Do You Know How to Play Badly Well?

posted on: November 3, 2016
author: Brian Lomax, Ed.D.

“The worse you’re performing, the more you must work mentally and emotionally. The greatest and toughest art in golf is playing badly well. All the true greats have been masters at it.” — Jack Nicklaus

Ah, I love this quote from all-time golf great, Jack Nicklaus. When I read the phrase “playing badly well”, I immediately think, “yes, yes, that’s the difference between the greats and everyone else!” Let’s unpack this bit of wisdom so that we can understand it more deeply and learn how to play badly well in competition and in life.

Every athlete has a physical game or abilities that are easily observed. We can see their technical skill, their speed, their strength, etc. However, it is much more difficult to measure the strength of an athlete’s mental and emotional game especially before a competition has begun. For this reason, I like to think of every athlete as having a Jenga tower representing their mental/emotional game. You can imagine it standing on the side of the field/court/etc. The Stoics referred to this Jenga tower concept as your “inner citadel.”

In the game of Jenga, you are trying to remove as many pieces from the tower without collapsing it. In this analogy of the mental game and a Jenga tower, we are approaching it somewhat differently. Throughout a competition, you must protect your Jenga tower. You don’t want to remove pieces from your own tower and you certainly don’t want to allow your opponent (if you have one) to do so either. How you react and what you focus on while competing either weakens your tower or strengthens it.

The Jenga tower concept is critical to understanding how to play badly well. There must be a foundation of your tower that never collapses. Those pieces must always remain in place and they cannot be compromised by any outside adversity. Weak to average competitors allow their Jenga towers to be smashed completely with pieces strewn all over the field or court.

That strong foundation is built on certain core beliefs and behaviors:

• Unshakable desire to reach your objective
• High Effort and Energy level
• Focused Intensity
• Ability to take action and always move forward
• Unshakable Self-belief

You may be able to think of others, but I believe this is a good start. No matter what adversity you are facing in competition or in life, you cannot allow it to take these behaviors off-line. They are the foundation. Without them, you will give in to your negative emotions and defeat yourself. Unfortunately, this is what we see all too often even at the Division 1 collegiate level.

In conclusion, work on your foundation on and off the field of play so that the next time you are playing badly (there will be a next time!), you can do it better than in the past. Perhaps in the future, you will become one of the greats to whom Jack Nicklaus was referring.