Get Out of Your Own Way – Chapter 3, Part 1.
Chapter 3 – Belief, Or Experience?
I do not recommend replacing your current beliefs with variants of any of the concepts you might find in the following pages.
As proposed in the previous chapter, if there is a purpose, it’s simply to encourage you to ask some different questions about yourself, about golf, and about life.
Different questions are likely to provoke some fresh new thinking about your game. Fresh thinking that will help you stop getting in your own way and move you closer to your potential as a golfer.
Rather than give you more information, more knowledge, I hope this book will give you the tools to strip away theories and concepts that might have been obstructing your path to the golf you are capable of playing and restricting your enjoyment of your game.
To make self-sabotage, as it is sometimes called, a less frequent experience.
At the risk of repeating myself, please do not believe anything written in these pages. Instead, let’s subject the ideas to rigorous interrogation.
There is no point in simply replacing one set of beliefs with another set.
I will encourage you to examine many of your own pre-existing beliefs and theories. Likewise, I expect you to question and test the ideas I will propose. There will be thought experiments along the way to help you do so.
The purpose is to move past belief. To uncover a philosophy for the way we play golf based on what we know to be true rather than on what others have told us.
In order to get past assumptions and patterns of thinking acquired from our golfing culture, we need to investigate the truth about reality and about the nature of our wider experience.
This might sound like a significant and arduous task, but fortunately we have been blessed with powerful tools that will help us.
The human mind is an amazing gift. Perhaps uniquely among animals, we have the developed the capacity for conscious metacognition. We think, but we also know that we are thinking. We can analyse and interrogate our thoughts.
This ability to self-reflect allows us to use logic and reason to investigate the world around us. We can detect and observe the patterns and regularities of nature. We can make accurate predictions about how nature will behave. This in turn allows us to develop technologies that continually transform the way we live.
Many human beings are lucky enough to experience levels of safety and comfort that our ancestors could not even dream about.
Many of these advancements have occurred through use of the scientific method, a framework that allows us to ask questions of nature in a way that reduces or even eliminates reliance on beliefs.
A hypothesis is framed in terms of a question. An experiment is conducted to test the hypothesis. Nature responds with an answer. Logic and reason are used to interpret the outcome.
Direct experience of reality puts belief in its proper place.
Have Your Beliefs Ever Changed?
As with the process described above, uncovering the truth of something is predominantly a matter of stripping away existing beliefs, theories, and ideologies rather than adding new information.
Most important discoveries are simplifications rather than additions of information and complexity. Einstein’s general theory of relativity, perhaps the most significant realignment of our belief in what the universe might be, can be described in a simple one-line equation.
E=mc2
A single parsimonious mathematical statement allowed a whole raft of theories and beliefs about the nature of our reality to be thrown into the dustbin.
All of us have a set of concepts and mental models that inform the way we live our lives and play our golf. Some are based on direct experience. But many are not.
These beliefs are largely responsible for our habits and patterns of thinking in the moment. Our behaviour emerges from this thinking.
If you are like most people, your primary and dearest-held belief is a description of who you think you are.
You have a story about how you arrived at where you are now, about your destiny, how your character was formed, why your personality is how it is. A story about your strengths, your weaknesses, your preferences.
You will have some theories about why you are the way you are, and probably some ideas about what you need to do to become the person you really want to be.
These beliefs are the mental tools that allow us to survive and play in the planetary ecosystem we experience.
Most of us are very attached to the story of who we think we are, to the extent we take the belief in that story for granted. This attachment has consequences, both at a personal and on a societal level.
Sadly, throughout human history, wars have been fought and millions of lives lost over strongly held ideas or concepts. One set of beliefs about right and wrong is pitched against another set, and violence ensues.
Peace only comes when beliefs are changed or compromised.
On a personal level, all of us have beliefs we once held very dear that we now see are not, and never were, true. Often this change only occurs in the face of considerable suffering.
What causes us to have a change of mind, or what may more accurately be described as a change of heart? A real change in how we feel about something.
In almost all cases, it happens when a belief is confronted by reality, by the actuality of your own direct experience.
By experience, I don’t mean the sum of memories and knowledge you might have accumulated over the years. I don’t mean your theory or belief about what is going on.
We all know how easy it is to be fooled by our perceptions, by our prejudices, by our interpretations. These are just different flavours of belief.
So, if our beliefs aren’t based on evidence, and we can be easily fooled by our perceptions, what are we to do?
What can we trust? What can we rely on? It seems that our reality is based on shaky foundations.
No wonder so many people feel lost and insecure so much of the time.
Maybe that’s why they are so reluctant to explore their own mental models or narratives, for fear of what might be uncovered.
What Do You Know for Sure?
Let’s start by looking at the choice offered above.
Which is more reliable, belief or experience?
It seems to me the answer is a simple one.
All that is known, or could ever be known, is your direct experience.
Experience alone must be the test of what we take reality to be. Even a belief is experienced as a thought, or a framework of thoughts.
If we ignore what our direct experience is telling us, then belief is the only alternative.
Many times in your life, you have been confronted with this dilemma. When you have moved forward or overcome something, it’s always when you opted for your direct experience over your beliefs.
Something odd happens. A surprising event occurs.
As a result, you saw something new that suggested what you previously thought or believed can’t be believed any more. It wasn’t true.
We have all had this happen on the putting green. The putt looks like it breaks from the right, so we aim an inch outside the right edge of the cup.
We roll the ball along the line, but it curves to the right.
Our belief that the ground sloped from right to left was wrong. The belief has been altered by our experience.
Many golfers who slice believe that the ball ends up missing the fairway because the clubface is open to the target at impact.
But when they hit shots on a launch monitor (Trackman, Flightscope, Foresight Sports etc) and confirm the impact factors, this often turns out not to be the case.
The clubface is pointing left of the target. But the swing path is going even further to the left, imparting sidespin. Hence the ball curving off and missing the fairway to the right. (The reverse being true for left handers).
Unless you know what is really happening – what is actually true – your chances of changing your ball flight and predominant shot pattern are slim because you are struggling against a problem that isn’t what you believed it to be.
Your perception and interpretation of reality is faulty. Your belief is based on a misunderstanding.