Life is hard. Then you die...
...but it's the moments in between that make it interesting and worth living. Desire. Ego and fear, bad luck and good luck. Disaster and triumph. Frustration, anxiety, anger and uncertainty. Complexity and elegance. Bad habits and self-flagellation. Loneliness and communion. Skill and judgement. Near misses and flow. Joy and pain. These are the opportunities and threats of the most beautiful games in business and life.
First things first. This is not really a story about golf. So even if you've not been cursed with the passion (or obsession) for it, read on. Golf is a useful metaphor for any meaningful and spirited pursuit that is at once difficult, complex, unpredictable, inexhaustibly infuriating, and in its rarer moments, profoundly satisfying and fun. Golf is a microcosm of human nature. And just like any vocation or avocation, its occupation requires nontrivial mastery of temperament and domain. Golf, the way I approach it, is a Greek Tragedy and laboratory of life. I have conceived and tested virtually every coaching tool I use to this day on a golf course, while face-to-face and tussling with my darker angels. As Steven Pressfield wrote, "golf is a game that is meant to be played, not won". This is what I've learned in that pursuit and how I think it applies to life and business. Buckle up...
love and mentorship
I was seven years old, when a friend of my parents' took me and my younger brother golfing for the first time. "Uncle" Leon, as we called him, had no children of his own. He was an ardent student of the game and a gifted teacher, who loved children and had the patience of Job. He was a true enthusiast, and not just about that. By the time I was a preteen, I had a fundamentally solid swing, a positive attitude and a growth mindset. I didn't just learn to swing the clubs and hit shots, Leon taught us how to play the game and express our joy while doing it. But that all changed when my parents divorced. Life became suddenly serious. I became the man of the house long before I was ready. I put away all of my childish pursuits. Playtime was over.
Golf is one of those things that does not work when forced or taken too seriously and by the time I was nineteen, I quit. I was a diffident and brooding young man. I wasn't doing well in school and I didn't like who I'd become on the course: lying, cheating, fixating on the score and flaring up whenever anything didn't go my way, which in this activity was almost always.
Later that year I discovered iceclimbing. Climbing replaced golf as my avocation and it was clear to me that if I approached the ice the way I approached the golf course, I would die. Climbing required finesse, ego control, emotional regulation, deft problem solving and massive focus–all the things required to hit a golf ball well–with the added risk of getting maimed or dusted with even the tiniest lapse in judgement or presence. Climbing is consequential in the way that golf can never be, and works only in the flow state. Before I understood the psychology and neuroscience of performing in that zone, I had the deep experience of it. I was built for this activity. In short order, I took my mastery of iceclimbing to just a few notches below the world standard at the time–the equivalent of being a scratch golfer. I found my courage and confidence, and the freedom of hanging on ice tools hundreds of metres off the deck without a rope.
After considering the path of becoming a mountain guide, I opted instead for industrial design. I eventually took my interest in complex systems and became an executive coach. I am a keen student of how entrepreneurs and leaders work and how they build teams to accomplish their dreams. Building coaching tools and delivering the support they need to get into a collective flow state is the most beautiful game that I play in vocational terms. What I learn from my avocational pursuits I apply to my vocational ones and back again. These pursuits are two faces of my calling in life and I play both with my soul mate.
Some number of years later, I was climbing with Tania on Murchison Falls, a remote and difficult iceclimb on the road to Jasper from Banff. The steep pillars fall steeply from a high cliff band for several hundred metres. We were about half way up one Sunday when a large gargoyle of ice detached from the overhanging upper reaches of the climb and came crashing down uncomfortably close to our stance. We rappelled down and on the walk out I suggested to Tania that we should take up a safer sport. I casually suggested that golf might do the trick.
patior ergo sum (I suffer therefore I am)
Heath Ledger was just 28 when he was found dead in his SoHo apartment during the winter of 2008. His death signalled a curiosity I had about suicidal depression. There was some suspicion that he had taken his own life (which was never proven). The concept was very foreign to me. I've lived a very blessed, privileged and charmed life. Nevertheless, like a method actor, I naturally wanted to know what it felt like for a situation to get so bad that taking my own life would seem like the only way out.
I was by that time coaching for about twenty years and was well into midlife and a successful career as an executive coach. I would describe my approach to coaching as a kind of entrepreneurial psychology or a consciousness and mental hygiene discipline. I always want to understand the vast expanse of human suffering as a way to tap into our capacity for compassion and creativity. From the darkness, maybe the light?
When Robin Williams took his life in the summer of 2014, the other shoe dropped. Looking back it's clear that I had at some point decided to descend into an "exploratory" suicidal depression. I don't recall ever really feeling depressed, but this was surprisingly easy for me in retrospect. I have since been diagnosed with a low grade depression, called dysthymia. I only needed a suitable trigger set. And I found it. (It turns out that if you are hell bent on experiencing depression golf is a pretty efficient way to do it.)
While all this was going down we went on our first trip to Maui. We had an afternoon free, so on a lark, we decided to go golfing. Tania had played a few times in university and I hadn't swung a club in decades. We rented some clubs and bought a dozen and a half balls. The very first thing I did was chip one of the balls under a dense hedge never to be seen again–a portentous beginning. The Genie was now out of the bottle and I've not gotten her back in.
Tania and I just celebrated 31 years of marriage. We do pretty much everything together and have a clear set of core values that have bound our partnership through decades of struggle and triumph: passion, commitment, excellence and progress. I am grateful for having a spouse so willing to suffer. These values inform everything we do in business and in life. We are an intense couple (we also do several sports that can kill us, like mountain biking, iceclimbing and backcountry skiing), which has made golf an interesting avocation for us both .
Golf is pretty much the only way I express my depression. To be clear, I have never gotten to the ideation phase of suicidal depression (and I have multiple layers of safety valves) but I have been to the depths of despair dozens of times, where I find myself ruminating on the concept of not existing as a way to relieve the incredibly intense emotional pain and feelings of darkness. I can think of nothing worse than that. I now understand how things could get so bad for someone that they think suicide is their only option. Depression for me is the annihilation of passion, excellence and progress but it never got so bad that it broke my commitment to get to the root of it. Perseverance is the defining trait of our marriage.
You might be asking yourself right now, as many people have asked me, "if golf makes you so miserable, why don't you just stop doing it?" It's a fair question. And the short answer is: "purpose".
existential opportunity
A mountain guide yelling Avalanche! is the one thing a backcountry skier never wants to hear. Our group had just finished the long first run of the day–a sweeping meandering path intended to carefully sidestep key trigger points on the high alpine slope. We were at the bottom ready to head back up when Tania heard something from above. A small wind slab had kicked off from the summit ridge. It looked quite small from where we stood and was well left of where we had skied down. I assumed it was a small size two that would have a short runout. I couldn't have been more wrong. The next thing we saw was a massive wall of snow exploding into the sky as the avalanche jumped a ridge onto a path heading directly toward us. It was quickly gaining volume and speed. Our guide said it looked like a size four and we knew an avalanche that big would be large enough to run to the valley floor below us and decimate the forest on its way down.
He yelled for all of us to run to the forest about 20 metres away. It was the only option. We were tripping and falling in the waist deep snow, getting snagged in the snow alder below our feet. I kept looking up while I desperately thrashed my way through. The avalanche had jumped another ridge. It was getting bigger, moving faster and getting closer. I've always known that a day would come when the mystery of my death would be revealed. As a climber and skier with forty plus years in the mountains, I've had my share of near death experiences and close calls, but I'd never been so certain of my impending demise until that moment. I thought I was done, that this was it: the end of the road. We all managed to make it into the trees and waited for the crushing final blow that never came. The incident was a near miss. In the end, the avalanche was a size three; it was still large but not large enough to kill us. It stopped several hundred metres above us. But it took out our tracks mid-run, where we'd been only fifteen minutes earlier.
Skiing, and backcountry powder skiing in particular, is a most beautiful game. The feeling of slipping through uncut champagne powder is one of the great experiences of life. It's rare and coveted and very difficult to achieve. And it is very possible to die doing it. Existential risk is an inherent part of the game.
Marriage is a most beautiful game but carries the risks of a lifetime of misery and divorce. Many people have experienced the downsides of that game. I am on my second marriage; I understand the risks. Family, friendships and community are most beautiful games. They are heartwarming avenues of love, intimacy and compassion but also of death and loss. Entrepreneurship is a most beautiful game that offers a lifetime of opportunities for contribution, wealth and wellbeing. It also offers the possibility of bankruptcy, failure, lost clients, staff and investors, financial scarcity and bone-crushing stress. A long life is a beautiful thing full of beautiful experiences, while death, accidents, chronic pain and life threatening illness lurk around every corner.
In the face of all of this golf might seem like a trivial pursuit: a grown-assed man fixated on getting a tiny ball in a hole. And from that perspective it is silly. But depression was never about golf and I would never trivialize depression. I always understood it to be about something much deeper, about finding something very hard to find. A key.
I am now old enough to have experienced almost all of the dark side of life and still nothing compares with the depression I have felt on the golf course. Since taking it back up in 2010, we've played hundreds of rounds of golf. Unlike my many days on a bike, or skis or crampons or in coaching sessions, I have enjoyed very few of them. I have experienced all but one of my depressive episodes on the golf course. I cannot even begin to describe how much misery I have endured doing an activity that most people acknowledge "is supposed to be fun".
Golf is the ultimate life lab and R & D activity for a coaching business. Before I returned to golf in midlife, there was nothing I did that triggered frustration, anxiety, disappointment and anger with the frequency and intensity that golf does. Sure I had my share of challenging days and really good days but I never really got to experience the full depths of the human condition. How exactly could I be an effective coach if I did not have empathy for the various ways and means of human suffering? Maybe that seems fucked up to you, but I will say this. I designed most of my suite of coaching tools on the golf course.
chasing flow
Let's begin with the first coaching idea: flow. When we are in flow, we are tapping into our latent skills and strengths to resolve emerging challenges. So as coaches, we help our leaders tap into their latent skills and strengths to resolve emerging challenges. Flow feels amazing. It is a perfect powder run, a pure drive off the tee, a great presentation, an effective meeting, the discovery of a new invention, a high performance team doing the best work of their lives. But as the Bard says, here is the rub. Flow only occurs when we take on challenges that are bigger than the ones we developed our current skills and strengths on. Flow is the excitement that lives between anxiety and boredom; the power between disappointment and frustration; the connection between anger and loneliness; the clarity between uncertainty and confusion. Flow lives in the stretch. Flow requires that we risk a bad result and shitty experience in exchange for the possibility of greatness.
This brings us to our second coaching idea: triggers. I am very clear what flow looks like in all of my vocational and avocational pursuits. I also understand the emotional risks: anxiety, frustration, confusion and anger on one side of the flow state and boredom, disappointment, loneliness and uncertainty on the other. Severe depression for me is the pile of all of these negative emotions all at once. In golf, these are all associated with losing balls. When I lose about seven balls in a relatively short time frame, I descend into a deep depression that generally requires at least a day to sleep most of it off. I remember these feelings from golfing as a teenager before I quit and rebuilt myself through climbing and mountain biking.
At the time right after I would lose a ball (and probably long before that), I would very likely feel disappointed that my ball did not do what I wanted it to. Every golfer understands this. Golf is super hard and most people are not that good at it. Even the pros understand these feelings well. With each lost ball, the frustration and anger builds until it hits a threshold. When I returned to golf I was not that skilled and ratcheted through the 7-ball-threshold early in almost every round. It took me several years to understand that what I was feeling was depression, complete with suicidal ruminations. Lost balls came to symbolize how shitty that felt, and how shitty my opinion of myself was at being a shitty golfer. I did this for so many years that I developed a persistent trauma pattern golfing. Losing a ball is enough to trigger the feeling of trauma.
The idea of a trigger is very misunderstood. Most of us, when we feel triggered, do not realize that we have allowed ourselves unconsciously to become the victim of the trigger event. "Losing a golf ball made me feel frustrated." There is no place inside my golf ball where disappointment, frustration, anger and suicidal depression are stored and awating release. The emotions are not a feature of the triggering event. I am the one feeling them. It is just that for me, losing a golf ball lowers the threhold for me to feel these things.
denouement
I've long said that if I golfed the way I climb ice I'd be a scratch golfer and if I climbed ice like I golf I would be dead. Until this summer I had not had the experience of going on a golf holiday and having fun. I spent the prior years preparing to return to the three places I had the most traumatic experiences of my life. I did brain scans and a psychedelic journey, changed my diet, did somatic therapy, hired a new golf coach, started a meditation practice, learned how to use AI, designed a new coaching app.
I left on our trip with a single very specific intention: be pleasant.
What I learned was that I associate lost balls as proof that I am a shitty coach. After all, if I have not learned how to master emotional self-regulation on the golf course, how good am I really? It took me 15 years to uncover this blindspot. It is a silly idea in the light of day but while it was operating in the deepest reaches of my subconscious, that idea–that frame–was the root cause of my misery. Is it true that if I lose my shit on the golf course I am a bad coach? Obviously not. I am just a work in progress. I spent the last 15 years working through my trauma to develop the tools I need to help my people through theirs. It has not been a wasted life.
Let's combine the two ideas of flow and triggers:
If you want to experience much greater flow in your life and business pursuits,
you need to take on much more significant internal and external challenges,
and in doing so, you risk feeling severely emotionally triggered (which sucks),
until you develop the advanced skills and strengths to deal with them effectively.
what's your greatest leadership challenge, existential threat or persistent stressor and
what event seems to trigger it?
(If any of this is too close to home: in Canada, call or text 9-8-8 — the Suicide Crisis Helpline. Free, 24/7, and you don’t have to be in crisis to use it. More at 988.ca. I wrote this as a story about a game. For a lot of people it isn’t one.)