Patrick Smith
Cheyenne Woods has launched a new podcast, Real Game, where she talks to professional athletes about the mental game. In the first episode, Woods introduces herself and her interest in the mental aspect of professional sports. After graduating from Wake Forest University, Woods turned pro and went to Europe to play on the Ladies European Tour. As a young pro, she asked herself, “What’s the difference from where I am now to where I want to be?” She realized the answer was her mental game.
“How do you differentiate bettering your own game, versus thinking you have to completely change into a different player?” Woods ponders in the episode. “That’s something I just couldn’t figure out. It got so bad to the point that I was putting so much pressure on results, and trying to be a player that I thought I was supposed to be, I developed a really severe performance anxiety that came out in the form of yips.”
Woods had the added pressure of being Tiger Woods’ niece. She talks about how there are obvious advantages to being a Woods in golf, but there are expectations attached to it, too.
Her yips manifested in her putting. She thinks it started in Hawaii, where she missed a tap-in to miss the cut by one stroke. After that, she didn’t feel OK within five feet of the cup. Her heart would race; she couldn’t feel her hands.
“I’d be marking a 6-inch putt because I don’t trust myself to tap it in. I would miss it. I would not hit the hole. It was embarrassing,” she said, getting emotional while talking about it.
She tried everything: putting with her eyes closed, putting while looking at the hole, putting cross-handed. She talked to sports psychologists. Nothing worked. So she went to therapy to find a way through the anxiety.
“We were able to work through each situation that would give me these feelings,” Woods said on the podcast. “And I would have to train my brain to dissociate the negativity with those experiences. It took a while to really retrain and rewire my nervous system to not be triggered by the golf course.”
They went through each scenario that would cause anxiety, from pulling into the parking lot, to standing over a putt.
Eventually, she was able to feel good on the golf course again. She spent a decade playing professionally, and won once on the Ladies European Tour. Now, Woods is no longer playing competitively. She and her husband, former major league baseball player Aaron Hicks, have two young children.
“When I was at my lowest lows, I felt so vulnerable and I felt so fake, trying to pretend like everything was fine,” Woods said. “If I had just opened up and talked about it, I probably would’ve learned that the player next ot me has experienced it, too.”
That’s why she started this podcast: to talk to athletes about the times in their careers when they have felt vulnerable, and how they were able to train their minds to be able to get back to competing how they know they can.
Throughout the podcast’s first season, Woods will talk to athletes from different sports. Her first guest is Brian Urlacher, and new episodes will drop every other week. You can find Real Game on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
