26.1 Mental Coaching in Pro Golf with "Clever Trevor" Jones, ACT therapist

[00:00:00] It reminds me of something that I will ask patients sometimes to emphasize one of the kind of more difficult concepts to understand and act, which is the self as context. And I say, you know, what would your response be if somebody on the street walked up to you and shoved you? And, you know, people have a very distinct idea of what they would do in that situation. And then I say, okay, well, what would you do in that situation if you had just been fired from your job or you had just had a loss in life?

[00:00:28] Would you still shove them back or would you feel a little bit different? Somebody get this guy some help.

[00:01:07] Or put more simply, if you need help like this guy, call your own doctor. All right. So today on the podcast, we have Trevor Jones. Trevor is a PGA professional and a big proponent of ACT therapy. We'll get more about your story in a minute in terms of your professional playing career and how you segued into coaching and how you got involved with ACT and relational frame theory. I came across your stuff just looking into ACT.

[00:01:37] I talked to Stephen Hayes and, you know, I think it was about around the same time. I just had been looking at that demystifying mental toughness podcast that you've repeatedly appeared on. And it just strikes me because it seems like there is a whole world of sports psychology that is really revolving around ACT now. I'm a little bit biased, but I think ACT is the best and the most approachable therapy out there.

[00:02:05] So thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate you being here. And how's your day going? Awesome. Thank you so much, Ethan. Yeah, and maybe the first of many metaphors in this conversation. Get the ball rolling with this one. But, you know, ACT and sport is just so hand in glove. Yeah, obviously I'm from a golf background, right? You know, I had played golf at an elite level, you know, worked my way up all the way through the amateur rankings, turned professional.

[00:02:33] Again, worked my way up through those rankings and really had a lot of, I suppose, you know, elite athletes are always looking for that 1%. So you look at everything, right? You look at your biomechanics, you look at your technique, you look at your health and nutrition, you look at your fitness and, you know, gym work and everything else. And of course, psychology, you know, anyone who plays sport longer than five minutes realizes that what goes on between the ears is going to be influential.

[00:02:59] So I did lots and lots of looking into what we might call more traditional, you know, areas of sports psychology, more historic areas of sports psychology. So I had all the, as an example, I had a whole kind of book of, I can almost call them like mental gymnastics that I do pre-performance, right? And so I'd have the kind of the positive affirmations about myself. I'd be writing things down around, you know, great memories of sport. Yeah.

[00:03:28] I would be essentially pursuing a kind of a feeling of certainty and a sense of confidence like around my performance. Number one, it's a pretty exhausting way to exist as a performer, because of course, the pursuit of something like a feeling of certainty and confidence means that there needs to be an absence of what? Right. Uncertainty and self-doubt. So of course, the problem is you're like, you're pursuing on the one hand and you're kind of fighting off with the other. Right.

[00:03:57] And all the while, who's hitting the golf shot? Yeah. So I had a defining moment. I was stood on the final hole of a national championship with a two shot lead, hundreds of people around the back of the green. And, you know, I went through my little process and stood up and, you know, kind of shoulders back and chest out and that whole nine yards. And then I stood over the ball and then my mind kind of threw at me. Don't shank it.

[00:04:23] Which if you don't know golf, like that is not the time to shank a ball. Right. Because there was a lot of trouble on the right. National championship is on the line. And I backed off the ball and I tried my best to fend that off and it wouldn't go away. And I was like, oh, crap. Right. Because now I'm under time pressure. Like I've got to hit a golf shot, you know.

[00:04:45] So I stood back over the ball and I remember my mind was just screaming at me that I was going to shank the ball like into the absolute garbage on the right hand side. And I flushed it. Like I flushed the shot literally right down the pin. Hundreds of people around the green pitched pretty close to the hole when it struck it. So I'll expand back a little bit and big round of applause. And I'm checking myself like, what just happened? What just happened? I've made it through. I made it.

[00:05:13] And I'm just like walking to the green like, what the hell was that? And I step up and I two putt and my mind's still screaming at me that I'm going to mess up. And I remember driving home from the tournament with this national championship trophy in the passenger seat. And I'm looking over at it. And like my experience just did not match what sports psychology at the time had been telling me. Right. It's almost like I just couldn't figure out. I was looking at this kind of equation and I was like, those things don't go together.

[00:05:44] And I had the seed of something at the time, but I didn't know really what to do with it. And it wasn't until years later after I'd finished pursuing a career in golf that I stumbled across acceptance commitment therapy or acceptance training, depending on the kind of the context in which it's used. And that was just like, yes. I was just like, oh, my God, like this is it. Like, I mean, I guess that was maybe seven, eight years ago now.

[00:06:12] And I've been feet first in the rabbit hole, Alice in Wonderland style since then. And I'm now a mental performance coach working for the Aware Performance Group. I work closely with a great friend of mine, Billy Ryan. And we are, yeah, we're moving in some pretty cool places on a big adventure together.

[00:06:31] So it's really interesting, your experience, because it's kind of the opposite of one of the big act philosophies in sports, which is, you know, process over outcome. And actually what happened for you is you recognize that mentally you were deviating from the process, but you got a positive outcome from it. And in that moment, I imagine you were so ecstatic.

[00:07:00] You were so happy with the result. But actually, maybe over time that worked against you because it probably in part reinforced this idea of avoidance. Right. Maybe I found a way to avoid those thoughts for long enough to be able to hit those shots and win the tournament. So you in essence, you know, you avoided the discomfort there. Right. And you got the result you were looking for in the moment.

[00:07:28] Do you think that was actually maybe a little bit harmful in the long term? Because maybe, you know, the mind loves to if I do a rain dance and then it starts raining, my mind says, oh, well, it must have been the rain dance that created the rain. Right. Absolutely. I think there was one of the big things that came out of that was actually a lot of confusion. So my experience wasn't matching up with these kind of pre-formulated rules that I had in my head. Yeah.

[00:07:55] And these rules around performance, I've playfully dubbed them STDs. So when I sit with athletes, I ask them to keep an eye out for these things. What are these STDs that? But in this sense, we're talking about socially transmitted dogmas. These ideas, these beliefs, these cultural memes, these dogmas that are just kind of passed down through the water supply. And we just take them as gospel, right?

[00:08:20] There's this kind of equation in most kind of athletes' heads that in order to perform my best, I must feel confident. Kind of the optimal zone of performance. Just the right amount of kind of anxiousness and nervousness in the middle of the bell curve. You know, not too little, you know, a bit of a Goldilocks effect, right? Not too much. We need this just in this optimal zone.

[00:08:44] And the antidote to these STDs is people's experience. When I sit with clients, it's very often, think about a time when you've had that thought, oh my God, I'm going to mess up. But you've actually performed. And everyone's had that. And conversely, felt, you know, kind of smiles and sunshine felt on top of the world. Like, I'm going to absolutely destroy this today. And they've had a stinker. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:09:12] So returning clients to be back in touch with, like, the lived experience. Yeah. Rather than just this storied up version of how, you know, the rules around performance, should we say. And the cool thing about that is as we get clients back in touch with their lived experience, there's so much more flexibility there. It naturally evokes this sense of, oh shit.

[00:09:37] Like, if I can perform when it's metaphorically raining inside, then, oh my God, like, I can perform on any day. Rather than just waiting for the sunshine and it to be 75 degrees and no wind, right? As a metaphor. So, yeah. It's a cool thing. Just getting people to notice that there are these rules that they're carrying around with them that they may have just picked up innocently. The STD metaphor lands particularly well with college kind of athletes, right?

[00:10:07] I was going to say, that's an attention grabber. Avoid the STDs. What did you say? I thought we were talking about golf. What did you say? Yeah, you got it. So it's just, it's a really powerful one because, again, it gets athletes, sports people, you know, in a different kind of relationship with this kind of questioning. Like, is it all about the confidence? Is it all about the self-belief, right? That's kind of another big one. Like, I must believe in myself.

[00:10:33] Like, I have to be, you know, this other one that concerns me is this kind of rigid discipline. You get into this, you know, almost, I hesitate to say, but almost like this master-slave relationship with yourself. This very authoritarian, like, performance can only happen in this kind of place. And, of course, it's dehumanizing. You know, if you want a quick route to burnout, then treat yourself like a horse to be whipped. Couldn't agree more.

[00:11:01] Did you see the tournament last weekend, the PGA, where Rafael Campos got the win? I heard about it, but I'm very curious to hear what you saw in that. The backstory here is Rafael Campos is a PGA golfer, has not been on the PGA for a while, but they have their fall series. And so some of the guys who are ranked a little bit lower are allowed to compete. And the ones who do the best over those eight events earn a PGA Tour card and get to play in all the bigger tournaments.

[00:11:30] Well, Rafi Campos has had just a disastrous last year. I think he came in having missed 13 of 14 cuts, said it was the worst year of golf that he's played. And I don't remember if it was before the tournament or if it was maybe before the final round. Somebody interviewed him and, you know, asked him about what he thought about his, how he had been playing and et cetera, et cetera.

[00:11:53] And he very quickly becomes tearful because he's just had the birth of his first child, a daughter, the Monday before the tournament starts on Thursday. And he was just weeping, talking about how, you know what, this, all of this, what happens this weekend, it doesn't matter.

[00:12:15] He was able to let go of the outcome because he knew when he got home, he had something so much more important and valued in his life. And that was very moving for him. And you might think somebody who's in that, you know, somewhat emotionally volatile state or experiencing high emotions might not be able to engage with their process. But this guy who's missed 13 of 14 cuts, he goes out, he wins the tournament.

[00:12:44] I mean, I was blubbering like a little baby. I had my little one-year-old daughter laying on my chest. She's falling asleep. I'm watching the recording. And the minute that final putt goes in, it's waterworks until they stop filming. The emotion was just so palpable.

[00:13:02] But I hope that Rafi Campos has an understanding of why mentally he was able to win that tournament when he had played disastrous golf up to that point for the last year in that he was able to let go of the outcome while still remaining engaged with his process. If that's not an example of what we're talking about, I don't know what is. I mean, it's a wonderful story.

[00:13:31] And just how many more examples do we need of something I want to talk a little bit more about today. But there's this quote that was showing up for me as you were speaking. Being loved deeply gives you strength. Loving someone deeply gives you courage. It's a quote by Lao Tzu. And that quote is two and a half thousand years old. Being loved by someone deeply gives you strength. Loving someone deeply gives you courage.

[00:14:01] Like we see the transformative effect on there, on his performance, on his willingness to kind of walk into the lion's den, so to speak. Like how many more examples do we need within sport of one of the most powerful reinforcers on the planet is love in terms of human experience? And yet sports psychology is terrified of it. Right?

[00:14:30] Like we don't walk into that space because, you know, historically we need to be in this kind of performance space and we need to put the armor on the athlete. And we need this kind of self-talk and we need this self-belief. And it's like applying, you know, the shield and the kind of the armor and the helmet. And of course what the athlete is doing is, yes, their sense of self might be more safer, let's say, behind all of that. But the more you add, the more clunky they become.

[00:14:59] The more restricted they become. I don't know if you can imagine like a medieval knight. Do you remember that crazy period they went through where all they could see was through this tiny little slit in the thing and every little, can I add some more here? Can I add the chain mail? Can I add the thing? Can I, you know, the poor horse is like his back is being broken. You know, and if they fall off the horse, someone can just walk up and just whack him over the head with a stick, right?

[00:15:25] So this openness, this vulnerability within those relationships, within those connections, you know, we're working into a space there where the openness around that. Yeah. Like the word vulnerable, the etymology of that means to be woundable. Yeah. Yeah. So the willingness to walk out into this space, more like you're in your loincloth, right?

[00:15:51] But you're willing to be there and you've got your, whatever your skills are, right? And let's have at it, let the cards fall as they may. So often in the strength of those relationships and the strength of those connections can afford us the willingness to be vulnerable. And often that's when we're our most effective. It makes me think of Rory in from a thousand miles away.

[00:16:16] I see within Rory, I see a very narrow path for what he needs to do to get to where he wants to get to. It reminds me of something that I will ask patients sometimes to emphasize the one of the kind of more difficult concepts to understand and act, which is the self as context. And I say, you know, what would your response be if somebody on the street walked up to you and shoved you? And, you know, people have a very distinct idea of what they would do in that situation.

[00:16:46] And then I say, okay, well, what would you do in that situation if you had just been fired from your job or you had just had a loss in life? Would you still shove them back or would you feel a little bit different? Right. What if you had just received a promotion? What if you had just got married and you were full of love and, you know, you were full of grace? Would you still shove them back?

[00:17:07] So we think we understand what we would do in certain situations, but it requires the added context to really know how that outcome would play out. So anyway, I don't know if you have any other thoughts on kind of Rory's mental game and the struggles that he has gone through, especially with that, you know, missed three footer. Can't remember what tournament, but one of the major tournaments. Yeah, you know, absolutely.

[00:17:37] And I love the space you're working in that you're walking towards there with athletes around understanding, you know, number one, how we relate is very context dependent. But also recognizing that there is a part of us that can shift across all experience and remain consistent. Yeah. I don't know if you're willing to just do a little exercise just really quickly with regards to that.

[00:18:04] If you've got a pen and a piece of paper and you might even be able to add the graphic up later on, right? What I want you to just draw here is like a capital T I, a capital I. What I'd like you to do is we're then going to do a little I for different parts of your experience. So maybe I'll put down, for instance, you know, I as a mental performance coach and then a small I as a father.

[00:18:31] We're starting to kind of fill this in with these small I's that represent ourselves in different contexts. So I as a golfer and the memory of me winning the Welsh National Championship, that's a part of me, right? So there's another I. Like, I don't know if you want to kind of, I'm five foot eleven. I have brown hair, right? I am a father. I am a practicing psychiatrist. I am a son. I am a golfer. I like spicy foods, yeah?

[00:19:02] I like watching movies with my two boys. So we're just starting to flesh out. And if I was doing this with an athlete, we could start recalling different performances. The eye that won the event. The eye that had a training injury. The eye that missed the part on the final hole. And we just start really filling that in. Like the whole thing starts to get filled up.

[00:19:26] And what we start to see within that is that we contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman once famously said. But also notice that there's this container, this capital I, right? What's that part of us that is the container of all of these different experiences that we've accumulated?

[00:19:48] Building that sense of self, that there's a part of us that is bigger than just that moment, just that memory, just that performance. It's a really, really cool place to play from. And I think there are, there's a couple of ways of getting in touch with this, this sense of self, which I think this sense of self, ironically, we don't experience in isolation. If we want to kind of say it that way.

[00:20:18] It's how we really connect and relate to others. And if you'd be willing, I'll just roll you through an experiential exercise that I've come up with over the last few years called the six breaths. And this is something I think that kind of brings all of these things together. And then I've got a couple of cool stories about this six breath exercise afterwards, if you'd be willing to do that. Sure. Okay. Okay. It's just a short eyes closed exercise.

[00:20:43] If you'd be willing just to, and if you're driving right now, like for goodness sake, please either pull over or pause the podcast or come back to this later. Right. We'll put this disclaimer in there. Right. But I just invite you to go eyes closed for a second, Ethan. And I'm just going to invite you to bring to mind someone who you love like crazy. Someone who you love in the most unreasonable kind of way.

[00:21:12] That kind of open heartedness. And have there been times over the years where maybe they caught you looking at them? And maybe they could see in your eyes just how much you loved them. And I wonder if you could bring to mind where they might be in this moment. See if you can picture the space they inhabit. And even their posture.

[00:21:42] Like how they hold their body. Maybe even you can notice the expression on their face right now. Are they concentrating? Are they laughing? Are they interacting? Are they alone? Let's see if you can notice what expression they might be wearing. I just invite you to now notice how they might be breathing in this very moment.

[00:22:11] I'm just going to invite you for the next six breaths. To see if your breathing of here and now can match their breathing of there and now. Just six times. Allow your chest to rise and fall with airs. And breathe.

[00:22:50] And I'll just invite you to allow those images to swirl around you for a moment. And just whenever you're ready. In the next breath or two. Allow eyes to come open for a moment. And back into the conversation with me. I just wonder from the strength of that connection. Whether you would be more or less willing to do something hard. And whether you would be more or less willing to take that step that hasn't been taken.

[00:23:20] Yeah. And I just want to put this out there. Okay. I've got lots of elite golfers as clients. You know, you couldn't very well know some of their names. Right. And I've had a client on the final hole of a tournament being watched by many, many, many people. Televised tournament. On the final hole of the event. With a one shot date. They were stood behind their ball.

[00:23:48] Doing this exercise. Right. And then hitting a shot right down the pin. Blushing the ball. There's gold. In the strength of those connections. Yeah. I'd be curious to hear what that was like for you. And what showed up for you. The first thing that showed up were my kids in succession. My youngest daughter. And then my son. And it morphed into my grandmother.

[00:24:17] And imagining her sitting on her back porch. Breathing. And actually watching the golf course that is adjacent to her condominium. And it really. It just instilled this sense of calm. I could imagine if I was engaged in some outcome based measure. That it instilled this sense that. You know what? That outcome is somewhat irrelevant to the love that exists in my life.

[00:24:46] From that mindset. It makes it so much easier to engage in things that are not necessarily going to be easy. That you may have perils and pitfalls. Or you may fail. And all of that is okay in the context of that love that you experience. That love that Rafi Campos experienced. Yes. It brought me back to. I believe it was a podcast with Stephen Hayes.

[00:25:15] And I think he was on a guy named David Pewter's podcast. David Pewter had a third year medical student who was interested in going into psychiatry. And he talked about one of his therapeutic experiences with a client. It's really, really struggling after a absolutely tragic death of their three-year-old daughter. Everything happened right in front of them. The daughter went into a seizure at home. And it never stopped. Something called status epilepticus.

[00:25:44] And obviously the mother was just struggling mightily with this. I cannot imagine the challenge that that would bring. The thing that this medical student who was aware of RFT and ACT. The way that he was able to make progress there. Was very much related to what you just said. He had the client or the patient. He said, I want you to imagine your daughter in those final moments. Looking up at you.

[00:26:15] Looking into your eyes. Seeing the love that you had for her in that final moment. And it doesn't take away the pain. But it inserts the piece of the story that our minds are not programmed to focus on. Right? Our minds are programmed to focus on survival.

[00:26:41] And beyond everything to focus on things that could harm us pretty directly. It also will come up with ideas that we would want to put into action that would improve our survival. But those can also make us feel bad about ourselves. That, oh, I thought about all these things. Which the mind will generate dozens, hundreds of these ideas every day. And I didn't put enough into action. But I think, and you've talked about this, this old branch of pop psych. Pop psychology.

[00:27:11] That just think positive. Just be positive. Now call them flat earthers. Yes. Yes. Just think positive. This false sense of, I'm so confident. I'm so confident. But, you know, I think people misunderstand the field of positive psychology. So, to me, what you're doing with positive psychology is you are appropriately and consciously tipping the scales back towards neutral.

[00:27:39] You recognize you've got a mind that is programmed to focus on the negative. And it's important for us to consciously insert the positive pieces of our story because otherwise you're just dealing with the negative. So, it's not avoid and pretend like the mind and that negative focus doesn't exist. It's let me consciously insert the other pieces of this story to provide the appropriate balance to it. Yeah. Yeah. You understand.

[00:28:07] And very often pop culture and the West can do a pretty tremendous job taking great ideas and just strangling them. Right. You know, what I would say, you've spoken to something which everyone can relate to in that to have a mind that is incredibly threat biased. And, of course, you know, you talk about being on a golf course or a basketball court or an American football field and you have threats everywhere.

[00:28:37] Okay. Like, in some cases, physical threats. Right. And my assumption with the six breath exercise is the aloneness that sometimes, you know, that often comes with being an athlete and the athlete journey. If we think about that from an evolutionary standpoint, Marlowe, the famous kind of social psychologist who did all the research with monkeys, you know, very famously said, a lone monkey is a dead monkey.

[00:29:06] So, in that space of athletes sensing that alone in the wilderness on this athletic journey, why not give them the connection that, you know, because the first thing that we're going to do if we find ourselves alone in the wilderness, evolutionary speaking, is we're going to look for the group. Because there's safety in those connections.

[00:29:30] And especially if they're the type of relationships that will, you know, fight side by side with you. Right. You know, not the superficial ones that would just run away as soon as something shows up, but the ones that would stand next to you, even stand in front of you. So I want to lean into that space. And from that place, it's not the absence of fear, it's the courage to be able to kind of move forward with that fear.

[00:29:57] So that's what I'm really leveraging, shall we say, with the six breath exercise. But as you said, that mishandling of positive psychology can really lean us into this space where it's the absence of these things that is the place in which great performance happens. And unfortunately, the game that has people playing is kind of something like this.

[00:30:22] Maybe if I was to let you in on a little kind of magic moment of mine where all of these kind of ideas that had been in my head and how do we kind of juxtapose the shift from these flat earth ideas in psychology, which, by the way, has little to no evidence that supports them, like tightly designed research methods and things like that. You know, almost no evidence showing efficacy.

[00:30:49] And I was out walking the dogs one day and it just kind of, it just hit me. And I remember running back and calling my colleague, Billy Ryan, and saying, I think I've got this, right? And he was all ears. And I said to him, what if we said to clients with regards to everything that traditional sports psychology has to say, very simply, which would you rather? A game in your head or your head in the game?

[00:31:18] And this is the shift, right? This is the shift from all of these like mental gymnastics that I've been taught to do and encouraged to do and reinforced to do that just ended up with, you know, exhaustion. They didn't really work anyway, or they were very kind of, you know, a little bit like being on a roulette table at the casino. And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it works. Yeah, of course it does. Look at that. Look at that. All the way over to actually we can have all this stuff and we can still be focused on what we need to get done.

[00:31:46] Almost imagining yourself on like the middle of the seesaw. This is now a graphic that I use with clients a lot. You know, tell me what it's like when you're wearing your head. When you're stood on the middle of the seesaw, but you're really tipping it this way. Yeah. Describe that to me. What's it like? What do you get caught up in? What do you get hooked by? What are you avoiding? Right. And juxtapose against. Well, tell me what you like when you're more in your game. What do you like when you're leaning? You're always on the middle of the seesaw, but you're leaning your attention one way. You're leaning your attention and behavior the other.

[00:32:17] And just that distinction for clients is such a useful kind of kickoff point because they really start seeing all of the behaviors that they've been doing, you know, in the service of avoidance. Right. Primarily. And it's actually just putting them more and more and more into their heads. So they're kind of tipping on the seesaw down this way and forgetting that there's a game to be played. Disclaimer. This podcast is for informational purposes only. The information provided in this podcast and related materials are meant only to educate.

[00:32:46] This information is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. While I am a medical doctor and many of my guests have extensive medical training and experience, nothing stated in this podcast nor materials related to this podcast, including recommended websites, texts, graphics, images, or any other materials should be treated as a substitute for professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. All listeners should consult with a medical professional licensed mental health provider or other health care provider if seeking medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Or put more simply. If you need help like this guy, call your own doctor.

[00:33:14] Thanks again for watching and or listening. If you're passionate about the subjects that I discuss on the channel, do me a favor and like, comment, subscribe. Do whatever you can to make your voice heard that these are problems that must be addressed in our society. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, I want to hear them.

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