Hey,

Last week I told you Neuralingual was live. This week I want to show you what it actually looks like in practice.

Here's where it started clicking for me.

I have been going to the driving range off and on for probably twenty years. A lot more off than on, to be honest. And every one of those sessions, good or bad, carved something into my nervous system. Neurons that fire together wire together. Hebb's rule, 1949, still holds. Your brain doesn't care whether the groove you're laying is the one you want. It just lays it in. I had twenty years of grooves, and most of them were wrong.

My brother Dan had been talking about shallowing the swing, how most amateurs swing too steep and it kills their iron play. I'd been doing exactly that for years. You know the feeling if you've done it: that jarring impact that rattles up your arms, the divot that looks like you were trying to plant something. So I went into Neuralingual and created an affirmation playlist. The intent was something like "I want to be a brilliant relaxed golfer, my power comes from contact, I want to improve my iron play and shallow my swing." It was probably rougher than that. You don't have to get it perfect.

NL generated affirmations sourced from Bob Rotella, Jack Nicklaus, Ben Hogan. People I'd actually heard of, which was a nice surprise. Things like "I trust the loft of the club, I abandon the urge to scoop, committing instead to a clean, compressing strike" and "My swing path is a wide, shallow valley." The guide broke down why each principle mattered, how trust and body awareness connect to better mechanics. That was useful on its own, honestly.

I listened while walking, before sleep, just getting the reps in. I also played the playlist on the range while I was hitting. Earbuds in, affirmations running, swinging at the same time. Not a lot of scenarios where you can do that. You can't exactly listen to affirmations during a job interview. But on a driving range, you can hear the words and feel the motion simultaneously, directly associating the language with the physical action. That's not nothing.

What I noticed first wasn't that my swing was fixed. It was that I was noticing things. I started paying attention to where my divot was. Actually looking at it instead of immediately teeing up the next ball. I was watching my swing path shallow out, which is apparently the technical term for the thing I'd been trying to do without knowing the word for twenty years. The affirmations weren't fixing my swing directly. They were opening a channel so I could sense the gap between what I was actually doing and what an optimal swing felt like. There's a model in motor learning for this: conscious competence. Awareness of what you're doing wrong is literally the prerequisite for improvement. Gabriele Wulf's research at UNLV backs it up: directing attention to movement effects (where the divot lands) accelerates learning faster than focusing on mechanics (how your wrists move). You can't adapt to something you're not aware of. I'd been blind to my own swing for twenty years. The affirmations turned the lights on.

I'm eager to get back out there. For the first time I feel like I actually have a strategy for improving at golf, not just a bucket of balls and hope. The wiring takes time, that's the whole point of repetition, but I feel like I'm finally laying grooves intentionally, informed by people who actually know what they're talking about, instead of just reinforcing whatever pattern happened to show up that day.

I think that might be true well beyond golf. Any time you're working on becoming something (calmer, more confident, a better partner) the first step is developing a feel for the distance between where you are and where you want to be.

If you haven't tried it yet: Neuralingual on the App Store

More next week.

Dave