The emotions and feelings that have become stronger for me as the years go on include

anxiety, excitement, anger, fear and joy. These are all the things that are constantly trying to

bombard my system and take over at any given time from the moment that I wake up till the

moment I go to bed. These things happen on the golf course, in my bed, when I am conversing

with others, when I am sitting/doing nothing and basically any other situation I can think of

outside of maybe meditation because that is a time where I allow any emotion to control me

momentarily before I let it pass.

The point of me acknowledging these emotions that I am in a constant game of tug-of-

war with is that they are the things that make me tick and whether or not I like them, they are

the things that are impeding me to do my best at some times, as well as the things that allow

me to perform my best in all aspects of life; which is quite an astonishing phenomenon. There is

certain thing in each of us that seem to be a constant in our emotional regulation: for some it is

keeping a bit of sadness in check with things like gratitude or openness to experience, for

others it may be a bit of anxiety that we combat with things that require all of our attention and

awareness such as a tough workout or a long run or practicing something very diligently for

short bursts of time or maybe just simply sitting there and trying to be aware.

These things in our life, in my opinion, are simply never going to go away. They are a

part of you, things you have learned possibly or things that you picked up from a childhood

friend. I believe you may be able to have a lot of great days where you do not feel some of

these emotions within you and you think you have everything figured out, but the reality is they

always seem to come back at the worst of times. It is not the fact that they come back that

scares us, it is the fact that we do not know how to use them to our advantage in daily

situations and are so afraid to fail that we think we are losing at life because we have these

specific emotions within us making us feel a certain way. An example of this I can provide is at a

recent tournament of mine, I had just gone dozens and dozens of holes feeling quite calm,

emotionally regulated and focus on the tasks at hand, for the most part. I was coming down the

stretch and hit one particularly poor shot at what I decided was a bad time and everything sped

up, my anxiety crept in and I allowed a normal emotion for me (anxiety) to take over my whole

system instead of simply recognizing that is was there and using it to take a few more seconds

to focus on what I had to do over and over coming in.

Now, obviously this was easy to realize after a quick cry after and a couple days to reflect on

the hardship, but that is not the point.

The point is we have to use these situations as human beings and understand what it is that makes

us tick, what are our own personal emotional habits and what can we do in a healthy way to

use these emotions in a positive way to allow us to find a solution to the roadblock in front of

us.