Podcast Transcript
Josh Nichols
Robert Linville. My best trait when I was at my best was the ability to accept results. And you sent me a message this morning before this about it was a message I had sent to you about ten years ago, and I said my number one goal in any round is indifference. Do you like that word? Do you like that mentality? And if you do, why was it so helpful for me?
Robert Linville
Well, I think the words can have different meanings for different people, obviously. So for you, indifference and acceptance were almost interchangeable, but for you, indifference took it to a little higher level. Like, I’m gonna be okay wherever I hit this ball. And I can handle it. I’ve got my belief system set so that if I just do what I do, it’s probably gonna be okay. But if it’s not, I’m still gonna swing with freedom. And the indifference term for you allowed you to — that was one of your keys. Just let it rip, right? Well, that doesn’t mean swing as hard as you can. That means you were just playing with freedom.
So the indifference term for you was huge because it took it even from acceptance to a higher level of just being able to go, just do what I do, and wherever it goes, it’s gonna be all right.
Josh Nichols
And do you think that should be — or how much of each should it be? Should it be a big picture belief system, or a part of the pre-shot routine, a reminder or awareness throughout the round? Keep reminding yourself, keep checking in — am I still being indifferent? What part of it is more important, that big picture belief or the tactical in-round thing?
Robert Linville
Well, without the big picture belief, the rest of it probably doesn’t matter. So every day you’ve gotta find those small wins. And another thing you were great at was the three-and-one, right? What three things did you do well today? And those are just small wins. And those small wins build your belief system. And certainly, you know, you have success in a tournament that helps, and you have confidence, and I’ve said a lot of times to you, I think confidence is more like an emotion. However you want to look at it, it comes and goes. Sometimes you have it, sometimes you don’t. It comes and goes within a round sometimes. But the belief system is more long-term, foundational. You can count on it.
Like, that’s what you build your support system on. So without that — you know, the daily “what do I need to do, what am I thinking, what’s my pre-shot” can help, but you can only play to a level you see yourself anyhow. So if you’re not creating a belief system, then at some point it doesn’t matter what your pre-shot routine is like. Going through the proper routine will be way more beneficial than not, but it still won’t really get you there, because you’re probably gonna panic.
Josh Nichols
Right. And there’s a “fake it till you make it” — that’s not a backbone you want to live on. You don’t want to build your foundation on fake it till you make it, like “I’m just gonna do this until I start to believe it.” But there is an element of “I don’t believe this right now, but I’m going to do the actions to create a belief,” which builds a belief, which feeds back into this — these processes that I’m doing must work because it’s building a belief, and I believe in myself more. My self-belief is higher. So they kind of feed off each other, and it kind of has to start with, for me, it started with the three-and-one. It wasn’t like I developed some self-belief so now I’m gonna do the three-and-one because I believe in myself. It was like, I really don’t have a great foundation of belief. I don’t see myself as doing anything good — everything I do is not good and not helpful and I’m not getting anywhere, I’m not improving. So I started doing the three-and-one — you got me to start doing the three-and-one — as a way to see, “you’re doing good stuff, you’re doing good stuff, you’re doing good stuff. You’re preparing, you’re getting some good results, but really you’re just doing good stuff.” And that built the belief, right?
Robert Linville
Yeah, I mean, one of the things I believe strongly in is narrative. And we had to change your narrative, because your narrative was such that — well, maybe, kinda, possibly — into just every day, just those little wins, building, building, building, until now, without really forcing it, your belief system becomes stronger. The foundation’s gotta be stronger. And then when you get in those situations, you can rely on the physical cues and the mental cues of “what do I need to do right now, how do I win this shot” — whether it’s breathing, whether it’s some kind of cue, whatever it is — the process of that particular shot can take place, but there’s got to be the bigger picture going on to help you get there. And the narrative part is just huge.
I mean, you just see it, and for juniors — any parents that are listening — you gotta be careful not to kind of crumble the narrative, ’cause it’s easy.
Josh Nichols
What does it look like for a parent to crumble a kid’s narrative, or a player themselves to crumble their own narrative?
Robert Linville
Well, as players, our main default is to the negative, right? Whatever we do is kinda like, what did I do wrong, how’d I do this. We think about the wrong way more than what happened right. If you get a paper back in school it’ll have red through it showing what you did wrong and nothing on the stuff you did right.
From a parent’s perspective, it’s easy to point out the things that went wrong. And it’s easy to do the comparison syndrome of “why aren’t you playing as good as this person.” And that easily leads into the junior themselves going that route too.
So it’s not positive thinking, it’s not that. It’s just, how do you create that narrative, that self-talk of how you see yourself? You go to tournaments, especially in junior golf, and you can kind of see it just by the way they carry themselves. I know you work with a lot of juniors too — you can hear it, you can see it. And it takes work to transfer that into building that narrative into a belief system, rather than just waiting for something to go wrong.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, the self-fulfilling “I’m not good,” or “I always play this course bad,” or “I always hit this club bad — see, I did it again.” Not that beliefs themselves can predict the future or make a future literally, right, but it’s like it makes a future more likely. And that’s something you talk about a lot in the book — probability. So a couple of quotes from the book, which we’ll talk more about at the end — for those wondering, it’s Responding Under Pressure, a book Robert just released. It’s concise, dense, really good. But a couple quotes: “The problem is that the game does not operate on fairness, it operates on probability, and preparation does not create certainty — preparation increases probability.” What do you mean by probability? Why is that the term you’re using there?
Robert Linville
Well, to me, golf is a game of math, in that what you’re trying to do is give yourself the highest probability to score as low as you can. That’s what strategy is all about — in golf management, when you’re mapping out a course, when you’re playing, it’s like, what’s the highest probability shot that gives me the best chance to shoot as low as I can shoot. Probability, on a big picture, really boils down to expectation and belief.
Expectation — however you want to term that phrase — for me, expectation is “I should get this result,” which is 99% of the time not good. Anytime “should” comes out, not good. And again, if we go back to the belief foundation system — expectation, you see a lot of downward spirals with high expectations during a round. You could see it in a longer-term process too, let’s say a month — if you play three or four tournaments that aren’t going well, you kind of see the spiraling. You see it in a round: playing okay, something happens, “I should be doing this, I should be doing this,” and then a big mistake, followed by several mistakes. We see this all the time — this is one of the things I’m sure players are talking to you about, “how do I get rid of this happening?”
For me, when a player has a high belief system and something goes wrong, it’s more like “I’ll be okay.” And when they have the “should” of expectation, panic sets in, and then you can’t even think. We’re not going into the neuroscience of it, but you really can’t process, because everything’s just — as I call it — the blur. It’s like a three or four hole stretch and you’ve lost the round or tournament. So the probability of playing well is much more likely, just from a logical standpoint, if we have a more patient belief system we can count on. We keep doing the process. We keep coming back to “okay, that didn’t go well, this mistake happened” — you can go future, you can go past, either way — but really, the question you can answer is “what do I need to do right now?” And that gives you the highest probability of success. So, long-winded way of answering that in a short-term, long-term kind of viewpoint.
Josh Nichols
So the idea of being logical, level-headed, neutral — is a word you use a lot — is it as simple as… I mean, okay, it’s simple but it’s difficult. Are certain players just, by way of personality — like, you’re a very logical, level-headed guy, you of course have emotions —
Robert Linville
Yeah, some would disagree, but let’s go with that.
Josh Nichols
I didn’t say you were smart, I said you were level-headed. You’re level-headed at a low level. But someone with a personality that’s data-driven and logical, and maybe just a boring person in general, might find it easier to stay logical and level-headed during a round of golf, as opposed to someone who’s more emotional and gregarious, who just has more emotions. Does everyone need to pursue the same sort of logic and the same sort of personality while they’re playing?
Robert Linville
Well, that’s an easy answer — no. But the thing a player can’t do is get down on themselves. They can’t have a pity party. That part can’t happen. What a player can do — you see it all the time — nobody likes it when they screw up, you’re not sitting there going “okay, yay.” So someone getting upset with himself, frustrated, that’s kind of normal. But can they get over it within thirty seconds to a minute? Can they prevent that from becoming a spiral? That’s where it’s different. Once a player gets down — shoulders, body language, mindset, energy all down — it’s over, because they’re waiting for something good to happen before they get back up. They’re waiting for something to happen to have confidence that they can play again.
And the players that can get over it, whether they’re level and just able to at least externally not look like it affects them — or it affects them, but then they’re okay — I think either one of those, depending on the player, can work well. So I think “neutral” can be misconstrued into “everybody needs to be robotic,” and I don’t think that’s it. We’re emotional beings, we’re not really logical beings. So you feed off the emotion, but then you have to understand your way to get back. It’s not “four holes lost the tournament.”
Josh Nichols
Yes. It’s funny you say that three or four hole blur — it is, I mean it’s always double bogey, bogey, and in a mini-tour player trying to Monday qualify, or win a Gpro event, or whatever, you can’t afford four-over in three holes in a one-day qualifier, let alone a two-day tournament where the cut is seven-under or something. So yeah, that three or four hole blur is so true.
Is there a phrase, or something everyone could use, in that “you get over it in 30 seconds” — everyone’s version of that is different. Everyone has their own one-to-ten scale, five being the sweet spot, and everyone’s five is a little different from each other. But if someone’s up at a seven, or someone’s down at a three, is there something that works for getting back to a five for everybody?
Robert Linville
Yeah, I mean, in general I think there is. I think a lot of people need a physical cue to help them. It could be breathing, it could be something with their glove, something with their shoe — pick something. It could be a physical cue, tossing a ball up and down, picking up grass, staring at something, like a specific leaf on a tree. There are a lot of things it could be. But the thing about the physical cue — all you’re trying to do is get yourself a little bit self-regulated so you can get back into the question: what do I need to do right now?
And then that question leads you into, how do I win this shot? And all of this — not dealing with major psychological issues, because I have no training in any of that — but just in playing the game, it comes down to, can you win that shot, can you make a good decision. And when you’re in that blur phase, you can’t even make a good decision. So the rest of it is out the window. You see a lot of double bogeys ’cause you hit a bad shot and then made a bad decision. And that leads to something else for a couple holes. But can you make a good decision — what do I need to do right now, can I make a good decision — you’ve gotta self-regulate somewhat so you can get back into that. And then you can work on: alright, I need to commit to this decision, I need to trust my training. And then the last one, which is the hardest one, is: can I accept the result no matter what happens? And going back to how we started the conversation — I love the term for you, I love the term for a lot of people — can I just be indifferent, which is a lot like being neutral, right? Not affected tremendously one way or the other.
Josh Nichols
Right. It’s not apathy though.
Robert Linville
It’s definitely not apathy. And I think that’s — a lot of people, when you start talking about acceptance of a shot, a hole, a round, a tournament, it’s like some people view it as “well, I can’t accept this because I care too much.” It’s not that at all. It’s like, these results are gonna happen. Sometimes — if we just go to a specific shot — sixteen percent of your shots are gonna be below your normal average. Now, Josh’s average shot’s gonna be higher than somebody else’s average shot, but still within their realm of what’s an average seven iron look like, what’s your shot dispersion, what’s that law of the average shot.
It’s funny, I was looking back through photos and found one from the nineties that I’d written about the law of the average shot — so it’s not really a new thing. You need to know where your shots turn out so you can form a strategy. But the point is, to be able to accept some shots just aren’t gonna be as good as others. Some rounds aren’t gonna be as good as others. And then we need to celebrate the wins too, which we don’t tend to do — the wins become more like “well, I expect to do that,” rather than “that’s cool.”
Josh Nichols
Yeah, back to the three-and-one, where every day you’re celebrating three wins you did, no matter how small. I remember I was even doing it — the next morning about the day before — and even if I didn’t do anything golf-related the day before, I would still point out three things I did well. I worked, so I made some money, I did this, I did this. And that was arguably more valuable than even when it was golf-related, because I used to consider those days a total failure. Like, “I’m not improving, I’m not practicing, I’m not doing anything golf-related, and I want to be a pro golfer, so that’s a failure to miss a day.” And those days where I would still point out good things would allow me to bridge — I know myself, and I have, like you said, the negativity bias, but I also have maybe depressive tendencies, I think I maybe scale lower than a lot of people as far as baseline. Those days would get me really down. But being able to point out good stuff and see, “okay, I’m still doing good things, it might not be golf-related, but I’m still doing good things,” it’s just a good exercise in general.
Robert Linville
Yeah, I think that’s a great point. Everything was reframing your narrative that we did — sure, we tried to work some on the technique side of it and got that to where you could count on it more often, but the part you did so well was changing the overall narrative, and getting to a point where you actually believed — you didn’t believe you deserved it, you believed that when you were in that position, you were prepared to handle it.
And actually, when I wrote the book, the chapter that started everything was just me responding to some players, trying to write out “what are you going through,” because it’s been a consistent theme over time of — I call it the law of deserving — you’re putting in the work, working harder than ever, your skills are getting better than ever, and the tendency is you deserve a result, you should get this result. And really, to me, that’s the law of deserving hurting players — not understanding why they’re in that frame. Like, why am I working harder, why am I better than I’ve ever been, and why am I feeling more pressure than I’ve ever felt? Instead of, I’m working harder, I’m getting better, I’m moving up the pyramid of levels of play or whatever competition, but I’m prepared to handle whatever — going back to probabilities — I’m prepared, and I can handle whatever the situation presents itself in front of me, which is a lot different from “I deserve this result because I put in this work.”
A lot of good players are high academic achievers, and when you study hard and work hard in class and do the work, you kinda know you deserve a good grade. It just works backwards in golf — especially in golf, most athletics in general, but especially golf, you’ve got so much time to process. But it’s that “I should be getting this result because of the work I’ve done.” So that’s actually how I started the book — just with that thought, trying to write it out so I could send it to several players, and it ended up I just kept writing, and it came out to be this little short book.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, it’s pretty cool. I can relate to that law of deserving, because before I met you, or before we started formally working together at all, I would practice hard — one, I was just not practicing well, I wasn’t working on the right things, I was self-diagnosing, filming every swing, comparing myself to others. So I was already not practicing well, but I was practicing a lot, which was causing me to feel like I deserved to be playing better. I should be playing better. So my narrative was almost starting to turn into “hard work isn’t helpful” — I was developing a bad relationship with hard work.
Robert Linville
Yeah, because the pressure was increasing, but you didn’t understand why. It doesn’t make sense — if we think through it, “if I work harder and get my skills higher, why would pressure increase?” Because you think you deserve this result and your expectations have gone extremely high, and your belief system really hasn’t increased much at all. So you’re just setting yourself up for failure, really, from the get-go. As soon as something happens during a round, during a tournament, during a span of time, it’s “here we go, this is how I see myself really,” and you just beat yourself up. And we don’t really need others to help us beat ourselves up — we’re pretty good at it.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, I know we’re tootin’ our own horn a lot, but I got good at golf in a short amount of time — I think I deserved the law of deserving, I deserve to toot my own horn. But what I did maybe better than what you’re describing with other players — I’m not the only one, I’m not a unicorn — but what I did really well was, as I got better, I also got more indifferent. My ability to get good results increased while my need to get good results decreased. And that was a really powerful combination.
Robert Linville
Yes. That goes back to the narrative, right? “I’m gonna be okay. If I play well, I’m probably gonna be in contention. I’m gonna be okay. If this shot doesn’t go where I want it to, I’ll find a way to get it back in play. I’ll probably be okay.” So it’s that whole shift in the narrative, changing so you could be indifferent, but not in a casual “I don’t care” way. You cared a lot — you weren’t practicing as hard as you practiced to not care. That’s the wrong way to look at acceptance and indifference. It’s, “I can handle it, and then I’ll figure out what I need to do, and it’s gonna be all right, I can figure it out.”
It’s crazy the way we — to me, and we got to see all his interviews — Tiger, back in the day, whether he played good or bad — I think I might have this story in the book, I don’t know, might be in another one. Fred Funk was playing with Tiger in a tournament, and I’m sure Fred’s okay with me putting this out there ’cause it was a long time ago — he played with Tiger, and Tiger hit it everywhere, scrambled around, and somehow shot — I can’t remember what, doesn’t really matter, but it was okay, like one-under or two-under, something.
Josh Nichols
Statute of limitations, you’re good.
Robert Linville
So Fred’s watching TV and Tiger’s doing the interview, talking about how close he was, how good he played, he just gave a couple shots away, and he really felt like he was in control of what’s going on. And Fred’s going, “I just played with him and he hit it everywhere” — you can’t imagine how far offline he was hitting the ball. And Tiger’s narrative — certainly some of it maybe was just a public persona, “this is how I do interviews” — but I think a lot of it was a narrative of, “yeah, today, maybe not quite, but I’m close.” Whereas in that situation, I’d be going, “man, if I get lucky, I hit it everywhere, I don’t know what I’m gonna do, I gotta go to the range and find something, this is not sustainable.” And he’s like, “yeah, I’m close, just a little tweak, I’ll be alright.” You know, it’s a huge factor.
Josh Nichols
So for him in those situations — he’s like the hardcore, serious athlete, whatever, that’s his persona, but also his narrative in his head. Do you think — where does practice come into the narrative, because obviously he was a crazy, crazy practicer. Is there an element of “it doesn’t matter where I hit it, I’m gonna be able to figure it out because I know I’ve worked on the other parts of the game”? Obviously that’s gotta be a foundational part of it.
Robert Linville
Yeah, and he could figure it out, he could escape, he could do things. He seemed to be pretty good. But talking to somebody on a local level, a really good player, Scott Harvey — how did you get your belief — it would be more, “I knew if I could do it in practice, and I could do it consistently in practice, that I could trust that.” And that’s where he got — like, nobody likes it when they don’t hit a shot that’s kind of where they think it should end up relative to where they want it to go. But being able to handle it and go, “okay, that didn’t go like I wanted, but I know what I’m doing, I can still trust what I got going on.”
There’s a — you saw this, the way we used to track practices — this is one of my big beliefs, there’s three levels: practice, non-competitive play, and competitive play. Competitive play could have different meanings to different people — not everybody’s on tour, it doesn’t mean you’re in a tournament, it’s just you’re playing a round you really care about, versus playing a round kind of for fun, and you’re practicing. If we can measure those three components, what we’re trying to do is get the non-competitive play to match practice, because in my opinion, practice sets a ceiling. So if we can measure that in some way, we can go, “alright, here’s your ceiling, and here’s when you just go out and play, here’s close to it,” and your competitive play will always lag behind those, over a long enough period of time — in one tournament you may exceed that, but not over a period of time.
But most people have no clue how they practice because they don’t track anything at all. I know you’re doing some of that stuff with the guys at Chasing Scratch, trying to track practice so we can go, “how’s your practice relative to how’s your play,” so we can know how to evaluate whether your practice is meaningful or not. It’s improved throughout the industry in the last certainly ten years, but really in the last five years — you see a lot more ways to practice that are more meaningful than just standing out there. And even the players that are really good, elite players, they kinda go through the process — they might not write it down, but they’re evaluating every shot, every putt, every chip — how’d that come off the face, what was that launch like, what was the shot quality, did it go toward my target or off — every shot’s an evaluation. And I’d say the average golfer is more like “keep swinging till you find the groove for ten balls and then you think you got it.”
Josh Nichols
Right — I’m gonna build confidence by getting ten in a row that are good.
Robert Linville
You know, I’m gonna hit this bucket, I’m gonna hit fifty balls, and I got it going now, so there it is — and there’s not much more evaluation than that. When we’re teaching, one of the things we’ll ask is, “alright, now what was different about that shot, what was that shot like?”
Josh Nichols
And you mean like, “on that one I really felt like I was doing this” — okay.
Robert Linville
Something — yeah, what are we trying to do, what’s the purpose? Obviously the purpose is I’m gonna hit good golf shots, but just “good or bad” — a two-year-old knows that. “That was not good, this was good.” It’s funny when parents are at lessons sometimes, sitting back watching, and we’ll be struggling with something, and then something clicks, you kinda get it going, and I hear the parent in the background go “that was better.” I’m going, yeah, I mean that shot was good, but it’s funny to me — pretty much anybody can see that was a better shot.
Josh Nichols
Right — just do more of that, right? Okay, thank you, that’s not helpful.
Robert Linville
Yeah, so it’s coming up with the process of going, “alright, what’s the purpose, what am I trying to accomplish other than wanting to get golf shots — what’s my process to hit the good shots, or make putts, or hit good chips, whatever it is, and then how am I doing with that.” And then how can I tweak what I’m working on so it makes sense to me — you gotta be able to take the information and go, “okay, when I do that, whatever that is, I’m getting better results, I’m feeling this.” Basically you’re either creating an image or a feel, sometimes both — you have a picture of something in your mind, or you have a feel. As long as you’re giving yourself verbal instructions like “do this, do this, do this,” that’s — sometimes you have to start that way mechanically, but you can’t play golf that way. And you can’t have long-term success that way either, as far as transferring it.
Josh Nichols
Right, you have to consolidate it into a feel.
Robert Linville
The Bob Christina transfer — whatever you’re doing, you wanna be able to transfer it. And if it won’t transfer, it’s really useless time.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, that wouldn’t be new to you, but that’s almost like a definition of practice I’ve never thought of — you’re trying to consolidate separate pieces of information into one feeling you can use in action. That would be the purpose of technical work — not just to show a camera or a coach that you can do this position, but is this in service of me consolidating these separate parts into something I can use? And if it’s not gonna move me in that direction, then this is not valuable time. I guess the hard part is knowing, is this going to turn into a useful feel, or is this truly beyond my skill level — am I always gonna have to think too much to be able to do this feel? And that gets hard.
Robert Linville
Yeah, and not sustainable. There’s certainly the technique aspect — going down that road for a minute, you may have to think about where your right wrist is or where your left elbow is, because you may need to work on this specific thing, but there’s always gotta be — in a big picture, I’m a big believer you have to have your why, but in a micro setting —
Hey Robert, give me just a sec. Let me start it again.
Josh Nichols
Good, you’re good, okay.
Robert Linville
You know, I believe in the big picture that you gotta have a why, and then, in a micro version of that in a golf swing — for me, if I’m gonna make a change, I have to have a why. And the why has got to be, this will produce a better result. But I have to go through the whole process to go, okay, what’s the root cause, and what can I get to, and then what can we produce — and do you have a tournament coming up this week, or is it two weeks, or a month away. If I’ve changed something — I just had somebody send me videos through a program, and it’s like, “this looks better,” and I’m going, well, I don’t think that’s a reason to do that. Because does it look better and does that help whatever we’re trying to accomplish — that’s a whole different conversation. But “it looks better” has nothing to do with it — you can take several winners on tour, including the one last week, and go, “okay, well who’s gonna teach that?” He’s great, but I don’t know how to teach him to do what he does.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, “looks” is certainly not the standard.
Robert Linville
It can’t just be, “it needs to look a certain way.” It’s gotta be, why are you doing this, why are you trying to change anything, and then can we transfer that into something fairly repeatable that you can go, “okay, this is pretty simple.” If it’s complicated, it’s not gonna transfer — I mean, maybe on the range, but that’d be about it.
Josh Nichols
Right, simplifying it, getting it consolidated into a feel — that’s kind of the purpose. But this mentality could also lead to searching for a feel, and I guess that would be the purpose of having a coach, or a why, right?
Robert Linville
Well, the problem — and we all go through it from time to time, certainly, I wish I could go back when I was really trying to play and know some of this stuff, but — it’s the trap of trying to fix the last shot with this swing, and then that shot did this, so I need to do something, and then this shot did this, so I need to do something, and then you’re on swing thought number seventy-three. You’re giving yourself all these thoughts, “I need to do this and this and this,” and maybe if we stuck with two or three things and just kept doing those two or three things, there’s a good probability those two or three things are gonna turn out to be much more valuable than going through your whole bag of swing thoughts.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, it’s such a strong tendency, because we wanna play well now, so we wanna do something now to play well now. But a lot of what you’re saying could be summed up as “stay the course.” You don’t always know the course you’re on is correct, but in order to give it a good go, you need to stay the course — whether it’s on-course responses to bad shots and on-course process, or off-course practice and feels and things you’re working on, and the coach you’re working with, and priorities and routines you have — stay the course and ignore temptations to veer off.
Robert Linville
Yeah, you see it at every level of play in tournament play. I was just on a panel, doing a presentation for the LPGA junior girls’ championship this week, and I was talking about — if you’ve got a truth you trust, there could be things going on long-term that may not be working immediately, but if we can stick with the process — there’s a reason we’re doing these things, it’s probably gonna work, there’s a high probability it’s gonna work — rather than “somebody else over here is doing this, and somebody else is doing this.” This happens at the tour level all the time — they’re doing this with this coach, this with that coach, “maybe I should try that.” It filters all the way down through the different levels, and you’re going, “well, maybe I should do this, maybe I should do this.” And independently you’ve gotta be able to tweak that process a little, and communicate, “I feel like if I do this, that seems to give me the best results.” Okay, why is that working? Figure it out. But it still comes down to the cliché of process — can you stick to your process, it’s a huge factor of trust. And if you can believe in that and keep working on it, there’s a high likelihood you’re gonna get much better results that way than just going off and doing whatever somebody else is doing, whatever’s on YouTube.
Josh Nichols
Right, whatever the latest tour winner is doing.
How long should you stay a course, and maybe related — how much should one expect to improve in a given time span? A year is a clean amount of time, I know it’s different, depends — but someone has three hours a week to practice, or five, or ten, or two, or thirty minutes — how much should someone expect to change or improve?
Robert Linville
I think if you’re doing the right stuff — and the right stuff has a different meaning, unfortunately, for different people — but if your attention and intention kind of match, and you’re working on certain variables that allow you to improve — and again, without any kind of measurement, you just go out and play golf and go, “well, I feel like my short game was bad today.” I don’t know, maybe it was — probably was, if you feel like it was — but what kind of shots, give me some examples, is this a tendency over five rounds or just this round.
So without tracking, it’s hard to define, but in general, if a player really works at their game, using just a handicap index, I think a player reasonably can improve about twenty to twenty-five percent, if you use zero as the standard. So if you were a ten, and you went through that year going, “alright, I want to improve,” reasonably I think you can get to an eight, maybe better. I think twenty percent improvement is a reasonable goal — not just “I’m gonna keep playing and see if I get any better.”
Josh Nichols
Right — yeah, “I’m gonna get down to a five this year and I don’t really know even what that means, I’m just gonna play more or something.”
Robert Linville
“I’m just gonna go play golf and see if I can” —
Josh Nichols
Try to shoot better.
Robert Linville
“I’m gonna try harder” — that always works.
Josh Nichols
Right, that works every time. I like “define a good course, or a good practice, and then stay that course.”
Robert Linville
Yeah, I know you do that with your players, and I know you’ve got it on your website — a practice program. I’m doing them for players too — it can’t be just a checkbox, the box itself has to have some meaning and purpose to why you’re doing it. It can’t be “I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this.” It’s gotta be, “I’m doing this because this result was this, and I need to adjust or improve on this, and here’s how I’m gonna go about that.” Most players just kinda random-fire and play, and that’s all good too — you just gotta have some way to have an idea of how to improve. You can just play more, and that could be good too.
Josh Nichols
If you want to improve, right. It depends on — yeah, your expectations need to match your effort level at least, but at the same time you don’t want the expectations to turn into deserving and “should.” You can’t expect to improve if your effort isn’t in service of improving — you can’t expect to shoot better scores if your effort isn’t in service of shooting better scores.
Robert Linville
Yeah, I mean, one of — I have like five pillars that are my foundational things, and one is, your work needs to match your goals. You got big goals, you need big work. If your goal is “I’m gonna play twice a month,” then you don’t need a lot of work — you just wanna play golf a couple times a month, and it’s okay if you don’t get better, that’s all right too. But your work needs to match your goals, and it needs to be purposeful. And that part, the industry as a whole, is so much better now — there’s ways you can know what you’re doing in practice and evaluate it so much better than it used to be.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, which is awesome, that’s a good thing. So bring it home for us — the thing I did well was, I got way better while becoming more indifferent and more accepting of the result. Make a list, some bullet points, of how would someone do that? How would someone get better while also becoming more indifferent, in a concise, bullet-pointed thing? I feel like I’m prompting ChatGPT here.
Robert Linville
Right, right — that kind of makes it sound like “I just started accepting and I got better.” It was about a nine-month process of working on this, working on this, continuing to do it. There was technical stuff going on, you were practicing, you were tracking your practice — we knew, in practice, if you could hit it average to your competition, you were gonna outhead them. We were tracking it, we knew that, and that’s a huge factor. For some players, it’s, “if I can putt average, I’m gonna outhead” — you gotta do something better than the average of the field, or whoever you’re playing against.
But it was a process of you continually doing these things, and then it became technically better, mindset better. Part of that was the acceptance which led to the indifference — but that was also because you had much more trust to let it go, you weren’t having to control everything. You could go, “look, I’ve put in the work, and I believe the work is working.” It wasn’t like one thing, like “just be indifferent and you’ll be good” — no, you’ll be the same, probably, at first. Maybe a little better because you don’t go through as much of the blur, the four-hole downward spiral, but you kind of play the same. But if you can get a process you believe in and consistently do, that’s really what it comes back to — narrative. It took a while to change the narrative, and right now it doesn’t seem like it took a while. If we look back at it ten years later, it probably took eight or nine months to really start seeing it — it wasn’t like one day the light bulb went off, it was a slow process that kept happening. Then you got in position in a smaller tournament, had to win, and you were able to rely on all your work and got it done. Then you went to a bigger tournament, and that was kind of on purpose — these tournaments we kinda had mapped out — and you went to a bigger tournament going, “just the same way, just play the same way, if I play well I’ll probably be right there.” Every shot, like the thing I sent you, that’s what you sent me — go through my process, do my stuff, and then let it go, and be indifferent about the outcome. Again, kind of a higher level of acceptance. And then you won. And you kept building, but it wasn’t like, “okay, you started winning, so you had confidence” — confidence probably came and went throughout each round.
Josh Nichols
It did not feel like that. Agree.
Robert Linville
Yeah, if we go back to the message you sent me at the mid-am — I don’t have it in front of me, but paraphrasing — it was like, “my ball-striking doesn’t feel good, my putting feels off, but my mindset feels great, and I’d rather have that.” It was a much longer message, but it was like, “I don’t feel like — it wasn’t like I’m brimming with confidence,” but you still had that belief system of “I’m gonna be okay, and I can handle and I’m prepared to handle whatever I face here.” And you did.
Josh Nichols
Yeah. I don’t have that one specifically, but I absolutely remember the “I do not feel like my game is good” —
Robert Linville
Yeah, it was like — you sent it the night before stroke play started, and you go, “yeah, I’m not hitting it that well, my putting doesn’t feel great, but I’ve got a good mindset, so I’d rather have that.” And then, obviously, you could trust your physical skills, and they were good that week — they didn’t go away, it just felt like they were going away.
Josh Nichols
Right. Yes, and that gives a whole new definition to confidence — it’s not that things are going well, but I can handle it even if things don’t go well.
Robert Linville
Yeah, I view confidence as an emotion — you’re happy, you’re sad, some days you’re happier than others, some days you’re more confident than others, I don’t know why. But if you’re waiting to make birdie so you can feel confident, I don’t think that’s gonna work.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, that’s fragile, very fragile. Okay — Responding Under Pressure, new book by Robert Linville. It’s building skills to respond when it matters most. It’s awesome — what is it, sixty pages or so?
Robert Linville
Something like sixty, seventy pages — eight or ten chapters, I should know that, I think it’s ten maybe. But they’re short, it’s really designed to be read at once, and hopefully there’s two or three chapters that resonate with a person, and you just go refer back to those chapters, keep reading those. I’ve had one player read the chapter on narrative like twenty times — you wanna keep that in front, because we don’t want to lose that. And some others, the law of deserving, is big for a lot of players — being able to shift the mindset into: your practice is preparing you to handle whatever you face and giving you the highest probability of success, not so that you deserve a result. You expect a result, you should get a result — that’s when you get in trouble.
Josh Nichols
Right, guarantee. Yeah, so we got forty years of expertise distilled down into chapters.
Robert Linville
Yeah, forty years — that’s about as much as I could write, it was about sixty pages.
Josh Nichols
Well, that’s what we said — we didn’t say you were smart, we just said you’re level-headed. No, this is awesome, Robert. You’re a legend as far as I’m concerned, as far as many, many people are concerned. It’s evident in the stuff you put out, the stuff you say — it’s awesome. Go get the book, everybody, go to respondingunderpressure.com or go to Amazon and search Responding Under Pressure, by Robert Linville. Thank you, Robert. Thanks for putting this book out, thanks for joining the show.
Robert Linville
Yeah, thanks. I’ll get to see you in a few weeks.
Josh Nichols
Yes, for those listening, we booked this before we hit record — we booked a lesson. So it’s on the calendar, therefore it will happen.
Robert Linville
We gotta get — what’s your other podcast called? Project Midam. So we’re trying to tune up a little bit for Project Midam. Yeah, we gotta get you there.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, it needs to not just be throwing things against the wall and hoping I show up and play good — there needs to be a real process. I need to put my money where my mouth is. Okay, well, thank you, Robert. This is awesome.
Robert Linville
Thanks, buddy.
