My come-to-Bruce moment: How I learned to stop thinking and actually listen

Picture courtesy of www.brucespringsteen.net.

What do thinking and non-judgmental witnessing have to do with performance? Everything

Hi there. This is my first post in a long while.

I’ve been working on a proposal for a book about firefighter Tim Casarin who was critically injured in a 2014 explosion that left him with 41 broken bones. Tim played 163 rounds of golf this season.

I’ll share parts of a sample chapter soon. Readers of my Getting Unstuck book were introduced to Tim.

Today’s newsletter was inspired by coaching that I’ve been doing with junior golfers in my new role as mental performance coach for Golf Tier System Academy in Las Vegas and Zone Golf Academy in Richmond, B.C. More about that later.

On to today’s post …

You can’t start a fire without a spark
This gun’s for hire
Even if we’re just dancing in the dark

Bruce Springsteen

I haven’t seen the new movie about Bruce Springsteen, but I really want to. Old friends from university days would be surprised. You see, back in day, I didn’t care for him. I didn’t dislike him. It was more like the whole Boss-mania thing annoyed me.

To most music fans of a certain vintage, Springsteen is a massive star, the epitome of a sincere, authentic singer-songwriter-rocker-poet, and just a super decent dude who gives 100 per cent for his fans.

What could I have possibly been thinking as a music nerd—who would eventually become a music critic—that would cause me to dismiss him?

As a coach, I’m always asking my clients about what they’re thinking about themselves. What are their judgments, stories and beliefs about themselves? What standards are they trying to meet? Why do they even play golf?

Almost all are frustrated that they’re failing to live up to their expectations.

When I ask if they’ve ever hit a golf shot or responded in a situation without making a judgment or graded themselves, most never have. Or rarely. Almost everything they do or observe is passed through a filter: this is good, this is bad, this sucks …

We’re all prone to stinkin’ thinkin’. Every person views the world through their own lens, which often distorts our experience. As golf coach Fred Shoemaker has said: “Our actions are determined by how the world occurs to us.” Unfortunately, most of us are prone to negatively perceive ourselves and the world. And thus, we miss what’s true and possible.

Just a few years earlier, my allegiances swung from old-guard rock to punk and post-punk exemplified by The Clash, Joy Division, Gang of Four, et al. I wore a lot of black, bowling shirts, and red Converse high-tops.

In the 1995 movie High Fidelity, John Cusack and Jack Black portray music snobs debating which albums deserved to be called “classic.”

I could be that insufferable.

Among my cool cadre of music geeks, it was OK to like music icons such as Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Lou Reed. They were cool. Not Springsteen. He was boring, mainstream, too damn obvious. He didn’t emote a scintilla of the stylish angst projected by Stiff Little Fingers, Elvis Costello and Talking Heads.

My antagonism was exacerbated by Bill Daverne, the biggest Springsteen fan I’ve ever met, then or since. In debates in The Gazette office, Bill would wax on about Bruce’s authenticity, and I’d prattle on about Wire’s inventiveness.

Bill asked to review a Springsteen show in Buffalo on our production night. It meant his review would be submitted late. To expedite matters, I gave him the exact number of typed lines so it would perfectly fit the allotted space. (Yes, folks, we typed on paper in those days.)

Bill rushed back to the office, banged out his review, and handed it to me. Typical of Bill, it was skillfully crafted. But it was four lines too long. Easy fix. I lopped off the four-line first paragraph, which I judged was purple-Bruce-prose.

When Bill saw that I cut his lead paragraph on the designed page, he freaked. He looked ready to fight. Someone grabbed Bill from behind. Perhaps embarrassed, he thrashed around until he finally ran out of the office.

I deserved Bill’s wrath. A punch in the head would have done me good. Cutting his lead without consulting him was callous and passive aggressive.

Bill and I soon settled our differences. I apologized. But the fracas created turmoil at the paper. Many staffers concluded Bill caused the whole mess. No, I was the key culprit. The managing editor—a full-time, paying job—resigned because Bill wasn’t suspended from the staff.

Four years later, I was working as a news agency journalist in Toronto and writing freelance for music magazines. I accepted an invitation from a colleague to see Springsteen play the CNE Grandstand in Toronto during his 1984 Born in the USA tour.

As the show progressed, I became increasingly drawn in and captivated by his magnetism, full-throttle intensity, and dynamism. I soon realized I’d completely missed the boat on this guy.

Near the end of the three-hour show, Springsteen launched into Dancing in the Dark, a melancholy but propulsive rocker about searching for a transformative trigger. As the song moved into its denouement, he reached down to a young woman at the front, helped her climb on stage, and began dancing with her. Quite obviously, she was ecstatic.

This is the official video for Dancing in the Dark, which features Courteney Cox before she became a star in Friends.

As I watched them dance so joyously, tears welled in my eyes. My heart leapt into my throat. What I witnessed bypassed my head and went directly to my heart. It was a transcendent experience, a transformative feeling of being connected to something much larger than myself and my narrow ego mind, like being in awe, struck dumb in reverence, awash in rapture that made me tremble and cry. I was cracked wide open.

Something was released in me that had always been there, but I had bottled it up behind a façade of reserve, a need to stay vigilant and protected.

That’s when I got Bruce Springsteen. Yes, the dancing bit could be judged as contrived showbiz schtick. Maybe the woman was a plant. But I didn’t and don’t care.

I began to really listen to his songs and relate to a blue-collar world that I was sheltered from as a suburb kid; now I heard the yearnings of his characters, feel their pain, understand their plights.

I didn’t become a Springsteen zealot. I rarely choose his stuff, but when I need to connect to something real and powerful in a song, I’ll often listen to Highway Patrolman, an achingly sad song from Nebraska, the album that anchors the movie Deliver Me From Nowhere.

That Springsteen concert memory serves as a reminder: that to fully experience myself and the world, I must drop below my intellectual concepts, my attachment to doing everything right, and my pathetic desire to be seen as smart and cool. Instead, I can just to be a witness—an open vessel ready to filled by whatever is before me, whether it’s music, a family member, a tree, or my own experience, like swinging a golf club or playing my bass.

It’s one of our greatest challenges: to free ourselves from old patterns of thinking and behaving; to risk being open to seeing ourselves as we really are, to surrender to forces within us that we don’t understand or control. Of course, we must discern what serves and doesn’t.

This doesn’t come naturally to most of us. In fact, we’re told not to trust our own experience; we might do or say the wrong thing, or be forced to confront those shadow parts of us we’ve denied and repressed.

Conversely, by passing everything through a filter of thinking, we don’t fully experience our own gifts as golfers, business people, lovers, friends, and citizens of the world. We occur to ourselves as we perceive ourselves, rather than who we really are. We’re not free to just be, play, perform and tap into our innate brilliance.

We’re all wandering around in a kind of darkness that Springsteen has been tapping into throughout his career. No one knows if they’re doing the right thing. We have no idea, but there are things at work larger than ourselves if we’re open to them. And who knows, we might just spark a fire that takes us into the light.

If you’ve ever considered mental game coaching, I’m inviting you to take the opportunity for a FREE 30-minute coaching call.

During this free session, we’ll discuss:

· What’s happening in your game?

· What are your objectives?

· What specifically makes you feel stuck?

· Identify actions and a plan that you help you get unstuck.

This FREE session will show you how to finally start moving forward.

To register for your free session, send an email to tim@oconnorgolf.ca.

Don’t miss your opportunity to get unstuck and develop your feeling of greatness!