(upbeat music) - Hi, everyone, Steve Adubato.

We kick off the program talking about golf.

All right, you don't have to be a golfer to appreciate this conversation with the great Dr. Bob Rotella.

He's the author of my favorite book of all time, "Golf is Not a Game of Perfect."

But this book, "The Golfer's Mind: Play to Play Great," It's exceptional.

He is one of the nation's top sports psychologists, and I've been reading him for years and still struggling in the bunkers.

Hey, Coach Bob...

Excuse me, Coach and Dr. Bob, good to see you.

- Good to see you, Steve.

- Okay, let me just jump right into this.

So much of what you write is compelling to me.

I teach leadership and coach leadership.

When you talk about confidence, I have confidence doing this, Dr. Bob.

But in a bunker, a sand trap, all of a sudden my mind goes places, and I remember bad shots, and I think, "What happened to my confidence "that I have when I'm on the air?"

What's going on in my mind, Bob Rotella?

(Steve laughing) - Well, I mean, more than likely, there's some doubt, or fear, or indecision.

It's interesting.

I mean, the pros pray for their ball to go in the bunker when they miss the green.

Because to them, the bunker shot is the easiest shot in golf, because all you gotta do is make a swing, and hit the sand, and the ball just comes out, and goes in a hole.

(Bob laughing) If you ask them what they think about, they go, "I just look where I want it to go, "and I hit it, and it goes there."

- What about the rest of us, Bob?

- Well, it's the one shot where you're not trying to hit the ball.

And most people look at the ball instead of looking at the sand.

And the whole idea is you've gotta just make the sand come out.

In other words, if you could just get all the sand an inch or so behind the ball to go as far as you want the ball to go, then it happens.

- All right, let's do this.

- But you're hitting the sand instead of the ball.

- Let's do this, I'm reading from Dr. Bob Rotella's book, "The Golfer's Mind: Play to Play Great."

Can I go through a few of these?

This is in the introduction.

And a couple things I picked up, I want you to react to it.

How about this?

Item number three in your top 10 list of things to be thinking about, frame of mind, "Get out of the results and get into the process".

Bob, I'm obsessed with my handicap, and why it's still 12, 13, 14 after all these years.

The score doesn't matter.

- No, it's... Well, it's an interesting question.

The the score ultimately matters, but the way you get the score is by not adding up your score while you're doing it.

Like, while you're doing this program, I bet you don't try to evaluate how the show's going every second you're doing it.

You're just lost in the interview and doing what you're doing.

And, you know, so we talk about you have to surrender to the outcome in order to get the outcome.

And you can go back.

I mean, I'll give you some examples.

In football, Vince Lombardi had the great quote, "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."

But when you ask him about it, he said, "I wasn't talking about the score to the game.

"I was talking about making the commitment to winning.

"I was talking about a winning attitude."

If you went to... John Wooden never spoke about outcome.

He just said, you know, "If when the game ended, we were behind, "we simply ran out of time."

That's how he got his players to just take care of executing each play.

Bill Walsh, a great 49ers football coach, the title of one of his books was, "The Score Takes Care of Itself."

And basically we're teaching all the golfers that you have to get lost in a process of... And what that means is, do you know where you want your mind on every shot and putt before the round starts?

And that has to become your mission, your purpose, your goal.

And after the round, I asked players, "Well, did you do what you said you wanted to do "before the round starts?"

If they say they did, I said, "Great, let's go do it again tomorrow."

If they say they didn't, I'd say, "Well, then what distracted you?

"And what became more important "once you got on the golf course "than doing what you know you needed to do "every time you sent over a shot?"

Now, what makes golf hard is there's a lot of potential distraction.

But you don't have to be distracted.

Like, I mean, in the bunker, thinking about leaving it in the bunker or sculling it over the green instead of seeing what you want.

- You know, and by the way, for those of you... We're only gonna be able to touch on Dr. Bob Rotella's brilliant thoughts.

And you don't have to be into golf.

What Bob Rotella talks about is relevant in any arena.

He's also been a sports psychologist and worked with people like LeBron James, basketball, football, sports, not sports.

It doesn't matter, because the principles are the same.

How about this one?

This is a great one.

I wrote...

I have these little rocks.

That sounds ridiculous.

Dr. Bob, this one says "gratitude."

You may ask, why do you have that?

I keep obsessing over having to choose your attitude, because you wrote this, "Know that nothing is gonna bother you "or upset you on the golf course or in life "and You'll be in a great state of mind for every shot."

So, hold on one second.

Go into every experience, Dr. Bob Rotella saying, "Nothing is going to throw me off."

"Nothing."

- Yeah, you know, you said you love that first book, "Golf is Not a Game of Perfect."

The whole idea of the book is golf is not a game of perfect.

It wasn't designed as a game of perfect.

It was designed as a game of mistakes.

Much like every sport is, much like life is, it's not gonna go perfect, the way you'd like it to go.

So, if you really are trying to change golf into a game of perfect, what you're saying is, "I don't like golf as it exists.

"I'm gonna try and change it "into a game that I want it to be."

And the other part of it is, we're all born human, which means we're born flawed, so none of us are gonna be perfect.

None of your opponents are gonna be perfect.

And so, it's like, the more you can accept the game and accept being human, now we can go about playing the game.

And I use the word "play" the game, because that's what you have to get good at, is playing at the game.

And so, I mean, we talk a lot about the fact that even the best players in the world are gonna miss a lot of shots.

And can you accept that even though you've spent hours practicing?

Maybe on the practice range, you hit every ball just the way you wanted to.

And that's the challenge even at the highest level.

What's interesting that most people don't get is, the better you get at golf, the more patience and the more accepting you have to be, because, boy, your expectations go higher and higher, but you're still never gonna master it.

And that's what that's all about, that quote.

- And let me add this.

In a lot of my leadership coaching that I do with my colleague, Mary Gamba, who's also on our production team, we say, "Practice makes progress.

"Practice does not make perfect."

I'm saying what Bob's saying, only differently, except I forget it on the golf course.

Okay, I'm gonna follow up on this.

You ready for this one?

This is beautiful.

"Believe fully in yourself so you can play freely."

Confidence.

Dr. Bob, confidence, does it come and go?

Do we choose it?

Does it only happen when we hit great shots or do great shows, or what comes first, the confidence and success or the success breeding confidence?

Help me on this.

Help all of us.

- Well, think about it.

Everybody has to believe before they can shoot par.

If you don't believe you can shoot par, you'll find a way to mess it up.

You won't let yourself.

Everyone has to believe they can win the Masters before they let themselves win the Masters.

If you don't believe you can win the Masters and you have the lead, you'll find a way to mess it up, you know?

So, confidence always has to come first.

And it's been around forever.

I mean, whether it was Babe Ruth pointing the bat and saying, basically, "If you throw it over the plate, "I'm gonna hit it over the fence."

Or Ted Williams telling the world his dream since he was a little kid was to be a 400 hitter.

So, he allowed himself to do it.

Whether it's Muhammad Ali, whether it's the great golfers of today, I mean, it's always come first.

Now people wanna know, "Well, I wasn't born with it."

Well, very few people are born with it.

If someone tells me they weren't born with it, then I'm gonna tell 'em, "Well, then you're gonna have to develop it."

It's like, "I can't help you."

If someone else happened to... Is it possible that someone was just born confident and stayed confident their whole life?

Yeah, there's probably such people.

But not many people that I've worked with have had that experience, where in every age of their life, in every activity, they were just full of confidence.

So, I mean, the challenge is, can you develop it?

And we call it self-confidence, because it's simply the sum total of all your thoughts you have about yourself.

So, if we had a recording of you, of all of your thoughts about doing your TV show versus all of your thoughts about your bunker play, and we had a computer printout every night, you'd go, "Oh, my God, look at the difference "in the way I think about doing my show "versus the way I think about doing my bunker."

And because everything I teach is we have a free will, and we have to take personal responsibility, and hold ourselves accountable for how we think about different things in our life, that's why we can have confidence in one thing and not in another, because confidence is very task-specific.

But it's self-confidence, because it's your thoughts about you doing certain activities.

- Dr. Bob, before I let you go, I wanna ask you this, you've been at this for years.

You've coached, taught, written about sports, sports psychology.

You've helped so many athletes.

By the way, it's worth reading the story about Sam Snead when Dr. Bob Rotella was just getting into the business, and people were like, "Who's this young guy getting into "talking about sports psychology?"

And Sam Snead, I don't wanna go into the details, but it's in the book, actually gave you the stamp of approval, because he said, "This guy has something worth listening to."

And we're talking about the greatest golfer at the time who had a terrible attitude as you wrote about in the book.

But here's my question to you.

You've been at this for a while.

Why do you still have the passion, the energy to be doing this as you've continued to mature and get better?

- Well, I think the simple answer is I am doing what I love doing.

And the second reason is I get to get up every morning and help people.

Like this afternoon, I have two college golfers coming to spend two days with me.

Tomorrow I'm going over and talking to the University of Virginia lacrosse team that's getting ready for the national championship semifinal.

I mean, I love working with people who have dreams and they're trying to find a way to help themselves achieve their dreams.

And that's what life's about, is having ideas in your head and seeing how far you can go.

- We have that in common too.

If you don't love what you do, I don't know how you do it well.

But Dr. Bob Rotella does it extremely well.

His book, "The Golfer's Mind: Play to Play Great" and my all time favorite, "Golf is Not a Game of Perfect."

Forward by Tom Kite, who actually redesigned the golf course that I play at in over in New Jersey.

The great Tom Kite.

Hey, listen, you honor us, and I'm sorry I talked so much about my own issues on the golf course.

That's not fair to everybody.

But I cannot thank you enough, Dr. Bob Rotella, for joining us.

Thanks, Bob.

- Great being with you, Steve.

Have a great day.

- You've got it.

Let's get out of those bunkers.

Nice and easy.

- I love it.

I can see it now.

- Yeah, we'll be right back after this.

I'm taking my 60 degree out right now.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

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And by ROI-NJ.

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