Justin Thomas II: Opposite Action in Action

Maybe you saw that Justin Thomas just won The Players’ Championship, golf’s fifth major with harrowing closing holes that guarantee a pressure-filled and exciting finale. And this year was no different. Of note, Justin Thomas was able to win such a difficult tournament so recently after a number of setbacks, just the kinds of life events that can often derail a player for a long time: he had a very publicized public relations gaffe referred to in my last post, he lost his grandfather with whom he was very close, and his good friend and Presidents’ Cup teammate Tiger Woods was involved in a catastrophic and career-ending car accident which he was lucky to survive.

Asked how he managed to hold it together during these tribulations, he made the following response: “I talked to people. I reached out to people. I mean, I’m not embarrassed to say that I reached out to people to kind of let my feelings out and just discuss stuff with them….some of the thoughts and things I was feelings, it wasn’t fair to myself and I needed to do something. And my girlfriend was very helpful with that and staying on me to make sure I was taking care of myself…”* In this response, he leaves out the fact that he also made an immediate, non-defensive, and total apology for his social gaffe, reached out to the constituencies he offended, and went on a training program to understand the root of his implicit bias and to show the genuineness of his repair attempt.

I don’t know if he is referring to seeking out a therapist, but in reaching out to people he is, perhaps unwittingly, referring to an emotion regulation skill called “Opposite Action.”** All of the events he experienced (embarrassment, grief, loss) elicit emotions which have action urges that bring the sufferer inward, to hide, to withdraw, to isolate. Acting opposite the action urge is a quick and effective way to change the emotion, and in this case, it was to reach out to people who could validate him, support him, and mainly relieve the negative voice stream in his head. In doing so, he had his sadness normalized, his thoughts re-balanced, easing his sense of shame and self-blame. Also, he shortened time frame of his suffering, and won one of the larger prizes in golf, including pulling off some particular nerve-wracking shots on the 72^nd hole.

To review: Justin Thomas experienced three events that had strong negative emotional impact, all of which could have derailed his entire season, if not his career. The negative emotions have action urges of avoiding and shunning. Instead, he acted opposite those action urges, made apologies, took action, and reached out for solace. Aspects of his practice that were particularly effective are that he went to people who wouldn’t reject him or reinforce his negative thinking. Finally, he didn’t just pay it lip service, he went all the way and he kept on doing it. Opposite Action works best when you do it thoroughly and repeatedly. So, the next time you are experiencing some emotional turmoil that might interfere with your game and noticing the urge to withdraw, practice some opposite action, and you may just find yourself walking tall and playing your best game.

*Morfit, Cameron. 2021. “Monday Finish: Justin Thomas Finds Better ‘Headspace’ at THE PLAYERS.” Pgatour.com. 03.15.2021

**Although the behavioral practice of exposure is not hers, the skill “Opposite Action,” as I’m using it here comes from Marsha Linehan and can be found in her “DBT Skills Training, Handouts and Worksheets,” 2 ^nd Edition. 2015. Guilford Press. New York, pp. 231-240 & 280.

Justin Thomas, the PGA Tour & the Stain of Homophobia on Male Sport

If you are a golf fan, as I am, you will have by now heard of the episode involving Justin Thomas, currently ranked #3 in the world, at the Tournament of Champions in Hawaii. And as disappointing as it was, you may have even been encouraged by his heartfelt apology and commitment to do the necessary self-examination to “be a better person.” However, there are still elements of the event that continue to unsettle me and reveal just how much, on a systemic level, homophobia is just as alive as it ever has been in male sport. To support this claim, consider the following:

1) Though a financial penalty is probably imminent from the PGATOUR, it has not been announced yet, nor has there been a statement distancing themselves from homophobia in any form and stating that it has no place on their tour. I gather that they don’t generally make public statements about players' fines, but it’s strange that they don’t see their silence as a tacit approval.

2) While Ralph Lauren was quick to drop their endorsement deal with him, with the rapidity one would expect from a product line so directly affected. Citigroup announced in a blog * (2 weeks later) that they were staying with him after a large portion of this year’s sponsorship money of his was donated to an LGBT cause. They believe this move will help “create change.” Other sponsors, Titleist, Footjoy, Beats by Dre, NetJets, Woodford Reserve, and WHOOP have all remained silent.

Maybe you haven’t noticed this silence, but I guarantee you it has been noticed by anyone in the LGBTQ community, for whom silence has not only been equated with oppression, but actually with death, and which has been fighting for acceptance in a world which is all too happy to have it remain in the shadows of the closet. It has also been noticed by gay men, for whom that particular word is associated not just with hatred, but with violence.

Making these omissions and delays more surprising is that they come at a time when “corporate America’s appetite for dealing with such public missteps has never been lower.”** Contrast this to what happened to Tiger Woods: the shattered glass from the back window of his Escalade hadn’t even been swept up before all of his sponsors swiftly dropped him. Apparently, you become a toxic asset if you’re a philanderer, but you’re still on the payroll if you just happen to hurl around the odd homophobic epithet.

To understand the reticence of his corporate sponsors and tour, let’s look at the text of Thomas’ apology itself:

“I’m clearly not proud of what I said. It’s humiliating. It’s embarrassing. It’s not me. It’s not a word that I use, but for some reason, it was in there,” Thomas said. “ And that’s what I’m trying to figure out, as to why it was in there . It’s going to be a part of this process and training program or whatever I need to do, not only to prove to myself but prove to my sponsors and prove to these people that don’t know who I am that is indeed not the person I am.”

While he has been applauded for the sincerity of his apology, anyone who has been raised as a boy, with a male gender identity, and particularly in boys’ sport knows exactly why the “f” word is in there, and how it got there: it is still a part of male socialization that being gay is the worst thing imaginable. It is associated with everything bad in sport, being weak and losing. And that is exactly the way he used the word, apparently without even knowing that it had emerged from his mouth. It is not a comment on Justin Thomas that “it was in there,” but a comment that, despite the breathtaking advances that gay men have made (the right to marry, broad representation in TV, film, and advertising, a presidential candidate), being one is still seen as a liability to an athlete at the top levels of sport. Indeed, that word is so implicated into male socialization that it’s hard to imagine how it wouldn’t be “in there,” hard to imagine it not being in there.

So, the major disappointment here is not necessarily that, in a moment of disparaging his own play, such a word slipped out of Justin Thomas’ mouth, but rather that his tour and many of his sponsors, in their silence, have sent the message that they tacitly agree with its usage, and are not interested in doing the work they need to do to help eradicate homophobia from where it resides in them and in the culture of those they are hoping to court as customers. In avoiding that responsibility and that work, they commit an injustice to all boys, gay and straight, struggling to a healthy sexuality and balanced gender identity. And, in doing so, they continue to make participation in sport a fraught and dangerous one for any aspiring gay athlete.

One effect of the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests was that many white people woke up to the fact that police violence against Black people is not a matter of one or two “bad apples,” but a part of a system that views Black lives as both inherently threatening and worth less. Similarly, here, it is not the Justin Thomases in golf who need to apologize, though their apology is welcome when they misstep like this. Rather, it is the tour and corporate sponsors who, in not denouncing homophobia in all forms, support and sustain the culture of homophobia that has stained sport since the inception of games with rules. In order for that stain to be removed, they need to repudiate it in no uncertain terms in both word and deed. Until then, you can expect to continue hearing the “f” word until you, too, don’t notice it.

**Hasan, Carla, “When an Apology is not enough,” citigroup.com. 1.25.21.

*Rishe, Patrick, “Crisis Management: Justin Thomas and his Endorsement Portfolio after being dropped by Ralph Lauren.” Forbes.Com. 01.23.2021.

Force v. Flow, part 2

In the last post, I wrote about the difference between force and flow energies. In this post I want to discuss ways to find, practice, and increase flow energy. There are two main steps to knowing flow energy more intimately and to cultivating it more committedly: 1) learning flow and practicing it, and 2) mindfulness to the difference between force and flow.

Cultivating Flow:

1) Find an activity whose intention is flow energy: yoga, tai chi, mindful walking. An easy entry point is a practice called Yoga Nidra, a yogic practice designed for more restful sleep. In Yoga Nidra we cultivate an energy that is relaxed, but alert, and aware. In essence, we practice dropping deeper and deeper into flow and away from force. Once this practice has become a part of one’s repertoire, we then have a frame of reference for the difference between force and flow.

2) Do things with the intention to do them in flow energy: with this difference in mind, and with mindfulness to force energy, bring yourself back again and again to flow energy. Everything can be flow when practiced as a such. Don’t wash the dishes to get to the next chore. Wash the dishes, as Thich Nhat Hahn has taught us: to wash the dishes. You don’t need to be practicing or performing your sport to practice flow energy, but rather, you can practice it all the time. Turn force into the exception rather than the rule.

3) Make an inventory of things that bring you out of flow (traffic, math tests, interactions with a certain someone, fifth set tie breakers, sprints); where do you rush? Where do you try too hard? When doing them, notice the dislike, discomfort, disease, and try to drop judgment or discontent. Lean into it. Allow it rather than fighting it or pushing through. Try slowing down, evening out the energy, exploring the difficulty or dislike. Enter it.

4) Of course, none of these steps matter if you aren’t breathing diaphragmatically. Learn this and do it all the time. It is the queen of all regulation strategies, and the portal to almighty flow.

Mindfulness to Force Energy is actually an umbrella form of mindfulness that comprises many levels:

1) Mindfulness to force emotions: frustration, impatience, anger, and even frenetic forms of excitement can be windows into the fact that we are in force energy.

2) Mindfulness to force thoughts: angry thoughts, racing thoughts, resentful thoughts, disbelief, rabid competitiveness, enemizing refs, rivals, crowd, and even one’s own entourage are all indicators of force energy.

3) Mindfulness to physical sensations: tension in the shoulders, belly, face; furrowed brow, clenched jaw; heat in the face and forehead; feeling “keyed up,” energized but at several levels too high.

4) Mindlessness to time: time is moving too fast or too slowly. You are rushing where pausing is called for. You are multi-tasking where one-mindedness is called for.

If this all sounds like a big deal, it’s because it is. Not only is force energy associated with bad performance outcomes, but it is often a window into deeper truths about the self. Maybe I am in force energy because I don’t like this activity. Maybe force is masking a confidence gap. Maybe I am in force energy because these are someone else’s goals and values I am representing. I am involved in false-self activity. In force energy I can win, but it will come at a cost. In contrast, it’s very hard to fake flow. If I am doing something that I love, and that resonates with my true self, it is much easier to find flow. If it is flow-syntonic, it is probably self-syntonic. In flow, we perform better because we are articulating something real, true and urgent about ourselves. And these are things we just can’t force.

Force V. Flow, part I

When I was at my competitive peak, with an intense practice and tournament schedule, one thing I particularly loved was the very intensity of it all: pressure  drills, court sprints, plyometrics, track workouts, squat thrusts with lots of weight on the bar, a really tough match or tournament weekend.  The soreness of it all was "weakness leaving my body," I believed, and acquiring the intensity that I lacked as a junior athlete definitely made me a more confident and steely competitor.  I've written often in this blog about the virtue of hard work.  But, for as fondly as I look  back on that period, I  also recognize that there was a certain  energy that attended all that work, fueled by my love of the intensity of it: there was a kind of force.  The force turned the intensity into a kind of do-or-die mentality.  I really pushed  through workouts, and I really pushed through matches.  At the time, I thought this intensity was my saving  grace, my superpower.  But, looking back, I see that it was all perhaps too intense.  I was too intense in practice, with no time for the crucial aspects of fun, flair or spontaneity, and too intense in competition, too edgy, too perfectionistic, the lens of  my gaze too narrow to enjoy the experience to its core.  I got hung up on bad calls, and I definitely got too judgmental with myself when I bunked a workout or lost a match that was within my grasp.  While there's much that could be said about this from a personality, or even maturity standpoint, today I'm focusing on the energetic nature of it, its quality of force.  Force energy is the energy that wants to make it all happen, that thinks that pushing is the only way through difficulty.  But, the flip side is that force has a certain violence to it, and as such, can have some serious negative consequences, as I'll outline below.  Of them all, the most detrimental is that it actually impedes peak performance and peak experience.  By pushing so hard, by having so narrow a focus, the richness of the  experience is lost, and with it, the joy.  I'm proud of my  competitive record,  but if I could  do it again, I'd try to temper the force energy, and dip below it to find an ease within the effort, the eye of the  storm.

To clarify more about the opposite of  force energy is  what Mihaly Csikszmentmihaly (1990) has called  "flow."*  Flow energy isn't lethargic or  associated with bad outcomes.  It isn't lazy or passive.  Both force and flow are, indeed, goal directed, but the temperature of their focus is different, with flow being a cooler, less harsh energy.  The intensity is there, but the violence is gone.  "Try easy," is what my yoga teacher, Baron Baptiste would say in my first encounter of the concept.  What a riddling thought when you are trying to get yourself into one of those angular yoga poses.  Drop the efforting in the effort he's saying.  Drop the panting, the pedal-to-the-metaling.  There are two critical areas of divergence between force and flow energy: the attention and the intention.  Let's look at it this way:

Force Energy	Flow Energy
1. While there may be an intensity of focus, its temperature is hot, the focus is laser-like, and its vibration is frenetic. As such, it can get unmoored.	1. The focus is equally intense but its temperature is cool, the focus is anchored. It is a state of immersion.
2. The intention of force energy is on the final product, on getting there, on completion.	2. The intention of flow energy is on what is happening, the process.
3. The attention of force energy is superficial, on the surface of the task.	3. The attention of flow energy is on the core of the experience, its essence.
4. Shallow, suppressed, uneven, and vertical breaths comprise force energy, making the action more difficult and scattering the energy.	4. The breath is long, even, horizontal, and focuses the attention and supports the intention of the action.
5. Negative emotions of impatience, anger, and disappointment color force energy.	5. Flow energy allows access to emotions like contentment, gratitude, and even joy. Peak experiences happen with flow energy.
6. In force energy, we are usually having a dysfunctional relationship with time: we expect too much in too little time, we can’t believe how slowly time moves when we want it to speed up, and our bodies are out of sync with the rhythm of the universe. Force energy is asynchronous.	6. Flow energy is in perfect conjunction with time; time goes away; time flows without being noticed; flow energy is not a race against or with time. Flow energy and time are synchronous.
7. Force energy begets conduct issues, injury, and is at war with reality.	7. Flow energy, by definition in sync with reality, is easier on the body, on the nervous system, and more readily begets peak performance.

I hope it's also clear that  peak performance and peak experiences happen in a flow state.  The problem is that many aspects of being an athlete funnel us toward force rather than flow: 1) most athletes who are looking to improve and win practice hard, and so, practice with a certain amount of force; 2) many coaches, in yelling and emphasizing results, are directing practice and play towards force energy; 3) many activities that athletes practice are, by their nature, difficult, and difficulty often steers the attention towards force; 4) modern life with its pace, its value on individualism and competition over collaboration and collectivism, orients the organism toward force energy; 5) finally, since we are bathed in force energy as our cultural amniotic surround, we often have no frame of reference for flow energy.  We have to stumble upon it, or channel it from the flow state we may have once known but have since lost.

In the next post, I'll talk about how to cultivate this primordial treasure to start enjoying peak performance and peak experience.  Stay tuned!

*Csikszentmihaly, M. 1990.  Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.  Harper Collins.  New York.

On Winners and Winning

So much of we do at Altius is to improve performance with an eye toward increasing self-esteem, enjoyment of the pursuit of excellence, and enhanced self-knowledge.  But, at the same time, we’d like one of the by-products of that work to be winning.  Winning is a validation of the hard work logged, and indicator that we’re on the right track, often a vindication on many fronts, and finally, a great deal of fun.  Often, when there is a prodigiously successful athlete, we call that person a “natural,” and we think that s/he wins often because of those innate qualities.  But, it’s also useful to think of winning as almost a separate skill from all the others.  It takes a great deal to get there, but it takes another set of skills to bring it across the line.  I decided to dedicate a number of pieces to the topic of winners in the hopes that we could distill what it is that the seeming naturals have that we could learn too.  Winning is not a magic, innate quality that winners have and losers don’t.  The reason why so many post-victory interviews begin with the question, “So, what was going through your mind when….” is because if we know what a winner thinks in crucial  moments, we could learn to think that way too.  In the next few posts, I will feature insights from winners as they reflect on some of their more momentous victories so that we can distill the set of skills that separates doing the thing from winning the thing.  Before we hear from them, I will say that, without doubt, winning requires at a minimum the kind of skills we’ve been writing about all along in Floating & Stinging: 1) hard work; 2) the ability to regulate the emotions during moments of high pressure; 3) self-belief; and finally 4) joy: the love of being in that moment doing that thing.  But don’t take it from me, let’s hear what the winners have to say.

“Foot-fault!”: A Child-Centered Parenting Moment in Youth Sport

Recently, I had a very unusual encounter in my life as a squash referee.  As you might imagine, I am often the person at whom daggers of the eyes are directed, as parents don’t like a call or set of calls I made ‘against’ their child. And while I am rarely approached by a parent to explain a call, a conversation I would welcome, I have been approached with the snide question, “So, tell me, have you ever played this game?” I understand the move: they feel as though their child has been hurt or wronged, and so they want to defend their child and direct anger at the person who hurt them.  There are two problems with this scenario: the first is that they are taking their child’s temper tantrum at the call(s) rather than the referee’s line of decision making as the fuel for their ire, and secondly, they themselves don’t have much competitive experience, and therefore aren’t so clear about the best way to handle real or perceived adversity in the heat of the moment.

This recent event was different.  I was refereeing a 17-year old boy playing in a local tournament against someone several years his senior.  He lost the first few points of the first game, and then won one and came in to serve.  “Foot fault,” I called, as his foot was well across the line when he hit his serve. As often happens when you make that call, I got an incredulous look.  “Are you serious?!” He caws at me.  “Yes,” I say.  “Your back foot was well across the line by the time you struck your serve.”  Looking at the gallery for a shared sense of outrage, and not getting it, he muttered, shook his head, and went to receive serve.

After the match, in which the 17-year old lost, I was approached by his father.  While I braced for a verbal lashing about my call, the father surprised me and thanked me. He told me that his son was in a temper tantrum at the first game break about the call, asking him if he could possibly believe that he had been called on a foot fault and that I must be crazy. He told me that he responded to his son: “Yes, I believe it!  He saw your foot across the line.  Now your job is to accept the call, keep your foot in the box while you serve, and focus on what you can do to win this match.”  He thanked me for helping his son get ready for the next stage in his playing career.  (He is going off to college in the fall.)  While I could go on to tell you the many other differences between this situation and the one I’m generally in when refereeing junior tournaments, the main one here is that this father has considerable experience as a player on the professional tennis tour.  He went on to tell me: “On tour, one of the main differences between guys who made it and guys who didn’t was the amount of time the ones who didn’t spent in the locker room whining about calls they didn’t like.”

I’m not one of these “tough love” parenting types, but I will say that a parent does a child a great disservice when he sides with the rage of the child against the referee.  Regardless of whether the calls are good or bad, learning how to deal with any and all calls is an essential aspect of being effective in competition. There is an array of skills you can help your child with when they are in this situation, but colluding with them in hating, or what I call enemizing the referee, will always yield bad results.  Here are some skills you can teach your kid instead:

1)    Radical Acceptance: encourage your child to accept all calls with grace, and move on to the next point.  But, this means really accepting and really moving on.  He or she can certainly appeal to the ref for an explanation so that they understand the ref’s line of thinking and help them avoid the same situation in future points, but they must generally accept all calls and keep the yelling in their head to zero.  This may require the subsidiary skills of pacing and breathing.  Remember: a player has 10 seconds to prepare for the next point. Use them to embrace reality and re-regulate.

2)    Do not rile your child up by getting into an ‘enemy mindset’ vis-à-vis the ref.  That is, don’t look exasperated and outraged in the gallery after a call. Your child will see this and it will only increase the complaining, whining, and feelings of victimization on the part of your kid.  This mindset is not clean, it focuses the mind in the wrong direction, and often produces bad performance and worse conduct.  Therefore: you, too, must engage skill #1 above, radically accept reality and self-soothe.  Doing so will help your child do it.

3)   Encourage your child to have a polite conversation with the referee after the match to explain his calls.  There might be something that your child does not understand about the rules that will help him in future matches.  It will emerge that the referee is not, in fact, a raving lunatic.  And, having this conversation will also be an exercise in self-advocacy, an interpersonal effectiveness goal which will result in greater self-esteem.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the skills I’ve outlined here.  Parents so often ask me how they can help their child in the fracas of competition, but they take “standing up for their kid” as so much a part of nature’s bargain that their default mode ends up being exactly the wrong track to take in the face of difficult, confusing, or even bad calls.  Using the skills I’ve outlined here will help develop a resilient, interpersonally effective athlete whose attention can be focused on the correct performance goals at the right moment.  Who knows, you might even be thanking a referee one of these days.

Jon Rahm, David Duval & The Lessons of The Players Championship

Anyone who watched the final round of this year’s ‘fifth major’, The Players Championship, will have seen the ascendant Spanish golfer Jon Rahm make one of the worst decisions I have seen in my years of watching tournament golf.  Holding a share of the lead when he came to the par 5 11th hole, his drive found the bunker on the left side of the fairway.  He was blocked from a straight line to the green by trees on his left sight line, but he decided—against the counsel of his caddie---to go for the green.  The shot required him to hook a shot out of the bunker, against the prevailing wind, over water, and to a pin that was on the right side of the green.  His shot did not hook enough, found the water, provoking a temper tantrum, as he swore, “I was so fu**ing sure the first time,” implying that it was his caddie’s fault for instilling the fatal dose of doubt to the shot, and revealing he had way too much going through his head to do anything well.  Probably an imprudent shot under any circumstances, but with one of his biggest wins on the line, it was downright self-destructive.  The commentators: Hicks, from the booth: “That is very, very perplexing;” Maltbie, from the course: “Really a poor decision;” and finally, lead announcer Paul Azinger, the new Johnny Miller: “You know, when you’re nervous, you don’t just hit poor shots, you think poorly.”  His comment supports the point I made in my post “Mastering the Moment.”  One of the reasons that players play and think poorly in pressure moments is because everything has sped up in their body and their mind, and they are not doing enough to counteract the very normal hastening that comes with elevated nerves.  In that piece, I lay out some protocols that will help slow everything down the next time you are nervous.  Furthermore, Rahm and his caddie need to do some serious processing so that they are not at odds the next time a big moment comes along.  As I have said in yet another post, that processing should start by reviewing tape of this incident multiple times, and for Rahm to be brutally honest with himself to see if he felt in his right mind, and to be honest about all the physiological reactions he remembers having, so he can use them as cues next time to slow down and rely on his caddie more not less.  The sad thing is that, even after his bogey on 11, he was still in the tournament, until three bogeys later when he wasn’t.  Sadder still is that golfworld magazine had written a piece after his Saturday 64 saying that he had overcome his temper tantrum days and would be very difficult to beat on Sunday.  It looks like there’s more work to be done.*

In a lead-up piece to the tournament, PGATOUR.COM ran a piece about David Duval’s win at The Players in 1999 during a dominant period when he had a 30 percent win percentage in his tournament starts, a remarkable statistic.  Duval speaks of that win as one of his most special because of how difficult the course was playing (e.g. highest winning score in the event’s history), and how much patience he had, and how he “held it all together.” And what he said about that tournament and that period is, “It becomes pretty easy.  There’s a hyperfocus…There’s an emptiness in your mind, if you will.  Some clarity.  It all kind of ties together.”  Here, too, he is validating a point I made in these pages (“Think Like Dustin: A Lot Less.”), and while you might not be able to play like Duval at his prime, you can certainly practice getting into that mind state.  One thing such practice does is slow down your subjective experience of time.  I know it will help you, and I certainly know it could have helped Jon Rahm last weekend in The Players.**

*Powers, C., “Players Championship 2019: Jon Rahm Claims he’s a changed man.  If that’s the case, watch out.” Golfdigest.com, Mar 16, 2019.

**Martin, S., “Duval’s Win at Sawgrass: an extreme test of patience,” pgatour.com, March 10, 2019.