Dr Raymond Prior on How Your Brain Works and Developing a Mindset for Success

Dr. Raymond Prior is a Performance Psychologist and is widely regarded by the world’s best performers as one of the best minds in the field. His clients include Major Champions, World Champions, Olympic Gold Medalists, Award-winning Coaches and numerous NCAA Champions and All-Americans. He also consults to Grammy Award winners, Oscar winners, Tony and Emmy Award winners.

Dr. Prior joins Mark Immelman to discuss his book – “Golf Beneath the Surface” and to illustrate how the brain works and how you can train your mindset to re-wire your brain.

As Dr. Prior takes you on a whistle-stop tour through the contents of the book, and his area of expertise, he elaborates on the following topics that will help you stack the proverbial mental odds in your favor:

The Old Brain vs The New Brain Composure Under Pressure Resilience to Adversity High Performance Habits Performance Disruptors, and Changing the Brain by Training the Mind He also talks about the Mindset for Success and Impulse Control, Understanding Risk and dealing with Anxiety, and Dopamine and its influence on behavior.
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ABOUT ON THE MARK: Mark’s knowledge, insight and experience have made him a sought-after mind on the PGA and European tours. Through his career, he has taught and/or consulted to various Major Champions, PGA Tour winners and global Tour professionals such as: Larry Mize, Loren Roberts, Louis Oosthuizen, Patton Kizzire, Trevor Immelman, Charl Schwartzel, Scott Brown, Andrew Georgiou and Rourke can der Spuy. His golf teaching experience and anecdotal storytelling broadcasting style makes him a popular host for golf outings.

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It is a thrill for me to have Dr Raymond prior on this podcast and if you’re listening on audio go check it out on YouTube because he sent me this book golf beneath the surface a practical guide for composure Under Pressure long-term growth and a more fulfilling relationship with a game Raymond well

Wome I what you’ve summarized there I think just about all in sunry listening to or watching this podcast are striving to so I’m so glad I’m so glad you would join us well thank you very much for having me Mark I’m looking forward to talking more about some ways that

Perhaps your listeners can tap into those things you know what I want to say this before I have you introduce yourself many many moons ago I was well I’m still a full-time golf instructor turned to broadcaster but I would fix every problem with a golf swing

Adjustment cuz you know the thing if all you have in your tool belt is a hammer everything in the world’s a nail yeah and then I started to grow up maybe wisdom set in and I started to realize how holistic everything is especially playing golf and The more I’ve done this

The more I’ve learned about it until I got your book and now I’m learning even more so with that said I want you to introduce yourself to our Global audience please yeah my name is Raymond Raymond prior you could call me Dr prior I don’t make people call me doctor

Unless maybe it’s people I don’t really like but that’s very few people in the world um my title and my training makes me a performance consultant my areas of quote unquote expertise are performance psychology performance neuroscience and sleep science my job in a nutshell is to help people understand their mind and

Their brain and the things that they do in relation to what the things that they want and to be able to train their mind and their brain to do so so you might put me under the category of sport psychology which is fine um and my job

Is not to tell people what to do only to help them understand the things that might be able to unlock some of the things that they’re looking uh to pursue so that in a nutshell is my job and you can find me um hopefully not very

Present I try to stay very much in the background and um behind the scenes as much as possible but you will find me working with professional golfers which is probably why I’m here today you also me pretty present in some uh corporate areas and then also I work with quite a

Few performing artists and Military members so that’s your singer songwriters your pop stars as well as some of our um military forces depending on what types of things that they’re doing so kind of find me in those different uh performance Realms all working from those areas of expertise in

A way that’s kind of liberating for me as I listen to you because I’m listening to you like a fan because there’s so much that I feel like I can still learn but when you talk about all of these other stars in their fields from military to Performance artists to

Business people I’ve looked through your website I mean you work with athletes from all over the sporting realm it’s everybody struggles with these things that you’ve written about in your book I mean this is not reserved because I feel like some of the Battlers when we’re out there battling with ourselves on the

Golf course and our worlds are caving in we feel so isolated and alone and it’s like you’re on an island so you liberating me with with just your introduction it might be helpful for golfers to know that you are not alone uh and so much of our human psychology

Um as it pertains is there’s way more overlap than there are differences in different performance Fields um and so it’s really human psychology as applied to and then you might fill in the blank golf perhaps writing perhaps doing podcasting whatever it might be but there’s a human being behind a

Performance and what running that human being at first and foremost is a brain and amazing how we can be we’re supposed to be our own best friends right but we can almost be our own worst enemies at time see people talk about beating the competition well you got to conquer a

Self before you can beat competition correct well I think there’s something to be said about um not necessarily maybe being our best friend or worst enemy because in the eyes of our brain saving you from life and limb danger or perceived threats is being your best friend okay but differentiating what is

Being a good friend in what settings can very much uh be different so for example if you’re playing golf you try to save yourself from poor outcomes or uncomfortable experiences tends to be very disruptive to Performance it keeps us from thriving right but in a different setting where life and limb

Might be at stake that might be intensely beneficial for us you know for example something like anxiety we know is very disruptive for performance in Gulf but we know it can be very helpful in life’s life-threatening situations so it’s kind of how our friendship is manifesting in our performance and in

Other areas of Our Lives that we can be we can train in ways that can make it more conducive at times incredible well look I’ve read some of the book um safas to say it’s going on the plane with me to the West Coast tomorrow because I’m

Going to be all into this um it you’ve sort of teased the book a little bit already so before we get to that and and you talked about how the brain and and and our our mind works um what was the inspiration for the book because I’m I’m

In the process of writing one now and I know I shouldn’t date this podcast because someone might listen to this when the thing’s published but my my inspiration was I’ve had so many smart folks on this podcast and they’ve shared so much great Insight that someone needs

To somehow package this stuff and so I went through all of the shows because I was like here you need to read this kind of thing did did you have the same moment with this or was it another inspiration there’s a similar thread through that which is I wanted people to

Have a packaged version of what is most updated or at least at the time of the book being published of what we know about human Psychology and Neuroscience as it relates to Performance and golf um as I discussed in the intro of the book every single area of golf is growing by

Leaps and Bounds both in quantity and quality through technology and through really good science yeah I’m not sure the psychology part of it has really kept up um and there’s a lot of um kind of what were very effective or what we thought were very effective modalities

From many many decades ago that still kind of ring true you kind of hear the same truisms the same platitudes that are kind of going around and what I would call kind of surface level psychology that is describing what’s happening and then just suggesting the opposite as the remedy to it without

Really understanding the the mechanistics of the psychology and the neurology underneath and so my Hope was that this book would one inform readers better about how their brain and how their psychology is operating and what we know research is telling us and also perhaps to challenge and the status quo

Of psychology and golf in a way that is not trying to devalue what somebody else is doing but to provide an alternative that might be a little bit more fitting for People based again on what research tells us not my personal opinion so the impetus of the book was to try to

Provide some value to people in a way that is here’s an updated little bit more in-depth version that then might may help you be able to understand yourself your game and then therefore simplify it on the course rather than hoping your brain can do it on the Fly

I love it because um like I mentioned to you I think before we went hot um I passed it on to my daughter my eldest who’s now becoming she’s talented but becoming a competitive golfer and you you know the challenges of that right everyone listening to this we’ve all

Been there um and I just read what I guess would have been the forward it was entitled as so and at the end of it you writ to any golfer teaching professional coach administrator or parent who seeks to understand golf in a deep deeper and more sustainable level build more consistent performance understand

Yourself and others and enjoy the game Mo this book is dedicated to you and I was like yeah yeah your coming there that’s what it’s for I’ve been fortunate enough to be around in golf I had a very um circuitous entry into the golf especially the high performance Golf

Community and since I’ve been there I’ve been able to interact with so many people that are really indeed the Common Ground between everybody in around golf is trying to help people perform better and enjoy the game more and I want to just in the book people it’s not just for them it’s

For the people around them as well so that is really my homage hopefully to them that when they pick up this book it’s not just for the guy who or girl who’s trying to win a major it’s also for the people around everyone trying to

Uh get a little bit better at a game that is very difficult to get better at goodness you know every great golfer I’ve had on the show um from Jordan Speed to Justin Thomas to you know any else you asked them about coming up and they all spoke of the influence of the

Parents that’s right and I think and I’m one of those now not just podcast host our job is as important as any you know the folks who are around the competitive golfer because it’s because like I always say to the the competitive golfers I teach I’m like look the buck

Stops with you because you’ve got your hands on the rubber end of the golf club but but the support mechanisms around said individual are very important too yeah I’ll put a little bit of person influence on this one less more about research but it’s been my observation that nobody becomes successful alone and

Who you surround yourself with and what they bring to your you might say your blast radius around you is is really important and that is a difficult thing to do for coaches and for parents when you have particularly children growing up because everything you do is going to

Influence them in one direction or another until hopefully you are helping them develop their own influence over themselves and that is a tricky tricky balance there’s no cut and dries in that area for the most part okay if we were in sales I’m sure we’ve sold this book

Now sure stay till the end so you can find out where to get it um you kicked this whole thing off with a story that when I read I sort of smiled and maybe I shed a tear at the same time because I’ve lived this and I’ve lived this and

You were with a friend I believe it was and you were at a golf tournament at aonic which is a really good golf course hard yeah and I don’t know if it was a client but there’s a young lady golfer coming up there she’s in contention she

Hitss on the green 20 ft final hole and proceeds to three but ending what was a really good day without a real exclamation point but more um depressing and disappointing and you add the list of adjectives there and I found it curious you would start with that so I

Want you to share the story because I feel like it’s a good kicking Point uh kicking off point to get into what you write about the brain and such yeah that story is a kicking off point so I was um just observing uh the couple final groups this was the women’s PJ

Championship a few years ago at aonic and um it’s a really good example because I think it’s something that many golfers have experienced in one form or another which is my performance was going really well right up until it wasn’t and the way my brain and body

Reacted kind of got in my way and um so just to try to tee up that story is because I wanted to lead it into how does our brain actually operating so the question that the person I was staying or standing next to asked is why do we

Get nervous or why do we respond that way and the reason isn’t because some character flaw or my training is uh ineffective so on and so forth it’s because our brain is exactly designed to know when Stakes matter very much to us and to kick off a Cascade of

Physiological reactions to try to mobilize us for that but it doesn’t always do so in the most efficient way I about to say because you know it’s it’s crazy because every golf for listening to this you you you feel sometimes you feel Invincible everything’s going your way

And all of a sudden you go from hero to zero and you try and think about this logically and you’re like what the heck happened I mean I was doing just fine now I feel like I can’t hit the golf ball it is it’s a crazy crazy thing that

You happen to explain very well in this yeah and things can shift very quickly particularly in high stakes environments and if you’re playing professional golf it is indeed a high stakes environment like there’s a significant amount of social risk Financial Risk competitive risk uh sometimes physical risk depending on

What the situations are and your brain is designed to be in tune to risk and when it perceives that there’s enough risk involved not necessarily threat but risk it’s going to mobilize because that’s what it is exactly designed to do and that’s the the mechanisms behind us getting nervous it’s a stress response

Now to be very clear Stress and Anxiety and nerves are not the same stress is intensity and duration of demand so playing in a major is a very stressful performance Venture nerves is a stress response that is our brain and body mobilizing to handle that stress okay that’s the activation of our nervous

System that’s how we feel butterflies that’s the blood pumping from our internal organs and our digestive ways out to our arms and limbs to make us more activated for a potential need to either I need to do something to pursue the resources I want or the things I

Want or perhaps defend myself from what I don’t but think of nerves is more of a it’s a bit of a neutral activation okay it’s like hey we need to be ready to do something but I’m waiting for you to tell me what okay right anxiety on the

Other hand is feels highly activating for our nervous system but it is a psychological State characterized by worry about the future and so we can perform really well through nerves because they are perhaps something that offers us the option for Pursuit based activation anxiety will automatically

Move avoidance of risk to the top of the priority list for our brain and that’s what keeps us from pursuing playing well and trying to make us play to not screw up and you don’t have to be a psychologist to figure out we don’t typically play very well trying to not

Screw up yeah it reminds me of a I’m going to quote um this is not verbatim but I had a you know spent some time around coach Lou Holtz once or twice back in the day and I remember him saying he was in a typical coaching

Moment was in the clubhous there at a golf course and and he he talked about being nervous and being anxious and he said he would always ask his players the following question he goes if you can answer yes to this qu these questions then what you’re feeling is positive and

The questions were have I prepared and do I believe I belong and if you and if you say yes and yes he goes well then what you’re feeling is going to make you better but if one of the answers to those are no well then it’s it’s kind of

Um I would say debilita but I always found that curious because it was accurate but I was like okay so what if I did answer no but I’m still in the situation and I still perform so I guess this is where you come in that’s a really good question so um there’s

Certainly something to be said about preparation um and again so I wouldn’t never tell any client you should go underprepared right because that’s certainly not helpful the more prepared we are for things and not necessarily more being as much as possible but am I prepared enough for the stress that I’m

About to enter is really important thing okay the self-belief part is an interesting um wrinkle to that because on the surface we as humans go well if I feel like I belong or I feel like I deserve that will then move me through but then you ask the question well what

If I don’t yeah and what our research shows us is that actually self-belief can be very very powerful for us not required and not nearly as powerful as we think it is if we look at really really Elite performers many of them have a a a thread of self-belief that is

Just like this unwavering like I just feel like I’m great and it’s going to be good but they are actually the exception to the rule more often they actually High performers have three psychological characteristics that separate them from others and the first is actually a sense of inadequacy which is I’m not really

Sure that I’m good enough the second is though they have a belief that if I put in enough effort and I’m prepared and I’m doing the work and I’m continually learning and testing my skills along the way I might be okay and then the third and these if

You’re reading my book toward the end or if you’re familiar with the psychological kind of U more modern literature these are the two elements of a growth mindset which is always operating from the question where is my current ability actually and how can I get a little bit better right so it’s

Not this unwavering belief that I can be great oftentimes High performers especially the elite of the elite have a sense of I’m not sure if I’m good enough but I’m pretty sure I can be if I do the right things Okay the third thing they have is impulse control which is they

Have developed a series of habits and behaviors that are highly conducive to Performance and impulse control to be very clear is not that I don’t feel impulses to do things that might not be helpful it’s that I can recognize those impulses pop a timeout in one way or

Another and perhaps choose to do something that is in my best interest not necessarily the interest of my immediate Comfort or certainty right so there are a couple of layers to that and you’re getting to kind of what modern psychology is pulling out for us is

Which a lot of these kind of um long-standing platitudes and catchphrases at some point we go well okay well what if that’s not in place and then because if I have the requirement I have to believe in myself unconditionally and I’m not doing that well now the my brain and body is

Designed to respond to uh oh we’re in trouble and now I’m in defense mode not go try to perform as well as you can get some feedback on it and actually you’re okay type of a stuff so there’s there’s some wrinkles to that for sure fascinating okay let me that was

Personal let me get back to the uh the script here um so in section one this is where you talked about the this LPGA player who was playing well and then ruined it and you were pitch the question now why does that happen and then in the section you delve into it’s

Basically the section is called your brain delve into the old brain versus the new brain so character those contrast them and explain uh the characteristics thereof to The Listener please sure our brain is this pretty pretty complex organ as as relates to organs but if we’re trying to simplify

It down a little bit we can think of it as old brain and new brain if you were going to make a fist with one hand this would represent your old brain and what’s important about this part is that it is the fastest and the strongest

Parts of our brain so when it comes to operating functions this is the part of our brain that’s running things automatically so our habits for example it’s also the part of our brain that just so happens to be kind of the threat detection part of our brain okay and the

Reason it’s the fastest and strongest is many many many many years ago when the world was a much more dangerous place and we weren’t really interested in uh thriving as much as surviving the we needed the fastest strongest parts of our brain to be making decisions about what we did essentially pessimists

Survived way back when right so because thriving wasn’t really on the table stuff you real fast sure I came to I came to this interview off a OnCourse lesson with a client yeah and maybe it was kind of serendipitous but the client was doing really well and then had a bad hole and

Then I made an observation and they like well no I’m not that way inclined I’m a realist yeah and I look at them I’m like well okay and I wasn’t really sure how to proceed but The Optimist in me started to talk to them about what you’ve done how you are equipping

Yourself for success and what this was was a road it was not a roadblock it a bump in the road maybe a blip on the radar but what you say about the pessimist surviving I guess the realists were the same way inclin right yeah if we’re really getting into the

Nitty-gritty of psychological science we can pull apart optimism and pessimism if you’d like which I do in the last section of my book um but in this uh certain case what realism really is is just marginalized pessimism it’s like well I’m going to assume that things are

Only going to be this certain way but again it’s still us just projecting a future in the way that we see it based on our past experiences or the own personal veillance that we put on it it’s not so the future is always imagined for us and so what we imagine

It is just coming from us and how we’ve kind of filtered through our past events so saying I’m a realist is not any different than saying I’m a pessimist or an optimist it’s this is what I’m projecting in the future and I’m just assuming that there’s just some of

Things can be good or bad but not that good and you know bad things happen which again you can argue how real that is in the world but you know saying you’re a realist is kind of another way of saying I’m pessimist light okay so to

Get me back on track here so the old brain I’m holding up my fist if you’re watching on YouTube so Raymond um that is you list all the characteristics but threat detection or basically projecting into the future for a possible event and it’s there to protect yeah we’ll reel

Back a little bit so this part of our brain doesn’t necessarily project into the future that’s part of our young brain but we’ll get there in a second what is important about this old brain is the fastest and strongest and it doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and what’s perceived right

So hence what kept us alive so many many years ago is whether it was a real threat saber-tooth tiger or a perceived threat rustling in the bushes if it assumed real threat you only you because you only had to be wrong once way back when to be dead right so it

Overestimates threat in terms of what it perceives to be a threat and then it so it runs our stress response so the fastest strongest parts of our brain so why we get nervous very quickly and perhaps without us going okay do I need to be nervous about this is that this is

The part of our brain that is designed to activate us when Stakes matter and there’s risk involved without us having to consciously think through it which is against it’s a survival mechanism for us it makes us more well equipped to handle stress but again it’s not necessarily

Anxiety so why we feel nervous that’s that physiological Cascade of my heart rate moves up my breathing rate increases to get that blood from my abdomen out to my arms and legs and while I feel sweaty and all the things that come with feeling nervous that are somewhat physiologically uncomfortable

For us that’s the part of our brain that activates our sympathetic nervous system which is the upregulating making me more activated type of uh part of our nervous system our young brain if you were to take that fist which is your old brain and wrap your hand your other hand over

The top of it that represents our young brain which is the slower weaker part of our brain but also the part of our brain that can think rationally think consciously make intentional choices and project into the future or perhaps dwell on the past all right the difference between nerves and anxiety from a

Neurological standpoint is where they come from also so nerves comes from our old brain it’s our old brain doing exactly what it’s designed to do when we’re stress anxiety comes from our young brain that’s our prefrontal cortex going uhoh there’s risk here what if this happens what if this happens uhoh don’t

Let this happen and playing out uncertainty in however many different infinite scenarios that it could play out oftentimes assuming the worst case scenario and when my prefrontal cortex does that in two ways one long enough so frequently enough or intensely enough meaning threatening enough my old brain

Will start to take over and actually shuts down our prefrontal cortex because it’s faster and stronger and it can do so so when we are anxious the reason we default to avoidance is because our brain goes you have projected a future that is very much worth worrying about I

Don’t know the difference between whether it’s imagined which it is or whether it’s real it might be so I’m just going to take over and put us into defense mode so now my nerves plus anxiety is now I’m playing by essentially playing multitasking with avoidance if if you’re talking about

Human motivation we can either be motivated to pursue or motivated to avoid where a lot of golfers go I don’t play very well or I’m not committed it’s not because they’re not committed it’s because they’re asking their brain to go pursue this shot in this way and dear

God don’t let this happen which is not a negative thought it’s an avoidance-based task and these are conflicting tasks they’re moving in opposite directions stemming from the future that I have projected that told my young my old brain excuse me you need to be worried about this and it doesn’t know the

Difference between whether whether I should or shouldn’t golly okay I could camp out here for a little while but I do want to ask one question um the proliferation of anxiety especially in young people yeah I mean goodness gracious me it is it’s rampant and I hate to say the first response but

It appears to me as I watch it from far out kind of the 36,000 foot view medication is given to people or described and that just I guess that numbs or dulls this response is that’s is that what what was happening yeah so to your first point um Mark we are

Living in The Age of Anxiety for human beings there’s no doubt about the rates and the intensity and the frequency and the minimum age people start experiencing not just State anxiety which is I’m in a situation that might require anxiety but more what we call trait it’s not really trait because it’s

Not a genetic thing but it’s just ongoing anxiety as a kind of a constant for them is is becoming more and more um the vast majority of people I work with anxiety is a significant portion of what why they’re coming to see me um medication can be very helpful for some

People the caveat to that is that is assuming that you’re also doing the other things that are changing some things that you might be doing to create that anxiety we often learn anxiety from core beliefs from adults mostly the way they respond to things that we do the

Type of feedback that we get from adults even Praise by the way the type of Praise that you give a young person will often times influence the type of anxiety that they develop and how it becomes deployed for them similarly for those paying attention um the way we use

Cell phones and we get dopamine specifically influences the type of anxiety we experience and how frequent and how intense and I’ll just dive into that just a little bit so not leave people on a cliffhanger yeah it’s real that that what you say there I mean you

Hit me squirly between my eyes with a cell phone yeah so um dopamine is a neuromodulator in our brain that makes effort feel good it’s a reward for our um efforts right so again many many thousands of years ago if you stocked that woolly mammoth all day it made that

Stocking worthwhile for us without necessarily needing the outcome at the end of it similarly if you found water or you uh found food along the way and you consumed it you would get rewarded with dopamine because that’s what made us remember hey if you can get this you

Should get it it helped to gain the resources we need either via effort or via path of lease resistance so there’s kind of two Pathways that we get dopamine one is earned meaning I need to have I need to face risk there’s some vulnerability involved there’s some sacrifice there’s effort involved this

Is why when you go have a really hard workout you kind of feel good during it once you get into it and afterward yeah but to be very clear that earn dopamine requires agitation to begin with yeah right so you have to risk something or sacrifice by something to go get it for

My cold plunging I feel so good afterwards right there you go so your cold plunge is going to increase your uh plasma dopamine levels by like 53% which is going to be this kind of long lasting boost in energy and focus it also comes with norepinephrine which is just

Another way of saying energy so your cold plunge yeah awesome so there’s a reason why there’s that’s kind of a fadly it sucks before the time you look at the water you’re like ah je really exactly right so it requires you to engage with discomfort in order to get

The bonus from it what happens for us cell phones and the reason it starts to create anxiety for us is that it’s an unearned source of dopamine all I had to do was the direct Behavior to get it meaning the same thing as I drink some

Alcohol I eat a cookie the only thing I had to do was the thing to get it with no risk No sacrifice no effort now again this isn’t a bad thing but our brain is designed to go path of least resistance when it’s available to us so not only am

I getting dopamine very very quickly without the sacrifice required for it which means my threshold for the amount of work and the amount of sacrifice and the Willing the risk I’m willing to take to get that dopamine is dropping which means the bar for what makes me feel anxious and think in

Anxious ways is getting lower my threshold is dropping that makes that okay yeah right and so as this is happening and then when I feel that anxiety and that risk that I’m uh anxious about I tend to go to the thing that makes me feel better which is more

Swiping and scrolling right so it’s this kind of cycle it’s the same reason we get addicted to cigarettes or addicted to Al alcohol what happens is our nervous system especially with dopamine it’s like a scale if you tip it toward pleasure first there’s a longer kick back toward pain in the other direction

And vice versa the more you kick it to pain the more you get a pleasure response in uh in the opposite direction longer interesting now this is important because when you continually tip this scale toward pleasure your threshold for pain gets lower and what makes you in

Pain also becomes like wider yeah so the more we engage with things that just make us feel better without us having to earn something with it the more we are priming our brain for things like depression and anxiety just from a neurochemical level the other part of

Social media which again we’re a little bit off kilter but I think this is important for people to know people’s L right now Raymond if you are engaging with social media more what you’re ultimately also GNA see as some airbrushed curated version of everybody else’s life that even on a subconscious

Level you go well my life’s not that good my life’s not that good and if all I did was point out that your life even though there’s some really great things in it doesn’t compare to the best 1% and broadcasted version of everybody else’s life that’s a recipe for anxiety and

Depression and we know this particularly affects young women especially because you know there’s some body image stuff involved with that and also just like my quality of life is not the quality of life of everyone else by the way no different than a pro golfer going down

The range and going that guy swing or that girl swing or that guy swing right so this comparison where the disparity between where I am and where everybody else is is also a really um anxiety provoking experience and so this is why we see the research showing that the

More people are engaging with easy sources of dopamine their levels of anxiety and the frequency and intensity are much higher again not because it’s some character flaw it’s exactly how our brain is designed to operate in that type of a setting goodness gracious me it’s almost like you’ve done a sales job

Just for the golfers listening human beings but but but like right you’re going to feel better if you got you go and have that hard session on the Range or you going and try and learn to hit the shot that you never did because the success after man that’s fantastic it

Does and it and when we stick with that a let’s say you’re trying to learn a new shot and your coach has prescribed you some drills that are indeed quite difficult for you and include a certain level of failure the agitation is what triggers learning in your brain if you

Don’t stick with it during through that agitation and your brain will not reward you with the dopamine for staying in it but also without the agitation the cortisol which is an agitating kind of stress hormone for us and then the dopamine with it it won’t release the chemicals that then trigger learning

Which then your brain will go and rewire while we’re sleeping so when people try something hard and then quit on it early it’s not just that you quit like okay you can make a kind of a moral or ethical argument about it or a discipline argument but also you haven’t

Giv your brain the conditions to be able to actually learn in the long term okay I just want to point out something too I mean that that was all fantastic but you said something your brain will rewire itself when you’re sleeping I want you to explain that

Because I’ve heard this but you suddenly made the whole thing seem very sensible I had that like I said to you that aha moment so so so we’ve practiced we’ve done the uncomfortable we’re drilling life is sucking but I’m sticking to it it’s not like the change is happening

There the change is happening when we laid our heads on the pillow in the evening that’s right so you can think about your practice during waking hours as triggering learning very specifically a certain types of chemicals when we are focused on something you might think of our dopaminergic system like a Bluetooth

It pairs to what we’re focused on and what we’re engaging with when we stick with it through the difficult stuff long enough for our dopaminergic system to go okay we’re doing this this is what we’re focused on we’re not bailing out of it that dopamine is running we’re in a

State of neuroplastic triggering and our brain is releasing a chemical called acetycholine which serves a variety of functions one of them is it acts like a highlighter marker so when you’re training let’s say you’re trying to hit a draw after hitting a slice and you’re doing a drill and even though you might

Not be getting the outcomes you want when you repeat a motion your brain is literally highlighting here’s a neural Pathway to change here’s a neural Pathway to change here’s one to create and it’s laying down the framework kind of painting the the blueprints for it but neuroplastic change only happens

While we’re sleeping so if you went got the best lesson of your life or played the best round of your life if you don’t sleep well enough at night you’re very getting very little of that and so the power of sleep is not just it’s a

Recovery which it is but also if we want to be a long-term learner if you’re not sleeping enough your brain cannot physically make the neuroplastic changes that you have been trying to direct during your waking hours it’s just amazing you know you learn these things that sort of get handed down through

Generations and you know babies need to sleep to develop so you’re saying so do we so do we exactly us adults need to as well we all getting by on little sleep and it’s interrupted and I wear recovery band it’s we could do a whole podcast or five

On sleep and we maybe we’ll do that in the future um got sleep is sleep is a foundational component to anything performance and health related which we could get into it another time but um the long and the short of it as it pertains to our old brain and young

Brain young old brain is where nerves come from it’s our threat detection Center in our brain it’s our our stress detector but it is mobilizing us for both Pursuit and avoidance it’s still waiting for us to tell it which one right so that’s why when there are times

When we feel nervous and we’re like okay I got an opportunity in front of me it feels really good there are also times where you go oh wow Stakes are here I wor I’m worrying about what’s going to happen or uh oh what if this happens where now the anxiety starts to then

Move that uh nerves and the stress response toward avoidance and it doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out that that is a less enjoyable and a lower performing option for us constantly multitasking with avoidance based in the future that’s awesome um I I I wanted to touch this quickly too but I think

You’ve already sort of weaved your way through the conversation because one of the things I jotted down here was you wrote that you can change the brain by training the Mind I’d like you just to elaborate there a little bit more that’s neuroplastic change so neuroplasticity by definition is our brain’s ability to

To change based on our experiences so let’s say for example I wanted to train my focus if I do mindfulness practice which is one of our more efficient means of training Focus over time and there are a variety of different ways you can do this some of the practices have been around for

Thousands of years and now there are some um neuro uh measuring devices that can certainly help with this we might do like neuro neuro um neurop Peak training or something like this where when I do that thinking differently or interacting with my own thoughts and focus differently my brain is changing those

Neural Pathways while I sleep in the same way that it would if I’m in the gym and I stress my muscles differently they are also going to adapt and it’s not just the muscles put the neural Pathways in my brain that move those muscles at

The same time so when we use our brain differently I’m sorry our mind differently think about things differently respond to things differently interact with our own thoughts and feelings differently our brain rewires over time and if you’re younger particularly under the age of 25 that neuroplastic change happens faster

Uh when we’re younger our brain is designed to create new neural Pathways when we get about over the age of 25 it’s actually designed to preserve those neural Pathways so it’s a it is indeed harder to make change when we’re older than when we’re younger but the process

Is still the same which is if I do something different long enough my brain will rewire to move me toward that this is why it’s hard to make swing changes you know if you’ve been swinging the club one way for however long your brain has created very efficient neural

Pathways that it is designed to preserve so then when I go do something different I’m asking my brain to rewire and that does indeed take a little bit of time tremendous goly this does sound like more podcasts okay I’ve kept you for a long time so I want to whistle through

These I did want to touch on these things because I went to your website and had a look at what you do and look it’s all fascinating but you listed a few things composure Under Pressure um resilience to adversity and high performance habits um I feel like you sort of touched on those

Too but would you just kind of you know butterfly kiss those a little bit each just to course almost give the the fan and The Listener and The Watcher of this marching orders if you will you know yeah of course the book to learn um so if everything that you’ve just touched

On are kind of sections two three and four of the book so section one is do I understand my brain so that it’s not a surprise to me why it interacts in the way that does like you don’t need to be a neuroscientist but having a fundamental understanding of how your

Brain works is like having a fundamental understanding about how your arms work so that you can understand how to deliver the golf club in a way that is more efficient right or why a certain uh movement doesn’t do it as well may I ask you this real fast because as a golf

Teacher I love a good training aid that allows you to hit a golf ball and I’m big on drills when since me starting to teach golf in 1996 up until now you come for lesson with me I’m going to explain the concept to you the why of it explain

To you what your Tendencies are know what you might see if you do this and then I’m going to give you a drill or something to go and do so that drill is just I know it’s muscular but essentially it’s Chang changing the Mind mind am I summarizing

Correctly it’ll it’ll change the brain so again anything we do differently physically is gonna GNA lead to rewiring in our brain provided we do it enough and consistently enough for it to change so you know um you’re kind of getting along like yes it’s a muscular skeletal movement but that movement can’t happen

Without a command from the brain and the more I give a different command from my brain the more my brain will rewire to give that command more efficiently but it it does indeed take time and that’s again assuming that you’re sticking with that agitation long enough and then

Pairing that with really good sleep yeah in the book you call the brain the supercomputer and this brings up a question right because yes golfer because everyone listening to this or watching this has been there you go for a lesson because our audience we aspirant this is the smartest golf

Audience in the world here um so they listen to podcast they go for lessons they want to get better so we’re in the midst of changing something to perform but then we’re like there’s a Target over there and I’m gonna get the ball over there this is the conundrum correct

Yeah I think um what you’re kind of highlighting is as a golfer being really picky about when the outcome and the target are the priority or the you might say main metric and when the motion is the primary right though many uh string uh swing instructors have asked me like

How can I get them less Target oriented them being their students and part of explaining like this is not a time where we really care where the ball goes of course we’re eventually trying to get it to the Target in the most efficient way but right now we can’t do that until we

Address the motion first and I want you to focus on that for two reasons one it allows you to focus on doing it correctly and two that’s showing your brain what to rewire when you then go to sleep last night not just produce ball at Target and sometimes that’s as simple

As putting a net in front of where you can’t see where the ball’s going um and being less Target and less outcome oriented during your learning because that allows you to focus on the learning that you’re doing but ultimately it’s a Target Sport so there’s going to be some

Draw to it but really picking apart when are the times when the ball flight the outcome and the target are the priority and when is the motion or making a change the priority and then eventually hopefully you’re trying to marry the two down the line I think I accidentally did

Something as an instructor smart here recently and I’m I’m looking for your Commendation um I’ve done this before maybe it was just you know I was I was blessed with a Moment of clarity um where I had a client fantastic talented doing really well at a hardd event here

To start the season and it was a case where I could see that the game was being played almost with a hand breakup there was apprehension there was never really an unencumbered swing that was made everything looked like it was riddled with oh my goodness what if this

Doesn’t happen or what if it goes wrong and I prescribed for said client I’m like I want you to just go and make a 100 swings a day no golf ball just go set the club up just swing it swing to balance and so they bit thankfully and I

Went out and watched them hit the other day and it was a different person there was a freedom it was uninterrupted it wasn’t like there was a ball that I had to hit over there it was like the athletic person inside the individual was coming out is is this yeah what you

Did is remove in a very efficient way what you did is remove a a task that was counterproductive to what you were asking them to do you know um I’ll just pair there’s a variety of different trainings so for example sniper school and a lot of our Olympic um sport

Shooting teams they dry fire far more than they’re taking actual shots really right because there’s a fire impulse there’s a um an Impulse like a a recoil impulse in um sport shooting or any shooting for that matter but then also in golf there’s a hit impulse and so if

I take the hit out of it then I can focus on the motion that I’m trying to make perhaps then I get off the outcome so much and then my brain is again starting to rewire and I’m starting to learn oh this is what it feels like this

Is what it it produces then I can introduce the Target or the ball later on without that becoming the priority during my practice so that can be very helpful which is why just hitting and raking on the Range and trying to hit a ball to a Target is pretty inefficient

Practice because you’re just trying to produce an outcome Without Really engaging with well what’s getting you there if you watch really good professionals practice they don’t hit balls very fast no they’re very deliberate with it um and it’s much more of a quality over quantity thing which

If we’re talking how our brain learns a quality rep counts a lot but if I pair that with 10 not so quality reps again I’m asking my brain to hopefully pick out the one out of the 10 out of there that it’s gonna have a hard time doing because again it’s G to

Move to gravitate toward repetition not necessarily more like a quality rep uh Dr Raymond prior now Reverend Raymond prior I should say speaking Yeah folks practice needs some some per it needs to be Purpose Driven um I want to then just the adversity is a big thing because you

Talked about some high performance habits and such but look the one guarantee about Golf and I often times laen it to getting on the first te like getting into a boxing ring and you’re gonna take a few hits and the person really that survives is not necessarily the best it’s just the most

Resilient and the person who recovers the best so talk about that please yeah sure so I’ll just kind of um like you said Leap Frog over the other two so composure if we really understand composure it’s do I know how to stay present in high performance settings okay right

And stay task focused so that’s what composure and it’s not necessar a characteristic or a born- in trait it’s do I know how to stay focused on what’s relevant when it’s relevant and everything that’s relevant in high performance is happening in the present moment for us it’s the most valuable to

Us so section two of the book um is about mindfulness and how we train ourselves to be present more often and also interact with our own thoughts and feelings in a way where we can be present yeah section three is about our habits and how they form and how we can

Start to change them if we have developed habits that are not so conducive to performing at a high level um and that is really important for us because as much as we as humans like to think we’re very intentional and very rational human beings we are very much

Creatures of habit like every other animal on the planet we have trained ourselves into a series of behaviors and unless we’re paying attention to them in a certain way in languages that our brain speaks very difficult to just say instead of doing this just go do this

Yeah okay the last section of the book is about our psychological framework so if you think about our psychological framework it’s how we see ourselves how we see the world and how we see ourselves interacting within it our psychological framework is telling us the stories about what’s worthwhile for

Us what’s engageable for us what’s possible for us and what’s meaningful for us among a variety of other things where resilience comes from is the stories I tell myself is when things get harder don’t go my way it’s worth it for me to stay with it rather than bail out

And give up it’s not a character thing it’s the stories and the shapes of the beliefs shapes meaning the way I’m thinking about things that gives me very good reason to go things are getting hard stay with it or things got hard it’s not worth it you should bail out

Yeah and we bail out in a lot of ways it can be I’m plain scared all the way to I quit altogether and totally leave like it’s amazing to me watching like a Monday qualifier where players as soon as they figure out mathematically I’m not so sure I’m going to make it through

There’s a lot of withdrawals I’m not saying that’s a good decision or a bad decision but that is their psychological framework saying if you’re not mathematically available to qualify it’s time to Escape right and so that part of resilience we used to think resilience was just this willpower hardiness that

You just have through by just like pressure pressure uh pressure blasting people yeah where it really comes from is the psychological framework the core beliefs that we have that tell us when things get hard this is actually okay and and you should stay with it and understanding what those beliefs look

Like allows us to be able to challenge the ones we have that aren’t allowing for that and perhaps develop ones that are I’m going to sound biblical now but it sort of sounds like you know there’s a Bible verse that goes you know the continual renewing of the mind you know

As it pertains to what you just described I mean that that is a thing correct are you building you have it um there’s something to be said about being able to learn really efficiently mark that Bible verse brings in some very significant science right now which is

It is really valuable for us to be able to relearn not just physical things not just strategies not just how equipment works but also relearn thinking and responding to things in ways that are more conducive to moving us toward the things that we want to so you know for

Example many players learn anxiety on the low end of the learning curve and it propels them up the learning curve if you’re a perfectionist and running through anxiety on the low end of the learning curve where just M supplying effort and time and Reps is going to get

You better you’re going to get better yeah at the top end of the learning curve where everything requires such Precision more time more energy and more effort to make smaller and smaller increments of progress that Perfection and anxiety will burn you out and it will keep you from performing freely and

Learning and so the long and the short of is if I don’t learn how to address the same things or similar challenges differently or relearn how to address them I’m stuck with whatever I’ve developed to to begin with which may or not be helpful for me as I pursue that

That is fascinating you know I see that on a weekly basis when because you know on CBS we covering the very best at their very best because they’re contending and you know these same folks if you catch them the following week they might not hit the shot like they

Just did but but but they’ve just been in this environment where they’re lying themselves to go and like I was watching tennis the other day it’s like these folks just started hitting the ball harder and harder and harder and the announcers were saying yeah they’re not being aggressive enough and I was like

Holy cow I think of tennis trying to get the ball in the court where these folks were you talk about pinpoint yeah it’s very precise lines really it’s incredible yeah it really is it’s it’s amazing um how freely we can pursue things even with very small margins for errors when we have self-given

Permission to be able to do so you know if I was going to kind of put a a definition to what stable confidence is it’s self-given permission to perform freely without a guarantee which if I have that in place there’s not a surprise to me why there are so many players on both

Tours who are at or near the top of the leaderboard every single week and that’s because they are giving themselves permission to play freely every week and it’s not that things go perfectly for them along the way and everything’s just right but if I’m not creating any self-imposed barriers to my own

Performance or contaminating everything else down the line like my core strategy my technical skills my equipment Etc and I’m giving it free reign to be used not only do I get to learn and get feedback from what that’s doing but I have a significant advantage over the and I’m

Much more consistent than the people who don’t have that self-given permission and have this really long checklist to check off in order to play freely which as you come all the way full circle what if you don’t is the answer okay I I’ve got to I’ve got to just ask this I know

The answer I believe but I’ve got to ask it just because again we’ve got a plethora of bands and mhm big wide audience we’re not just talking about Elite performers here anyone can let themselves give themselves the freedom to allow their best to occur whether you’re a club golfer or or whether

You’re a PGA Tour or whatever professional yes you can if you understand your brain and you’re training your mind in a way where you’re understanding these things where you’re removing the external things that need to come your way in order to give yourself that permission to play freely

Anybody can pursue um more of what they want more fre and I don’t want to make that sound like it’s super easy and the flick of a switch because it’s not but it is available to all of us if we are willing to do a little bit of inner work

And a little bit of self-reflection and then perhaps do a little bit of work um we are you know when people tell me like oh people can’t change I’m like that’s all we’re designed to do is to change right everything that we do in our lives

We are constantly changing in one way or another if we direct that change in an intentional way because we understand what’s going on underneath now I can move that in the directions that I want to go which doesn’t produce a guarantee but it sure does stack the deck in my

Favor it all starts with a supercomputer folks it sure does okay it’s called golf beneath the surface tell folks where they can get this book please Raymond you can scoop that book wherever books are sold uh major book stores anywhere onl you just Google golf beneath the

Surface you’ll find it it’s on Amazon anywhere you can find it and they can learn from you there but if they want to learn from you directly tell folks how to find you remond um you can find me at my website which is um btsm mindset.com BTS beneath the surface some really on

The mark branding if I do say so myself Mark U you can also catch me um I have a podcast also entitled golf beneath the surface with co-hosted with my good friend Chase Cooper who’s an outstanding instructor and and real Curious golf uh member and uh you can maybe catch me on

Twitter at BTS mindset but only occasionally I have a very sparing relationship with social media right given what we’ve talked about Raymond thank you thank you thank you for the book Thank you for the time you’ve changed people’s lives on the show and for that I’m I I’m very appreciative

Mark thank you so much for having me please let me know how I can be of value to you and the listeners in the future how’s