I made a massive shift in my game between missing the cut at the 2016 U.S. Mid-Amateur to making it the finals of the 2017 U.S. Mid-Amateur. In this episode we get into two major ways I did that.
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When I played in the 2016 U.S. Mid-Amateur, I drove onto the property and felt completely out of my league.
As I pulled in, the entrance was filled with past champions, USGA signage, and all of it immediately triggered one thought:
“I do not belong here.”
Fast forward one year.
At the 2017 U.S. Mid-Amateur, I was 26 years old and a completely different person. No imposter syndrome. I fully believed that I belonged there.
And not only did I believe it—I proved it.
I won my rounds of 64, 32, 16, 8, and 4. Then I was in the finals. I didn’t win that final match, but I was one 36-hole match away from playing in the Masters and the U.S. Open.
So what changed from 2016 to 2017?
It wasn’t my golf swing.
It was what was going on between my ears.
The first major shift came from a journaling practice called the 3&1 Journal.
Every day I answered three questions:
I did this every single day for probably eight months.
Every day—whether I played golf or not, whether I played well or badly—I reflected back to myself three things I did well.
Over and over and over again I was reinforcing:
“Here’s what you’re doing well.”
Before that, my self-belief was directly tied to things like:
Suddenly I had a new metric.
My self-belief became tied to things I could control. Things I actually did.
Actual reality.
This was especially important when I played badly.
After a bad score, a bad practice day, or even a day when I didn’t do anything golf related, I still had to pull out three good things.
I could shoot 80 and still say:
Whether it went in or not, I did that process well.
That changed everything.
We can always find things we need to improve.
That part is easy.
But the rule was this:
Only one thing.
Not one thing you did badly.
One way you can improve.
That distinction mattered.
Sometimes it wasn’t “I hit that ball out of bounds.”
It was more like:
Those are things I can actually improve.
When we play badly, the temptation is to walk away and think:
“I need to improve my whole golf game.”
That’s usually just a bad relationship with results.
Singling out one specific thing helped me stay process-oriented instead of result-oriented.
A lot of people stop at identifying the weakness.
“I suck at putting.”
That’s not enough.
The final part of the exercise was:
Specifically, how are you going to improve it?
For example, if I had four three-putts, I wouldn’t stop there.
I’d say:
Now there’s a concrete plan.
Now there’s direction.
Over time, those daily reflections started piling up.
It was like watching a pile of golf balls get bigger and bigger and bigger.
By the end of a year, that pile had become huge.
I could literally see it.
“Look what I’ve been doing well.”
That’s how I earned self-belief.
Yes, hard work mattered.
But reflecting back on the work mattered too.
That’s how I went from walking into the 2016 U.S. Mid-Amateur feeling like I didn’t belong to walking into the 2017 U.S. Mid-Amateur believing I could win.
The second major change was my relationship with success and failure.
Over that year, the journaling practice helped me hold results much more loosely.
I also had better balance in life.
A few months before the U.S. Mid-Am, I had met my now wife. That gave me something outside golf.
Because of that, I got to a place where I could honestly say:
“This tournament can go great. This tournament can go terrible. Either way, I love the journey of improvement.”
That was a huge shift.
In 2016, every shot carried fear.
Every shot felt like proof of whether I belonged.
Every shot felt like an indictment of my swing, my work ethic, or my identity.
A year later, no individual shot told me who I was.
I already knew who I was.
That mindset created a huge amount of freedom.
I gave myself permission to fail.
Every single shot could go great or terrible.
Either way, I believed in my ability to go find it and make the most of it.
That meant I wasn’t swinging scared.
And when you stop swinging scared, you play with freedom.
When there’s nothing to fear, you’re able to play freely.
This doesn’t have to be golf.
You can apply it to:
The principle is the same.
Not:
“Here’s what went well.”
But:
“Here’s what I did well.”
Regardless of outcome.
That’s how self-belief becomes real.
That’s how it becomes sustainable.
That’s how it becomes non-fragile.
My challenge to myself—and to you—is simple.
Get more process-oriented.
Every day, write down:
Three things you did well
Not things that turned out well.
Things you did well.
One thing you can improve
Keep it specific and controllable.
Exactly how you’ll improve it
Make it actionable.
If you do this long enough, you’ll change how you see yourself.
You’ll also change how you see results.
And when you hold results more loosely, something powerful happens:
That’s what changed everything from 2016 to 2017.
And it still matters now. Maybe even more now than it did then.