Podcast - Game Improvement Golf · Tony Wright

232 – It’s Just A Thought! – Tom Sterner Interview

·1 hr 6 min·4 clips

Tom Sterner reframes a collapsing round as a chance to practice playing badly under pressure.

1. Game Improvement Golf episode 232 centers on Tom Sterner and his 2023 book It's Just a Thought. 2. Tony Wright hosts, and Tom Sterner returns as founder of the Practicing Mind Institute, author of three books, and a present moment functioning coach. 3. The episode asks how thought, meditation, and interpretation affect golf performance and daily behavior. 4. Tom says he wrote It's Just a Thought after years of coaching and research into neuroscience, quantum physics, and heart math. 5. He describes coaching a CEO from New York, first one-on-one, then with the CEO's whole team, and later with another company after staff changes. 6. Tom says he is getting back into individual coaching, preparing a fourth book, and reconsidering a podcast he had started and then stopped. 7. Tony brings up Tom's 45-year meditation practice, and Tom says meditation is a skill for observing thoughts instead of being inside them. 8. Tom says neuroscience suggests people spend about 95% of the day running subconscious programs instead of choosing thoughts consciously. 9. He explains that repeated thoughts, repeated actions, and other people's labels become stored patterns that the subconscious keeps replaying. 10. Tom says meditation helps people notice when the mind is thinking without permission so they can change the programming. 11. He uses Kyoto archery to contrast perfect process with bullseye obsession and says the aim is motion, or no mind. 12. Tom compares Western archers who judged each miss to golfers who start steering the ball after one bad shot. 13. He says interpretation creates experience, and experience then shapes performance through subconscious response. 14. Tom gives a college-golf example of a one-stroke lead on the 18th hole and says calling it a risky shot tells the subconscious to produce a risky swing. 15. He says the right mental language is a no-brainer shot, because the subconscious follows the meaning you feed it. 16. Tom describes a coaching call where he provoked an executive's anger and then showed him how quickly a subconscious pattern can take over. 17. The tone is conversational, instructional, and example-driven, with Tony asking pointed questions and Tom answering in long, dense explanations. 18. The format moves between personal history, golf-specific situations, and broader claims about mind training and performance psychology. 19. Golfers who like mindset, meditation, and performance psychology will get the most from it. 20. Listeners wanting light banter or a short, simple golf tip may skip it.

As heard by us

A reflective golf conversation that turns awareness and self-control into plain language.

This episode follows Tony Wright and Tom Sterner as they examine the mental side of golf through the lens of Practicing Mind, with a steady focus on present-moment functioning and awareness.

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Why you'd press play

When your mind hijacks a round, this gives you a steadier way back.

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