in golf.

We should be looking to System 2 to help us make more decisions when there are a lot of factors involved. System 2 is the part of our brain that helps us solve problems by making connections. This approach to problem solving mean actively identifying and leveraging relationships between seemingly disparate pieces of information, concepts or experiences which allows you to draw insights from different areas to find a solution. This is what you see professional golfers doing when trying to decide on what yardage to play. They are taking into consideration multiple different factors: lie/spin, temperature, altitude, wind, and runout just to name a few. Even on shots that they have never seen before, time after time, we see them pull off what commentators call “miraculous”. Really, it was a calculated move, and luck was on their side. The problem is when we practice, especially on the practice facilities, we aren’t engaging System 2, so it never gets to practice working through these problems. It’s just too easy to let System 1 give us the easy answer. Easy to say, hard to do. Let’s talk about one easy way for us to start making connections and really get our growth and learning the jump start that it needs.

Cognitive psychology gives us the answer, but you probably won’t like it. I said System 2 is calculated and makes connections and the best way for it to do so is by creating a simple, deliberate decision-making process. I call them decision trees, but I didn’t invent the term. We’ve all seen them, those diagrams that say if yes go here, and if no go here. We can do the same thing when we play golf. Pick some easy decisions you see all the time. Distance, pin location, wind, rate the lie and slope. Then answer the questions in the same order every single time. To build an efficient decision tree, the answers must be known. So, write them down. You may find what you think is the right answer is often wrong and correcting your original tree is necessary. If I led with this is statistics, determining course of action by probability of success, most of you would’ve stopped reading. But data, not guessing, is the answer.

We looked at getting comfortable being uncomfortable. Most people don’t like being uncomfortable. We have air conditioning and moisture wicking clothing to keep us comfortable in the summer and heat and puffy jackets and sweatpants to keep us warm in the winter. The result of always being comfortable is a lack of learning. Our bodies don’t know what to do when it gets too cold or too warm and how to act properly to adjust on its own. Now I say most people because there is a growing number of people put themselves into uncomfortable positions, on purpose. Those people’s bodies tend to do what our bodies have been doing for thousands of years, adapt to changing conditions easily. I am one of those people. My current challenge is cold immersion. It’s fairly easy to do. I just get in my pool. When I first started doing this around the New Year, it was a quick in and out. The water was so cold that I wasn’t in for more than ten seconds. Now I do seven minutes before coming to work Monday through Friday. Weekends I push the envelope. So far, my longest time is 21 minutes, but I want to see how long I can go. All I’m doing is getting comfortable being uncomfortable. Don’t worry there are tons of ways to do this besides jumping in a pool with water temperatures hovering around 40 degrees. Trying a new sport competitively, public speaking, introducing yourself to someone new are all options. Growth, learning and maturation comes in many forms. While I tried to make connections between my examples and the golf course, I hope you see that these three areas apply to golf and to life. Ultimately it comes down to the choices that you make. Pain and hurt can result in growth, comfort in uncomfortable situations leads to maturity and making connections in wicked environments is the ultimate teacher. Only you get to decide…