Podcast Transcript
Josh Nichols
Do you think we, as golfers get too in the weeds of instruction and improvement, stuff like that?
Mike Berland
I mean, for me, it was the starting point. It’s that golf starts off with this idea that you have to get your handicap lower. You have to get a lower score each time you play. And the whole sort of notion of the game is based on improvement. But really improvement comes in a couple of different ways. You can improve your score. You can improve the joy and the time that you have on the course. You can enjoy the satisfaction that you feel. And so we’ve only had one metric, which was
How did you shoot versus, you know, how did you play? How much fun did you have? Did you enjoy the people you were with? Was it worth your time?
Josh Nichols
And obviously this is the mental golf show and a large portion of the mission of this podcast, if you want to call it that, is to help golfers play better golf. But that’s kind of a Trojan horse, is the way I think of it. People come here to improve their game, but I think they leave improving as a person without realizing that was what was going to happen. And so that’s been kind of a theme of the podcast is, you know, golf psychology is really just human psychology. The mental game as a golfer is really just human mental game and it helps you play better golf. Does that, you know, just to touch on golf performance briefly, do you think that having a better perspective on the game helps you play better?
Mike Berland
Yeah, understanding what your goals are and what are you trying to get out there. I’ve never played better golf than when I wasn’t thinking about my score. I never played better golf than when I was with people and we were just having fun and just being out there. And so when you get into this flow state, where you’re just enjoying the game and doing what you’re up. Suddenly the balls go higher and longer, the cuts go straighter and your mind sort of gets out of it and I think your body just takes over. And that’s so true in life. I was talking to somebody and said, you know, sometimes when you’re on the tee box and you can see your ball slicing out OB and they said in a meeting, do you ever see, you know, a statement that you say just landing so badly that you’re going to get fired? I’m like, never.
So then why does it happen in golf? You know, like, if you can’t see the future in regular life, why are you seeing the future in golf?
Josh Nichols
Hmm, so golf teaches you not, it teaches you to rein it in and be more present.
Mike Berland
Yeah, golf, be in the absolute moment. Set your goal and go achieve it and don’t focus on the outcomes. Focus on the moment. Be present.
Josh Nichols
Is there, you know, there’s all sorts of psychology literature on here’s the flow state, here’s the factors that help you get into the flow state, here’s prefrontal cortex, amygdala, limbic system, like there’s all this stuff. Do you think that that’s overcomplicated and it’s simpler than that to be in the moment quote unquote?
Mike Berland
Yeah.
I mean, the technical, the way you described it is very technical. The way I do it, when I realize that I’m out of it, I’ll go to a simple exercise. Five things I see, four things I can touch, three things I can smell, two things I can taste, one thing I can hear. And if I go through that exercise, my mind is ready to go. And I know like, if I’ve got this anxiety coming on, I go to that exercise and poof, I’m back into it. And then I try doing it in business.
And it worked the same way. And I tried it in skiing and it worked the same way. Once you can clear, it’s not just a golf exercise, it’s a life exercise. Once you can clear something that’s stuck in your brain and move on, it just, it lightens you up. You know, it makes you free.
Josh Nichols
I love that the kind of 5-4-3-2-1. That basically all the five senses if I caught that correctly?
Mike Berland
Yeah, I think I saw one of you, had a podcast on it, right? It’s a wonderful exercise. It’s so fast to do. Like it doesn’t, I was talking to a PGA caddy and he was telling me that on the tour, golfers have little exercises that they’re doing all the time to just keep them, think about other things, know, so that they, as they’re walking towards the ball, they’re not consumed with the shot. You know, they’re looking at blades of grass. They’re looking at leaves.
anything to sort of distract them.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, it’s funny how we, calling it a distraction is probably not even fair because it’s actually a centering, it’s a grounding. It’s a focusing thing. We’re distracting ourselves from being not present. We’re distracting ourselves from future or past to be present.
Mike Berland
Focus, yes, it’s a complete focus, yeah.
Mike Berland
For five minutes you can’t hit the shot. You know, for the whole time you’re walking up waiting for the other guy to do it, you can’t hit the shot anyway. So what, you know, you can’t just, you can’t be so focused on it. When you get to the time that you go in, when you go into your set up routine, when you’re gonna do it, okay, then be focused, you know, what’s the distance, where’s it going, what club should I use? And don’t do that at the last second either. I see a lot of people at the last second sort of haven’t thought it through and that doesn’t help either, they’re in a panic.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, and use
Right, yeah, you kind of start that process on the way and there’s a fine line between, you said in a four hour round, you’re golfing for 10 minutes. So what are you doing the other 230 minutes of the round? So that 230 minutes, do you think of it as like you’re popping into the shot and then you’re popping out? Like intentionally I am getting away from golf and I’m thinking about other things besides golf? Is that like a process that you like doing.
Mike Berland
Yeah.
For me all the time because I’m not a championship golfer. I’m not making my money. I’m wanting to be with my friends so that the chit chat that’s happening in golf is social and networking. That’s the part I enjoy so that I love the fact that golf gives you some natural icebreakers good putt tough lie you need to make chit chat and then you can go into other things. With the amount of time that you never spend with somebody. I don’t know what it would take to have a four hour lunch with somebody or a four hour dinner with somebody or you know what would you do for four hours when it’s just you and that person outside a hike that would seem like an ambitious hike. The golf gives you a number of different subjects that you can cover as you’re going through the adventures of golf. And it doesn’t matter if you’re with your kid or with your wife or with your parents, you’re still having the same chit chat that can go in all sorts of directions and get to some hard conversations if you want to.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, and if you’re riding in a car with him, when are you ever like four inches away from like, you know, if I’m being honest, like another man, right? Like I’m four inches away from you for like four and a half hours. That just doesn’t happen in regular life.
Mike Berland
Yeah.
And neither of you are really on your device and you’re most likely you’re chit chatting, you’re drinking a beer or you’re drinking a soda, whatever you’re doing, you’re socializing and you have to watch them, they have to watch you. Golf, there’s a lot of observing of other people. What I particularly like is by the time I’m done playing golf, whether it’s nine holes or 18, it doesn’t really matter.
I know that person pretty well. I know how they are when they’re up, when they’re down, when they’re frustrated, when they’re happy. And you can really see into their soul. And I love that skill. Sometimes I’m surprised by people and sometimes I’m like, wow, I didn’t know that about them. And other times I’m like, holy cow, where did that come from? You know, like I’ll see frustration. And I’m like, I thought this was the lowest key guy ever.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, you learn a lot about them.
Mike Berland
And he just screamed out something. I’m like, come on, that’s golf. Or I’ll see someone get really happy. And I’m like, I’m glad to see that they go up.
Josh Nichols
Yes, yeah, golf has this way of, I mean… The clients that I talk to, say golf does this to me like nothing else does. It pulls out the worst in me, but it also pulls out the best in me. I love the idea of kind of, you’re both, you with each other, but you’re both going through something really difficult together, right? It’s kind of like you’re sharing an in the trenches moment.
Mike Berland
So much adversity. No matter who you are, you’re gonna have a bad lie. Or you’re gonna have a shot that didn’t do what you expected. Or you’re gonna chunk one in the bunker. Even if you have… Cause everybody’s version of chunking in the bunker is something different. And how do you go through it? Like, one of the things I would advocate strongly for is people take putting way too seriously. And I think we should have like a putt clock. Like within five seconds you gotta put it down and go because we all know that putting is an imperfect science. You can hit the most perfect putt on the perfect line and it will hit a rock. We saw it happen, I think, to Rory. Like, it hits a rock, it doesn’t go. So we spend too much time doing things that aren’t really gonna make a difference. It would be more fun to just keep moving. And I wonder why people do that to themselves. They overanalyze something that they don’t have control over.
Josh Nichols
Man, that is really, really true, but also really, really hard in practice because we feel like we have to enact all this control over this thing. Right.
Mike Berland
Right? But that’s what golf is. Golf doesn’t give you control. And that’s why the dopamine rush is so good when it does what you want because you’re like, wow, it’s a real sense of accomplishment. And that’s where the frustration comes because what did you do so differently between one and the other? Probably not much, but you got such a different result. And that doesn’t happen in business. In business, if you make the deal and you make the offer and you get the company, you can do the same, you can have the same model over and over again. This is what I pay, this is what I get. And then golf every day can be completely different based on the weather, the wind, how your body’s going. My funniest thing is, you ever tried to play golf when you have an upset stomach? Not just, it’s really hard. Everything somehow changes and you don’t know what it is, but you can’t do it. And it’s something going on in your body that you have little control over. Or if you have like, if you’re a little dehydrated, you can have the same thing, like, but it’s just not functioning.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, you didn’t sleep great the night before, you got a crick in your neck, you’re distracted, you got something in your personal life going on, yeah.
Mike Berland
Yeah!
And golfers don’t acknowledge that. Like, wait a minute, man. You’re coming out of here after two hours of sleep because you had a late night. And now you expect to come out and, you know, and shoot 75. Give me a break. You’re hungover, you know? Or you were up all night with a stomach.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, it sounds like a big lesson in managing expectations. Do you? Yeah, go, go.
Mike Berland
Yeah, exactly. That’s a lot about what I called my book not about golf, about you and golf, is because golf is very hard to control. It’s really about you and your experience and did you enjoy it? And did you put in a place, a situation where you were gonna have fun that day? Did you play with people that you like to play with? Did you play a course that you like? Did you have enough time to be out there and enjoy it? And so set those situations up right. Know where you’re going. Know where the start is. Know where the game is. These little things that are very tense, have those things under control so you can just go out there and relax. If you’re playing at a place that you always play, do you like your group? Do you like the format you’re playing? These are all things that you can control.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, and it’s such an unpredictable thing. We’re just on a personal example in life. We’re expecting our second daughter in under a month. So we have our bags packed. We’re trying to make the most uncertain thing as certain as possible. So we’re trying to hedge for this and hedge for that. So golf is the same, right? Golf itself is so uncertain, but you can arrange these things and the thing about not about golf is the, you know, the, the re know, in quotes, the kind of regular amateur or the beginner or something, they, they have no clue about all this stuff and you show up and you’re, you’re kind of whisked along. Is that kind how you think about it?
Mike Berland
They’re trying to find out where do you drop your bag. They’re having all this anxiety about how they’re going to play and nobody really cares how they play. They just want them to play fast. Like they just want them to keep the pace of the group in front of you only because there’s so many people on the course and everybody wants it to be efficient. So they don’t care about your score. They don’t really care about, they want you to be engaging. They don’t care how you play. They just want to make sure that you don’t lie on, if you got an eight, don’t say you got a six. Cause people will be frustrated when the hole’s over, up. And that’s not really, somehow there’s a stigma about some of that stuff. Like picking up, not finishing a hole that beginners don’t know.
Josh Nichols
No cheating.
Mike Berland
Like beginners don’t know, hey, if you’re gonna get a seven, don’t worry, you don’t have to get a 10. You can take a seven and we’re all happy and we’ll move on to the next hole and you can try again. I think that’s a lesson. Be comfortable in how you play because you’re gonna get 18 more opportunities or 17 more opportunities.
Josh Nichols
Do you struggle with this kind of stuff?
Mike Berland
I don’t, I don’t because it’s kind of in my professional life, I’m a consultant, a strategist, I help elected candidates get elected to office. And so I understand adversity. I understand the importance of moving on. So I don’t get, I never get stuck on one thing because I know that we have to get on to something else. So I have a very much of a move on personality and there’s always, what we say in politics is that best days, you always want your best days ahead. So best hole ahead, best shot ahead, best putt ahead. Golf is very forgiving if you look at it through that lens. You know, can buy another ball, you can hit another shot, like it’s okay. Unless you’re a pro, unless this is how you support your family, that’s a different situation because now you’ve made a choice where there are consequences.
Josh Nichols
Mmm. I love that kind of forgiveness. Very few of us are doing that. Right, yeah, it’s a small enough percentage. If we got pro golfers out there listening to this, Scotty, if you’re listening, hit me up, you could be a guest. But most people that are listening are just trying to enjoy the game more. They want to get better, but I don’t know, how much should we be balancing I want to get better at the game versus I want to just enjoy the game?
Mike Berland
Well, here’s an amazing, I never knew this before I wrote the book. Every golfer leaves around a golf scene, I wanna play better next time. I can’t believe it. If you shoot 80, 90, 100, 110, you all say they remember their great shot, they remember a couple of the bad shots, and they wanna play better the next time. And I was thinking, where in life do you always wanna do something better the next time? Certainly not in business. You don’t say, oh, the next meeting I’ll do better. Or, you know, certainly not things in sort of a personal, I’d really, you know, I’d like to have a better conversation next time. But in golf, every time you come out, you say, wish I could do that a little bit better. You never think that it was your best. You always think that there’s something that you could do differently and you want to improve it. And that’s why think it leaves you, golfers always want to play the next match, the next round, the next game. They never are satisfied because it… that need for that dopamine, the endorphins that come from it. I really think it’s biological that they want to come out and do it again. And that’s why I’ve been pushing people so hard who say golf’s too hard, golf’s intimidating, golf’s not for me, golf’s expensive, golf’s for old white rich men. Like all these things are like, where is this coming from? Like go into a simulator at Five Iron, go outside and go to a driving range.
Just that one time you hit the ball in the air, you’ll be hooked.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, places like Topgolf and more approachable stuff.
Mike Berland
Topgolf. Fantastic. But here’s where top golf gets it right and gets it wrong. Top golf makes golf super accessible. It’s fun. You just have to get the ball out there. The mistake is golfers don’t go to top golf to become club champions. Let top golf be fun. And I think we’re probably made a mistake because they try to… It’s great for fun. It’s great for food. It’s great for socializing. I don’t know if it’s going to be a top place where, you know, where more amateurs want to get better. You know, there’s a, there’s, and I think that that’s where the mistake is. Don’t try to, don’t try to get the top equipment in there and just let top golf be top golf because it will bring people into the game and they can go into the funnel. And then the funnel has a lot of places where you can, if you like golf and you want to play better, you can improve your game. And I think that’s where people get things wrong.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, the-
Yeah, we’ve all seen the guy or girl bring in their whole, their own bag of clubs into a Topgolf.
Mike Berland
Yeah. And it’s fine, and they’re getting out of it, they’re using the simulator, and it’s the best range they have. Fantastic. And that’s good. I want them to go there. But that’s not Topgolf’s mission. Topgolf’s mission is to get the nine-year-old girls birthday party, or the work that brings in young girls, or the work outing that allows everybody on the team to be successful at golf and play those games. And those are fantastic entry points. And with food and with socializing, with powerful reinforcement, in a golf-like setting, it doesn’t diminish golf. It feels like a pro shop. It feels like golf has it rightfully shit.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, I’ve done, I think I’ve done multiple bachelor parties at Topgolf. It’s perfect for that.
Mike Berland
I think it’s also a great way start a
to like try to get the one brighter like a dart. I mean, that’s a fun game.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s challenging. I mean, I’m a good player and I get out there and I’m like, I have to chill myself out and say, okay, all right, Josh, this is genuinely difficult. This is equipment you’re not used to. This is a golf ball you’re not used to. Look at the landscape that you’re on. You need to manage your expectations here.
Mike Berland
Great.
And then you see those targets, you’re like, why can’t I just put it in the middle of one and get all those bonus points? And it’s like next to impossible.
Josh Nichols
Right. It should be easy. Right. Okay. What do you, what do you tell someone who has been playing for a long time, but they still just, they seem miserable with the game. They, they seem to kind of hate golf. Have a bad relationship with the game. How would you, what would you say to that person?
Mike Berland
Why are you playing? I always say to them, if you hate golf so much and it’s so frustrating, what is bringing you back? Is it social? Are you trying to win? Some people are trying to win and they’re frustrated with their game. Is your body not moving the same way that it was and you just don’t have the capabilities? I’m always trying to like, again, it’s the same in my professional life when I’m trying to help my branch or help my clients. What are you trying to achieve? And then… you know, is your frustration in line with your objective? Right? So if you’re, if you’re someone who’s seen your game go backwards and you’ve lost some distance or you’re not hitting the ball straight is, you know, is there something wrong with your mechanics? Is there something wrong with your equipment? Is there something wrong with your brain? You know, that you’re, you’re, you’re focused. I try to help them that way. And the, usually the first thing I do is say, Hey, why don’t we put the scorecard away? Why don’t we go just go hit some balls and see how you do when we’re not playing a match. And then all of a sudden, I see smiles.
But I had this issue that I talk about in the book where I’ve always been a consistent 15 handicap, like shooting mid-90s, mid-90s, once in a while going under 80. But I could lose my focus. I never thought I was a natural. I had to think about it. And during the middle of the most important part of my career, when I was selling my company and I was going through a lot of due diligence, which was new to me, my golf game just went away. I couldn’t hit the ball. It was very frustrating. So I was trying to do the same golf activities as I was during my business activities. And I was playing, was a guest of a friend during a three-day member guest that I played with for 17 years and were at dinner with my friend’s wife who doesn’t play golf at all. And I was telling her what I was going through and she says, it doesn’t sound like you need a golf lesson. It seems like you need a golf therapist. And I was like, yeah, you might be right. And that’s why I came to me, where I went to a golf therapist, a performance psychologist, and I told them what was going on. And the diagnosis was, you’ve lost focus. You’re doing things that you don’t normally do, and you’ve got to get back into flow. And that’s where those exercises came from. And the golf just came back, and it came back better because I could realize when I was getting into that stage. And so that was the most important golf lesson that I took recommended by somebody who’s never played golf.
Josh Nichols
So you’ve been to a performance psychologist for golf?
Mike Berland
Oh, 100%. In Vail, I went to a performance psychologist for golf. I’m a three-time Ironman in Kona. I’ve run five marathons. I’ve helped elected presidents of the United States, mayors of New York. So I’ve done all these things. So he says, well, you’ve had success in other areas. Why do think you’re not having success in golf?
And so we went through these, these issues and we looked at heart rate and we looked at flow and we looked at focus. And I, and I never would have thought that that was applicable to me, you know, because I’m not, I didn’t think I was at that. Yeah. Well, I also didn’t think that golf required those skills. Right. I just, cause you know, like, and he said, when you’re riding the bike in the Ironman, do you ever see yourself falling off? I’m like, no.
Josh Nichols
You’re a high performer. You-
Mike Berland
He said, when you’re swimming in the ocean, do you see yourself drowning? In business, you ever see one of your candidates getting blown out in an election? No. He says, well, why do you see bad things happening at all? And so we went through exercises. And the first time I tried one of those exercises, it was actually during the winter, and I also liked to ski. And I did one of the exercises, and then I did a mogul run.
And I got into this incredible flow that I had never felt before when my body just did the moguls and I didn’t have to think. And I couldn’t believe that the power of sports psychology and the mental aspects of sports, because you think it’s all like, you have to tell your body what to do. When you’re functioning well, your body just does it. Which I’m sure you know something about.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, right, that, man, that’s fascinating. So what do you think was causing you to lose focus?
Mike Berland
I think that I was, my mind was on my business, which was so uncertain and I didn’t know what was going to happen. And I wasn’t giving myself the proper break to switch from business uncertainty, due diligence, all these things I had little experience with. Then trying to get on the golf course where my, my heartbeat was still probably in zone two, you know, just at normal state. I wasn’t, and calm and so I just, my head wasn’t there and one error would compound to another error and a third error and I couldn’t get it back.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, you were distracted, so you’d hit a bad shot, which would make you angry, which you’d hit another bad shot, then you’re kind of self-catastrophizing. My golf game is gone, which just makes you confused.
Mike Berland
So sad. My whole life, golf has been something that I worked so hard to build. And it was going, and all these years just up in smoke. And I was super frustrated. Would I ever get it back? And that’s going through your head while you’re playing. Will I ever be able to hit my pitching wedge? Will I be able to hit my drive and bounce? And once you’re there, it’s hard to get it back on the course.
Josh Nichols
So was it like snap of the fingers, you got the train back on the rails? Like was it quick?
Mike Berland
No, no, took a year. It took a year to… And also the outcome was some technique improvement. Like I suddenly started to care more about my technique and doing it right. So I’d always had this idea if I could just keep the ball in front of me and keep the conversation up, that was good enough. And I realized that that really wasn’t good enough for what I wanted to do. And so changing some of my technique, to make it better and more predictable would lead to my fulfillment and happiness on the golf course. So I had to put in more work to get better at it, to meet my expectations of how I should play. And I think also the people I was playing with who were spending time with me and wanted to have a certain experience when we’re playing as a team to meet their expectations as well.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, you-
Right, you know, there’s, my dad has always called it business golf, where you don’t want to be, you know, we want golf to be approachable. We want people to be able to approach the game, you know, come as you are sort of thing. But at a certain level, you know, when you’re playing with a client or you’re playing with people that you want them to have a good experience, right? That, you know, that’s important in a lot of, you know, when it’s kind of business meeting golf or whatever it is, you want to have a certain skill level. So there has to be, there is some pressure there to perform, but there’s also an expectation of, okay, I need to, I can’t be a terrible golfer, right? I need to be at least some level. Is that kind of how you think about it?
Mike Berland
Yes, you have to be, I mean, I have be consistent with myself. I’m pretty buttoned up in most parts of my life. My golf should be consistent with that. And even in my marriage, where I play a lot of golf with my wife, again, I’m not looking to beat her. I’m thinking that we’re not in matches where I’m trying to like, sure, but there should just be a level of consistency in the way that we play and the respect that we have and you know, no one wants someone to be too slow or you know, let me hit another practice shot. We want to keep the game moving. It’s about mutual respect, I think. So it’s never about the golf itself. It’s about all the things. I didn’t need to hit the shot because I need to hit a beautiful shot. I just need to keep things moving so we can have an enjoyable experience. Whatever that experience is, when I take out. Someone, one of my favorite stories of all of golf is a dear friend of mine whose husband played golf and the woman didn’t play golf. She was in her 50s. And I said, look, you should really try it. She goes, no, golf’s not for me. It’s too hard, too late in my life. And I’m like, well, why don’t you just try it? And why don’t we come out? And I played with her. The first couple of times, if she just hit the ball, it was a major celebration. But she got the bug. And then she started to take some lessons. And now she plays four times a week. And I said, how do we get from here to here? Because when she could just barely hit the ball, I was so thrilled because we were outside and the golf course is huge. And she’s getting around it as she gets better, expectations for herself improve, and then she becomes part of other things. That’s, to me, those are the most fulfilling stories of getting somebody from thinking that it’s not even for them and showing them all the benefits, both from a self-respect, a self-image, from a feeling of fulfillment, and to be outside and enjoy some of the great places in the world where we golf.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, golf has so many upsides that might not even include hitting the center of the face.
Mike Berland
Yeah, I think that, I mean the center of the face is just like such a bonus, right? Like if you, right? I mean, anybody who is in the center of the face thinks it’s just a great bonus.
Josh Nichols
Mmm, it’s an amazing bonus. It’s an addicting bonus.
Mike Berland
It’s an addicting bonus, yeah. I had a guy, played last week, and he kept saying, I’m hitting the ball 10 yards longer than I ever have. And he was describing that as a problem. Like, why don’t you adjust for it? Accept it, accept your extra distance and start playing for it, but stop talking about it. It’s a great thing. If it falls back, it falls back.
Josh Nichols
Sounds like a good thing. Yeah, that’s a great thing. That’s a good problem to have.
Yeah, so I love what you said, of, you’re a high performer in, you know, athletics and business and, you know, it sounds like you have a beautiful marriage. So you have this standard of excellence that you hold yourself to, right? As Mike, you hold yourself to a standard of excellence. So when golf was falling behind, you felt, okay, this… It’s okay if I’m like ultimately big picture. It’s okay if I’m not good at golf, but I hold myself to a higher standard than that. I’m going to push myself to get better just because that’s who I am.
Mike Berland
Yeah.
Right, wasn’t because golf was my social glue. And so I was wondering what a life without golf would be. And because it was the basis of so much of my friendships, of my social life, of my work life. And so if golf wasn’t gonna be a part of it, what was gonna fill in? And so that’s why I’m like, okay, I was really thankful for my friend’s wife’s suggestion. It never occurred to me that that was the solution. And then I realized from that, that there were certain steps I had to do to correct things that were preventing me from the consistency. It’s really interesting. Somehow golf gets easier, the better you get at it. I mean, maybe that’s a truism for many things, but once you get a pretty replicable swing, you may not always hit it the best, but the errors aren’t as bad as when you just have no idea where the ball is going or how far it’s going. And so getting to that place has changed a lot of things to I still can make errors, but I don’t have the feeling of uncertainty that I had before. And the feeling of uncertainty is a difficult place in life, because I’m not uncertain in anything else I do.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, it sounds like your very job is to make things less uncertain.
Mike Berland
Right, people come to me with trying to understand what’s next. And if I don’t know what’s next on the nine iron I’m gonna hit, that’s a problem.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, so I like what you you’ve kind of painted two pictures. There’s the downward spiral of I lost my focus because of something outside of golf which can happen that’s like the the very first hurdle you can run into but then because you’ve lost your focus you hit a worse shot, which makes you angry, right? There’s this downward spiral, but you’re describing also an upward spiral of okay, I’ve regained my focus, right? I had to start there. I’ve regained my focus by doing these exercises, by paying more attention, whatever, by just gaining balance in my life, being able to let go of work when I get to the golf course, whatever. So I’ve regained my focus, which helps me hit a better golf shot, which makes me happier, which helps me hit another good one, and this upward spiral of towards momentum. Like you’ve talked a lot about momentum, right? You’ve written another book about momentum, that idea of you, you start, you get this ball rolling and it rolls faster and faster the further it rolls.
Mike Berland
Right. But here’s the problem about momentum. Momentum has no direction. So people always think like, I have positive momentum. And yes, positive momentum is great, but you could have negative momentum. So momentum is just a formula, a mass times velocity. If your velocity is going backwards, you know, one thing leads to another, and you’ve got to stop it and turn it into the direction that you want.
And that’s when people come to me. The reason I wanted to write the book is I wanted to share with everybody what I had found in golf. And I found this great way to spend time with friends, to get things of fulfillment and satisfaction, to build community and to get people involved. And so I thought originally for many years that this was my story, but it wasn’t everybody’s. And then I saw during the pandemic hundreds of thousands of new golfers coming into the game. I saw young Gen Z golfers coming in and I saw fashion changing. I saw customs change. Saw indoor simulators popping up all over New York and around the country and people were playing golf everywhere. And I was like, and I looked at him, this sport has real momentum. Let me try to explain stuff that they don’t teach you in the lessons or where you can’t find a million videos on YouTube for the tips and tricks of the social and networking parts of golf. And yet those for many people are the most important, you know, and it’s not, it’s not talked about. It just happens through osmosis. People will say business deals get done on the golf course. Where? They don’t get done on the golf course. You make relationships. You, you know, it’s the rest of life. You, you get to know people and they want to spend more time with you.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, you’re not whipping out the contract at the end of the round, right?
Mike Berland
Who would ever do that? But also, I wanted golf to be more modern and consistent with today’s world. I advocate for a lot of changes that we can still make to golf to make it more friendly, to more inclusive with today’s trends. Some of the structures of golf still need to go through another round of just modernization and a little bit more freedom.
You know, dress, dress codes, ages, know, formats, you know, like I’m finding now that people want to play all sorts of different formats. They don’t really want to play 18 holes. They want to play 9. They want to play something more interesting than best ball, two man best ball. They want to, you know, they want to play kind of, so they want to play scrambles. And those are
We shouldn’t judge those types of golf. Those are fun types of golf if that’s the type of golf you want to play. You know, we can all play different types of golf.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, yeah, should be what the golfer wants to make it, not what some guy said golf needs to be.
Mike Berland
Yes.
Wait, what the PGA plays or what Liv plays? Because that’s a fantastic type of golf, right? That’s one type of golf. But the Ryder Cup, that’s a different type of golf. You know the league that they’re playing in, that’s another type of golf. There are different formats and the more formats that we play in golf, the more people who love golf. And so there isn’t one type of golf anymore.
And that’s what I love. And also, performance enhancing comes in a lot of different ways. I love all these conversations about hitting longer drives and the ball that goes further. Who is that relevant to? Like, you know, like a thousand people? Like, I don’t know. Like, you could jack my ball. I don’t think it’s going any farther or any shorter. You can give me a driver. Like, does the 10 yards make a difference? You know, I think like we’re just talking to…
And so when I was on the golf channel, they said, is golf, do we make golf too intimidating? And I’m like, yeah. If you make, if you chill golf out a little bit, more people will come in and our sport will grow. Like it will, like right now we’re having a surge. Imagine if we could go to the next level.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, we see this, as we’re recording this, yesterday was the end of the open. We see these 100, I mean, we really only see 20 golfers, the very best of the very best. And we see the shots they hit, we see what they wear, we see they’re going through AimPoint and doing this and talking through, and they’re like this, that would be extremely intimidating, right, to say, okay, everyone needs to act like that or it’s not golf.
Mike Berland
But if you said to me right now, hey Mike, I’ve got an opening in the fourth swim at Port Rush, can you meet me there? Hey, I wanna come with you. I would love to play golf with you at Port Rush. Because I can go play on the same course and see the same shot that, we can try to do the same shot that Scotty did. But we don’t have, I’m not expecting to play like, and I think that’s the beauty of golf, is we can see these guys and see the version of golf they played. We can go play that course. You know, if you invite me and then and then we can but maybe we’ll play it on a simulator you know maybe maybe we’ll just go play down at five iron or top golf and there’s a lot of different ways for us so that’s why i love that this today’s golf is not being driven by a star on the on the tour you know this isn’t this isn’t you know tiger woods or jack nicklaus or anything this is grassroots so this is being driven from the bottom up because people are discovering just the sort of the longer term benefits of all discovered in the pandemic. You know, it took a pandemic that forced us to be outside with each other and socially distanced to find out that we really did enjoy being with each other.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, isn’t that crazy? We, be, be further away from people, but it put us together on the golf course. It’s crazy.
Mike Berland
The golf course, I mean, this is where we’ll, I this will have saved golf and also introduced golf. I don’t know. It, it will be both things. And the fact that the technology now allows us to play golf anywhere. So I talked to the CEO of Trackman. They have three and a half, they have three billion shots a year that they track this year. It’ll be four and a half billion next year. Four and a half billion shots on Trackman all are going into our database.
Josh Nichols
Wow.
Mike Berland
They all go to the same place. They have tournaments that go all over the world. On a certain day, everybody can sign up and play on the track, and the same tournament, over a couple days, in the exact same conditions, and there are prizes. And that’s modern golf.
Josh Nichols
Now that’s cool. That’s like the most accessible. It’s fully accessible to anyone.
Mike Berland
To anybody, I play winter golf at the Vail Country Club, which is a bar in Avon, Connecticut. And I go there, it’s dark outside, there’s a bunch of people inside, we put on whatever course we wanna play, and we play. And it’s indoors, you play 18 holes in an hour, right, because you’re not walking around, you’re just hitting shot after shot, and you go.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, that’s cool.
Yeah, and you can be eating a cheeseburger while you’re…
Mike Berland
And having a beer and listening to some music and then a t-shirt and you know any shoes you want in your work boots or your gym shoes, whatever you want to wear.
Josh Nichols
Yeah. How much do you think of golf as kind of personal exploration versus social, like the social aspect of it? What do you think is a bigger part? Like if you could never play with other people in golf and you always had to play with yourself versus the reverse, like which one would you choose?
Mike Berland
I can’t imagine myself ever playing a round of golf by myself. I mean, I just don’t, yeah. But I recorded a movie by myself. I mean, I feel like, I just, it’s not me. I’m, I always want to play golf with someone. And which was the issue because I didn’t like to practice. And so like, I didn’t want to do some of the work that you need to do to get a little better at golf. So for me, it’s always been the social parts of it and it’s not that even the sort of introspection that happens is introspection as part of a but I think that’s very personal. I mean that’s a very like how about you? What I’m curious to see from your perspective.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, and you’re kind of shaking up a lot of the ways that I think about golf, but it’s always been a very solo thing for me. I mean, you and I are probably just different people as far as personality goes. I like getting to golf. I’ve heard you use the term golf as your escape.
I like it to escape from people in a lot of ways. Like I want to go be by myself in the peace and quiet. And other people, they want to get away from, man, I work and I’m by myself all the time. I want to go be with people. I want to listen to music and I want to relax. Mine is like, I want to go be by myself and perform and be stressed out. And like this, it’s nice to me. So maybe we’re just different people.
Mike Berland
Yeah. Think that’s the beauty. We are completely different. Like, I’m not going to go hit 100 golf balls and watch which one won 98 and which one won 97 and which one won 100. I’m going to be so happy that they all got up in the air. And I’m going to be dying to see if I can find someone on the range to go play with me. But that’s, I’m like that in every part of life.
Like I can’t think of anything that I do that if I go skiing, I don’t really like to go skiing by myself. If I go grocery shopping, I don’t really like to go grocery shopping by myself. I don’t like to eat dinner by myself. So like there’s a lot, but that’s who I am. That’s, I mean, that’s why you write a book. It’s not about golf, it’s about you and golf. You know, because like for me, golf is not a solitary thing. It’s a group.
It’s a group experience and it’s what I’m promoting. It’s what I found and it’s what I’m sharing. I think that is very much one aspect of it. It’s not the full spectrum of what’s out there, but that’s who I am.
Josh Nichols
Right, the times that I do get to play by myself are extremely few and far between. It’s almost always with other people. So I cherish the times where I’m by myself, but it’s certainly not, that’s not all golf is. It just isn’t. So even tournament golf, you’re kind of solo because you’re performing, it’s you against the golf course, but you’re still with other people.
And Mid-Am golf, you know, 25 years and older, that has introduced a whole level of, you know, we’re all just like guys who have jobs that are also trying to play golf. So it’s opened up this whole element, this whole realm of, okay, yeah, we’re high performers and we want to do well, but we’re, you know, we’re just people.
Mike Berland
But I love Midam Golfers, because don’t you all know each other? You’ve been competing against each other for a long time. I know you still probably want to beat each other, but don’t you like each other? I mean, you don’t have to like everybody, but there’s some guys who you know, like, don’t you relish the opportunity to get that? I love one of my friends does a blog after when he’s playing in a tournament. And I’d love to read it because it’s all people he’s competing in this sectional has been competing against for so long. And we hear about somebody has this story and that story and they love it. And if know whoever wins or loses at any given day, that’s okay with them as long as they’re all out there competing against the course in the same conditions and having a competitive match.
Josh Nichols
That’s exactly right. And I think of kind of mid-amp golf, you could, it’s just as easy to get like a cold stare down from an opponent or a playing partner as like a fist bump and like a good shot and like, that was hard. How, how’d you pull that off or whatever, like sarcasm, like you can get both sides of it. Mid-amp golf is, you know, as opposed to junior golf or college golf where it’s cutthroat, right? I don’t, I hate everyone else here. I just want to play better than everybody else.
Mike Berland
Yeah, that’s…
Because at that level of some sort of professional golf is still a possibility, right? You’re still, by medium golf, I feel like you’ve moved down a little bit. Not because you’re not good enough, but you made a life decision, a career decision, and it seems like a different stage of golf. It was, I played in the American Express in Palm Springs a couple of years ago in the program for three days. And I never saw myself as somebody who would play in a three-day program like the AT &T. It just wasn’t even on my radar because it wasn’t the type of golf that I enjoyed. But I got the invitation and I was really happy and I thought, here I’m going to be with, you know, with PGA players. And I practiced for 60 days straight. I mean, really worked on each and every part of my game. And I got out there in between the ropes. I’m like, this is the most fun golf I’ve ever played in my life because you can just hit the ball. You don’t have to watch where it lands or something. And I was just so relaxed and I was out there and the crowd was sort of rooting. And I shot my best round in three years and I came in the top third and I was like with handicap of course. And I like this is so fun when I could really just focus on the golf and watching the PGA Tour players get excited when I hit a shot that surprised them, when I got an up and down, or I did a chip, or I stuck a drive, like, you they were just, they were, they were like, you know, I wouldn’t say they’re big smiles, but you could, you know, you get a look for them, and you know, you can tell that like, hey, you got their attention.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, and you’ve mentioned this before, the cool thing about golf is we can, theoretically, we can hit the same shot as the best player in the world. We can’t, you know, the kind of run of the mill, you know, baseball players or someone who plays softball, you can’t, you’re not gonna hit a home run, right? You can’t hit a 98 mile an hour fastball. You can’t throw a 98 mile fastball. So there’s so much in golf that we can replicate that the pros can do. That’s what’s so addicting about golf.
Mike Berland
Yeah, I shot an 85, which is good for me. And with my handicap, it turned into like a 67. And I beat my pro. And I was number seven for that day. And I was just so relaxed and chill because it just set up for my game. And I was able to not, I was able to focus on my techniques that my coach had given me, mental techniques. And I didn’t get distracted by anything else. And people say, do you see the crowd? I’m like.
I’ve speeches in front of thousands of people. That wasn’t my problem. I hung out with the president of United States. I’m not going be intimidated by a golfer. That’s not the issue. It’s like, it’s just, I do my golf?
Josh Nichols
Yeah, golf can be intimidating, but you’re working on making it less so, and that’s what’s cool. So the book, Not About Golf, about you and golf. Where can people get it? It’s already come out, so explain it.
Mike Berland
It’s come out. You can go to MikeBerland.com, which is page I have that has the links. You can go on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com, but MikeBerland.com is the best place because you can get a link to the book, also see other things that I’m up to. It’s, again, there’s more and more content coming to get at this idea that golf is bigger than golf. You’re not gonna get at tips and tricks on how to score better.
But you’re gonna get tips and tricks on how to enjoy it better and get more fulfillment from it.
Josh Nichols
And the actual way the physical book was designed where it’s not about golf and then you flip it over and it says about you and golf. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a book where it’s kind of like, I’m gonna flip this over and it’s still part of the title kind of thing. It’s cool and it’s red and green so it’s kind of like, here’s the negative side of it but here’s the positive side of it. It’s about you and golf. Yeah, it’s a really cool book.
Mike Berland
And it was, I’ll put a picture, this is the book. The reason that we put the golf ball here, which is textured, is because the golf ball is the universal symbol of golf. No matter where you are in the world, no matter what type of golf you play, if you play in the PGA, if you play a top golf, if you play mini golf, it’s a golf ball. And so this is the side. And so that was the idea, and then the life-changing joy of playing the game. That’s the message.
And we wanted people, if they didn’t even read the book, they would get the point. And I thought that that would be the best way to share the benefits and joy of golf.
Josh Nichols
Mike Berland, thank you so much. This has been a real pleasure. I hope this makes people, I hope people leave this episode saying enjoying golf more, liking golf more, golf is more about fun than, you know, it’s not this negative experience. That’s what I really hope people got from this.
Mike Berland
Thank you, I really appreciate it.
It’s not intimidating. Golf can be fun and you can get this improvement and there’s many ways to enjoy golf. It’s not just defined by a score.
Josh Nichols
Well said. All right, Mike, thank you so much.
Mike Berland
Thanks Josh.
