Your Authentic Swing
It's a relief that good thoughts aren't necessary for good performance.
Previously, in multiple essays, I’ve considered the false and limiting mindset that success is based on self-esteem and confidence.
There are feelings we like (feelings like confidence and love and happiness and satisfaction) and feelings we don't like (like loneliness and depression and fear and timidity). It isn't surprising that we try to generate some feelings and eliminate others. The problem with feelings, however, is that we cannot control them directly by our wills.—David Reynolds
Most recently, in my essay on Anthony Trollope, I wrote: Applying the principles of Constructive Living, we do what needs to be done, not waiting for inspiration, confidence, or self-esteem. We refuse to embrace the common post-game narrative of athletes telling us believing in one’s self is the determinant of success or failure. We don’t expect confidence to arrive before putting in plenty of practice.
It's a relief that good thoughts aren't necessary for good performance. A jumble of low-quality, fragmented thoughts often occupies our minds, and permanently uprooting these negative thoughts is an impossible task.
A few hours after my Trollope essay went online, I found relevant passages in G. K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy. Chesterton relates this conversation:
Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself."
Chesterton replied, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums."
Mildly, the publisher countered, “There were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums.” Chesterton rebuked him:
Yes, there are, and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself… believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief.
Doesn’t that take a lot off your mind? To improve your performance, you don’t have to believe in yourself to take action.
If Constructive Living promised the world freedom from neurotic misery, constant contentment and joy, spiritual highs, and an easy set of life principles it would be relatively easy to attract larger numbers of people. Instead Constructive Living offers a realistic means of handling life’s suffering and joy, a way to find meaning in everyday life, and a challenging perspective on what it is to be "ordinary." —David Reynolds
We all know “rotters,”as Chesterton observed, who believing in themselves don’t do what it takes to improve. The colleagues we see blundering year after year without getting better have some core belief that they are good enough already. They are a mirror that reminds us of the consequences of our own arrogance.
One of the core readings for our upcoming session, Classical Wisdom for Living a Good Life, will be “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most famous essay. You may know this famous passage:
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Those who read Emerson superficially often mistake him as a proponent of rugged individualism. He is not. In our studies, I will guide you through what Emerson meant by Self-Reliance. Emerson didn’t want us to believe in ourselves, at least not in the way that popular culture presents the idea.
Clinging to unreality is demanding and exhausting. Reality is just as it is. Make your image a realistic one. Disappear into the mystery of being ordinary. It’s a long fall, but the ground is soft and firm.—Gregg Krech
Yet, Emerson and Chesterton wouldn't tell us to not believe in ourselves either. Believing in ourselves or not believing in ourselves are opposite sides of the same coin— our attention is being hijacked in the wrong direction, and we think we are running the show. Refusal to take responsibility for personal improvement is a type of arrogance.
Constructive Living provides a life strategy for becoming ordinary. We fear that we are not ordinary (neurotic) and we yearn to be not ordinary (superior). Constructive Living teaches us how to be natural, just ourselves, nothing special. Disappointed? You expected more? Perhaps there is consolation in the truth that being nothing special, in the sense used here, is a state both rewarding and difficult to achieve.
For the marvel, the special quality, is in this moment, in this unique circumstance, not in you or me. I am just a part of this moment, an aspect, a participant. I am just ordinary, but this Reality is ever-changing wonder!—David Reynolds
Consider Rannulph Junah, a fictional character in Steven Pressfield’s The Legend of Bagger Vance. Junah was in intense emotional pain; he was at a crisis point in his golf game and in his life. In this wonderfully uplifting, mystical book (the movie doesn’t rise to the level of the book), Junah’s mysterious caddie, Bagger Vance, instructs Junah on how to find his “authentic swing.” Junah’s journey is the journey of everyman as we seek to go beyond our self-concept. In the book, Bagger explains why the game of golf is especially suited to helping us drop our focus on the internal narrator:
In other sports the opponent is regarded as the enemy. We seek by our actions to disable him. In tennis our stroke defeats him; in football our tackle lays him low … The golfer, on the other hand, is never directly affected by his opponent’s actions. He comes to realize that the game is not against his foe, but against himself. His little self. That yammering, fearful, or ever-resistant self that freezes, chokes, tops, nobbles, shanks, skulls, duffs, flubs. This is a self we must defeat.
Pressfield’s “self” is what we can call ego, our chattering mind that thinks it is separate from all that is. Pressfield uses a fictional match between Junah, Bobby Jones, and Walter Hagen to illustrate his point. In the match, Junah is having grave difficulties. Bagger Vance diagnoses Junah’s problems on the golf course: “Junah’s problem is simple, he thinks he is Junah.” Bagger continues, “I will teach him he is not Junah … Then he will swing Junah’s swing.”
What could Bagger Vance mean? Bagger sees that Junah has allowed his ego to get in the way of his life. Junah’s problem, like all of ours, was not his ego per se, but failing to recognize that there was an alternative to his suffering. Junah’s ego existence, like ours, was characterized by lack and limitation. In Junah’s case, this took the form of a drinking problem and his story of horrors he experienced as a soldier. Bagger helps Junah realize he is more than any of this:
Tell me who you are Junah? Who, in your deepest parts when all that is inauthentic has been stripped away. Are you your name, Rannulph Junah? Will that hit this shot for you? Are you your illustrious forebears? Will they hit it? ... Are you your roles, Junah? Scion, soldier, Southerner? Husband, father, lover? Slayer of the foe in battle, comforter of the friend at home? Are you your virtues, Junah, or your sins? Your deeds, your feats? Are you your dreams or your nightmares? Tell me, Junah. Can you hit the ball with any of these?
As with Junah, the source of our creativity, our talent, and our leadership ability doesn’t lie in our self-concept; it doesn’t lie in believing in ourselves. Bagger advises Junah to tap into Reality instead:
There is a perfect shot out there trying to find each and every one of us and all we have to do is get ourselves out of the way. Let it choose us. You can’t see the flag (that marks the hole) as some dragon you have to slay. You have to look with soft eyes. See the place where the tides and the seasons … all come together; where everything that is, becomes one.
Of course, like Junah, we struggle, trapped in our ego-created stories. Yet, struggling will not free us. Surrendering, we experience our own unique gifts. Bagger Vance taught of the “one true Authentic Swing that is ours alone… Like the statue of David, our Authentic Swing already exists, concealed within the stone, so to speak.” Our task is to chisel away all that is inauthentic.
Our ego is insulted by the idea that we can find an alternative to its guidance. The ego will cajole us into believing that, if we are serious about finding great performance, we should let it direct us. But mastery in golf, or any aspect of life, will not be achieved with the ego as our guide.
Now, no one tries to fight with rain or fog. You never see anyone going outside waving a sword or a karate blow at rain clouds. And no ordinary humans try by their wills to make fog go away…. We do what we can reasonably do while waiting for bad weather to pass.
The "natural" person, then, simply takes the feelings as they come, all intertwined and interacting, and goes about doing what reality brings that needs doing. The "natural" person wastes no time trying to struggle with feelings directly. The feelings are just "ordinary," unworthy of lots of attention over a long period of time. Feelings shouldn't be ignored--how could we ignore a snowstorm, anyway? But when you have to go out in a blizzard, you go out. That is the way it is to be human. The feelings are there, but we do what we have to do. —David Reynolds
This summer and fall, Mindset Shifts U readings and studies will help us gently walk past our self-imposed limitations. After reading Epictetus, Emerson, Leonard Read, Hayek, David Hume, and Adam Smith, your gaze will be altered. These classic works will help us correct our misconceptions about individual and societal flourishing.
As I recently highlighted, civilization is inherently fragile, and each of us has a part to play in sustaining it. Classical Wisdom for Living a Good Life will help us subtract the often bad advice we receive from the ongoing chatter in our minds and, in the process, strengthen our natural bonds with others.
Another excellent piece. As usual, I could feel the visceral truth of your words as well as of those in the quotes you included.
Right off the bat, the subhead "It's a relief that good thoughts aren't necessary for good performance" reminded me of reading the transcript of an interview with a tennis player who won a major back in the late 90s or early 2000s -- I think it was Marat Safin, for whatever that's worth -- who said (I'm paraphrasing) that at no point before or during that major final did he ever think he was actually capable of winning it. If a professional athlete doesn't need confidence or good thoughts in order to perform at his/her highest level, the rest of us surely don't.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that, at least in a sports context, not only are good thoughts unnecessary for performing well, thinking at all is generally unnecessary and is often actually counterproductive. This assumes we've acquired enough skill to be competent at whatever level we're at, of course, and practice does require conscious thought. As long as we have that baseline of competence, though, the state of flow / being "in the zone" that produces our best performance is, at least in my experience, characterized by an absence of thought. I've sometimes heard it said of an athlete's performance when he was clearly in the zone that "he was unconscious," which is more accurate than I think most people realize when they say that, as the athlete in that state is not consciously thinking, but rather sensing and intuiting, seeing the whole rather than a disconnected subset of parts, and making the right choices & physically executing with no experience of having made any conscious decisions.
I hadn't thought of it this way until reading this piece and trying to make sense of my thoughts about it by writing this comment, but it now occurs to me that the flow state is simply complete, unfettered presence. In that state, the ego -- which as you point out is no help, and even an active hindrance -- is quiet, the internal monologue is paused, and what's left is our essence: pure awareness.
I'm reading a series of books by the Zen teacher Cheri Huber, and she echoes something I think you've pointed out a number of times, which is that our essences, our authentic selves which are so often hidden beneath the ego and its conditioning, are expressions of goodness and love. It seems to me that being "in the zone" is a direct experience of that. To me that state feels like ease and effortlessness undergirded by a subtle, understated bliss. I'm a tennis player myself so my excursions into the flow state are usually in that context, and when I reflect on them afterwards, I find it truly amazing how that degree of presence facilitates my best play without my even feeling like I'm trying. I can't conceive of how the sub/unconscious mind can take in so much information at once, extract what's relevant, and have me physically execute the right move at the net or the most appropriate shot, as though my body is being controlled by some benevolent puppetmaster. Occasional mistakes still happen, but without the ego piping up to assign some negative meaning to them, they roll off of me and don't disturb the background feeling of contentedness, that all is as it should be and all is right with the world.
Part of one of the Bagger Vance quotes you selected read "There is a perfect shot out there trying to find each and every one of us and all we have to do is get ourselves out of the way. Let it choose us." I think that gets at two very important and related things: trying vs. letting / forcing vs. allowing, and getting out of our own way. It seems fair to say that trying [too hard] or [attempts at] forcing are pure manifestations of ego, given that the egoless flow state feels like autopilot with little to no perception of effort, in which we allow ourselves to be carried by the unseen and unfelt power of our unconscious mind's processing ability in tandem with our awareness. It follows, then, that clearing our own path to our best performance means being as present and in-the-moment as possible and letting go of / disidentifying with the ego as much as we can.
Thanks again & as always for your writing, and for indulging me in this long comment that enabled me to create some structure and organization for what had felt like a stew of tenuously connected thoughts.