How to train your heart

All the brightest book publishers and eager marketers of the world couldn’t dream what happened January 12, 2025, at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia. In an NFL wildcard playoff game against the Green Bay Packers, TV cameras captured Eagles star wide receiver A.J. Brown on the sidelines in uniform reading (reading!). What book was more important than watching his opponents or listening to his coaches before the next set of downs? Inner Excellence: Train your mind for extraordinary performance and the best possible life was an obscure, self-published paperback by Jim Murphy, a former minor league baseball player turned mental coach who spent lean years researching a fundamental question: How do athlete who have devoted their entire lives to a single pursuit perform their very best under the ridiculous pressure of the ninth inning of the World Series, a fifth set at Wimbledon, the final run in the Olympics, etc.

The answer is no less than the sum of the book that would sell more than 200,000 copies those next three weeks, rocketing to the top of The New York Times bestseller list and transforming the life of the author who bounced his mortgage payment that month. Turns out, Murphy had also quietly developed a cult following in pro golf, particularly among caddies who thought their bosses got in their own way. Chandler Blanchet, winner of the 2025 Korn Ferry Tour Championship, was gifted a copy of Murphy’s book by veteran pro Joe Durant. “Maybe the biggest difference for me was realizing that everything that happens is here to teach me, and it’s all for my good,” Blanchet says. The ideas go well beyond golf for Blanchet, who organized Murphy to conduct a retreat for him and his wife two weeks before the birth of their first child.

I recently played golf with Murphy, a natural athlete who has warning-track power with long irons and rolls the ball nicely with a sidesaddle putting stroke. If he played 10 times in a season, he’d cut his handicap in half. This was our conversation after the round, edited for concision.

Before we go deep, let’s start with something easy any golfer can do to improve his or her mind-set.

A simple thing is to speak with precision about the past and present tense. For example, don’t say, “I struggle with my driver.” Instead say, “I have in the past struggled with my driver.” Your subconscious is a powerful thing. It’s critical to leave the future, the next shot, open for positive possibilities because that is the truth. We are not defined by our past.

Athletes tend to not talk too loudly about seeing mental coaches. What is it you do for golfers?

Most guys come to me when they’re not playing well. Often their agent or someone from their team thinks I might be able to help them get instant results, better scores, the happiness that comes with those scores. But I’m not about better transactions. I want to enhance someone’s whole life by helping him or her see bigger possibilities, to help them develop a deeper sense of wellbeing and gratitude. If I can help you get more inner peace and inner strength, that’s going to help you in every area of your life, tournament golf included.

You sign NDAs with most of your clients. How may we quantify your presence in pro golf?

I’ve had full-time clients on the PGA Tour, LIV Golf and the LPGA Tour. Most years, I have three to four full-time clients who I talk to weekly and visit in-person on tour every four to five weeks. I follow their rounds closely, watch their interactions with their caddie, and afterward listen to them talk about their focus and what might’ve impacted it, help them get ready for the next day. There are a lot of other pros I just help when I can, junior and collegiate golfers, too.

At the risk of condensing a 300- page book into a few sentences, what is the operating thesis of Inner Excellence applied to golf?

If I were to summarize, the biggest challenge we all face in performance is over-analysis, or having way too many thoughts. Being self-conscious and thinking about results limits our ability to play with freedom. The ego is the part of the mind that always feels threatened, is always comparing and is never satisfied, and it leverages our deepest universal human craving—to feel love and acceptance—to make us uncomfortable standing over a three-foot putt. Every golfer, from amateur to professional, in the back of his or her mind fears looking bad and thus being rejected and missing out on the love and praise we get from good results. Once you understand this, it’s about learning what it takes for you to play with freedom and peace. When someone shanks a shot, you learn quickly what their inner peace is really like.

A recurrent theme of yours is that to play fearless you must first be selfless, which is a way of being that draws from Christianity and Buddhism alike. From which are you borrowing more heavily?

So much of Western culture derives from Eastern culture, but I think Eastern philosophy is much more advanced with non-attachment, humility, impermanence, even yoga. In my research to discover how humans perform their best under the most pressure, I tried to learn as broadly as I could. When I found out that the heart—not the mind—is the key to poise, in golf or in any life-situation, I set about trying to understand how to train the heart. Beyond feeling loved, the heart also yearns to feel a part of something greater than oneself. In exploring that last part, that’s when I leaned very heavily into the Bible as a source.

Pro golfers are a macho crowd. The idea that love is the most powerful force in the universe might come across as pretty mushy stuff to a lot of your clients, no?

For anyone to be a good coach or counselor, you must first connect with people on their level with their language. Whether I’m talking to a suicidal teen, an Olympic baseball player, someone from a foreign country or a person in their 70s, I’m not going to lead with words that might be off-putting to them. If an athlete is a devout Muslim, I’m not going to beat him over the head with a Bible. But to help anybody, it’s all the same things. I want to go much further than just getting someone to think positive; I want to find out what is a person’s greatest dream and their greatest fear. Simply, what’s in that person’s heart? I’m not going to use the L-word until I’m confident a person is ready to use it, too.

How have some of your more articulate clients on the PGA Tour expressed how they feel when they are playing their best—or their worst?

They say very close to the same things—that when they are performing great they feel a mix of calm and focus and relaxedness, almost a sense of time slowing. But a lot of PGA Tour players lack confidence and get self-conscious same as anybody. I had a golfer who was ranked No. 7 in the world who told me he kept experiencing a desire to walk off the course, to quit in the middle of competition, but of course, couldn’t. I impressed on him that he could. I stress using accurate language, and the fact is we always have a choice. I told him to vividly imagine walking off. He would notify an official of his withdrawal, slam his clubs in the trunk of his courtesy car, drive to Chipotle to eat a burrito with his caddie. “Imagine being at Chipotle,” I said. “You can do that if that’s what you want. Or do you want to play the remaining holes, even if you’re well outside the cut line, and maybe learn something that’s going to help you. Ball in a terrible lie with a tree in the way and you don’t want to bother attempting the shot? Remember: Maybe hitting this shot is going to help you win a major someday.”

A caddie of a tour pro you work with told me about a game of yours called “silent par 3.” What’s that?

Yes, I like to play this with clients or encourage them to do it on their own. On a par 3, or maybe all the par 3s, no one talks from when the first person in the group hits a tee shot until the last person pulls their ball out of the cup. You might be amazed at how rich those 10 minutes seem. You’ll work on being present. Some tour pros will say to me, “Are we going to do that thing again where we can’t talk?” as if it’s restrictive. But can they see it as freedom? Rather than make chit-chat, you’re getting permission to let go and just connect with nature and being there. It’s a useful practice to develop awareness of your thoughts. To be great at golf or anything, the feeling you need when you’re alone with your thoughts is the same: to feel spacious, creative, light, free to fail and an excited sense that anything is possible. If you can’t be silent for one hole without thinking it’s stupid, that might be a sign that when the big putt is on the line, you won’t be as good as you could be.

What’s something simple and actionable golfers can do when they get nervous?

The average golfer at rest takes 15 to 18 breaths a minute. The ideal to be relaxed is 5.5. I tell my guys to remember “playoff breath.” Having hung around the tour and watched a lot of playoffs up close, it’s astonishing how you can almost predict who is going to win just by watching their shoulders, chest and stomach on the tee box. Whoever has the deepest breathing patterns has the advantage. A good tool to get there is the double-inhale. Breathe in to fill your lungs to about 90-percent capacity, pause, then inhale again with an extra sniff. As you exhale back through your nose, feel your jaw and facial muscles relax. Another reset trick is to put your face in an icy wet towel. You see baseball players do this in dugouts. Golfers can keep a cooler in the cart or even carry a small insulated pack of ice in their bag.

It’s like you need to shock your mind into slowing down.

Right. Basically, people have way too many breaths and thoughts. Most of us need about two-thirds fewer of both. The only way to reduce thoughts is to simplify your life. Decide what the purpose of your life is, how you want to live, who you want to become, and then orient everything—what you watch, read, do, who you hang out with—toward that purpose. Otherwise, there will always be too many thoughts and distractions bouncing around, which creates anxiety. Your subconscious is so much more powerful than your conscious mind. The latter can handle at most five or six thoughts at a time and the former thousands. When you’re putting, your subconscious mind already knows the perfect pace and path. You just need to get out of the way.

Baseball was your world, first as a player and then as a coach. How did you get into golf?

It happened at a moment when I was really struggling. We are social beings, and the five years I’d spent in relative isolation writing Inner Excellence was catching up with me. I’d spent my life savings and was $90,000 in debt. Without a marketing plan, I was worried the book wouldn’t sell, and Barnes and Noble was about to pull it from the shelves. I’d written it to be a manual for pro athletes I’d train, but no one was going to hire a failure. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, literally spiraling with thoughts that I was going to end up dying in the street. Then I get an email from a person named Jude O’Riley. He’s the caddie of Henrik Stenson, he’s read the book and thinks I might be able to really help his boss. So I fly to Sweden to meet Henrik. We go jogging, sort of interviewing each other as we run. Henrik has such an intense, amazing personality—extremely motivated with a big heart. I ask him what he wants in life, and his answer is a version of what I’ve heard again and again. We all want a life with amazing experiences, enriching relationships, to make a difference in the world and to share that with our family. We hit it off and start working together. Then I get a call from Sean Foley, who has read the book and wants me to meet Hunter Mahan. A few months later, Hunter wins the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship. The next season [2013], Henrik wins the FedEx Cup. Then the calls from PGA Tour players just kept coming.

What’s this about you telling Ted Scott, caddie to Scottie Scheffler, to go to Starbucks with his hair uncombed?

Ha, yes, that’s just an exercise in mastering the ego. Going out in public unafraid to look foolish is healthy for us all, myself included. I’ll go to golf courses as a single and tell the people I get paired with that I’m a PGA Tour coach, without specifying that I’m a mental coach and not a swing coach. Of course, they then see my high-handicap action and get quite curious. Another exercise I do with my elite golfers is a game called “alternate target.” In a practice round, they must hit a ball out-of-bounds, into the center of a pond, maybe even top it, but they can’t tell fans or playing partners they’ve done it on purpose. You’d be amazed how strong this will make a golfer on the inside. By hitting these terrible shots, they overcome the embarrassment of what it would feel like. As Teddie says, who has become a good friend and who I quote in my next book, The Best Possible Life, “In order to hit the greatest shot of your life you have to be willing to hit the worst.”

Your relationship with Ted Scott gives you a direct line to the way Scottie Scheffler thinks. Compare our current World No. 1 to one from the past. While Tiger Woods was playing some of his most dominant golf, it was later revealed his personal life was in fact quite turbulent.

First, Teddie has such a good understanding of human nature, I wasn’t surprised to see Scottie take all his talents and rise to the top after teaming with Teddie. This past year at The Open Championship, Scheffler did that famous interview where he basically said winning doesn’t provide much satisfaction for him beyond a couple of minutes, as he feels more defined by being a good father, a good husband, a good person. He’s so steady and centered in the way he plays, never bothered by a bad lie or bad break. What made Tiger great, besides training so hard all his life, was this incredible ability to get angry and then refocus, get angry and then refocus. He could dial in the moment, shutting out his personal life, shutting out the last bogey, everything. What makes both Scheffler and Woods so good is the same trait shared by all successful athletes and people in business—courage. Most people aren’t willing to face the discomfort of feeling afraid.

An LPGA star was initially reluctant to work with you because she worried she’d grow happy and soft, lay around watching TV and lose her edge. What did you say to convince her otherwise?

This is a common concern. The majority of pro athletes don’t want contentment because they know working harder than everybody else is a key to being great. I asked her, if we reduce your anxiety and give you more joy in life and make you less afraid of failure, you’re going to then decide to take your massive talent and not even try? You really think that’s what you’re going to do? She answered her question.

True that you were once on the verge of buying a bus and committing full-time to the PGA Tour?

It’s true. I sold my house with all my furniture and possessions, save a few books. I’d always wanted a dog, but my travel schedule had precluded it. I had this dream that I’d get a dog, stay in national parks between events and go hiking with my dog. I had it all lined up to purchase Al Unser Jr.’s former motorcoach. Then I heard God say, “Don’t do it.” Then gas prices like doubled. A few months later my sister died, and it was good that I hadn’t done it.

‘If an athlete is a devout Muslim, I’m not going to beat him over the head with a Bible.’

Then the NFL game with A.J. Brown happens and your life changes. In 2025, you attend no pro golf tournaments for the first time in over a decade.

I refer to that day all the time as January 12. This year has been wild. I’ve basically been in a different city every three days doing talks and workshops and conferences. It’s been amazing, but I think I’ll get back to more one-on-one coaching in 2026.

Where do you stand on light to moderate alcohol or drug use with your clients? Does obtaining that sense of well-being artificially, even if not physically detrimental, prevent or delay them getting to the best mental space?

Everybody’s greatest need is for unconditional love, to be fully known and loved by someone very important to you, because then you can be fully free. When not present, this part of the human heart fills the void by chasing more money, more followers, more achievements and better looks to get that love. People desperately desire human connection, and when they don’t get it, they try to get it with other things, like money, food, alcohol, sex— which is temporary connection. These are all distractions.

Speaking of ultimate connection, PGA Tour caddie Brandon Parsons told me a story about you from Scotland. There were train tracks along a hole, and you told everyone in the group to drop their clubs, put their hands toward the sky, close their eyes, and as the train thundered past, pretend it was God’s energy spilling into them.

Imagine how that might feel, right? It relates to this tool I call the “Inner Excellence funnel” where you imagine unlimited abundance pouring into your heart and mind, and it’s all about posture. We want to constantly open ourselves to positivity, and how we stand and walk plays a big role—a lot of studies done by really smart scientists support this. Think how open and strong the posture of Tiger’s fist pump is versus a golfer looking at his shoes after a bogey.

Let’s forget Golf Digest readers and just focus on me. As much as you say one shouldn’t be attached to results, I know I’m going to struggle with that. I like to shoot low scores and to win.

What we love most controls us, and if what you love or want most is out of your control, you’ll be attached to results. How do you take a lollipop away from a little kid without making him cry? Give him a larger lollipop. You need a larger lollipop, my friend. If your lollipop is making birdies and winning—outcomes you don’t have full control over—that’s a stressful way to live. Instead, how about pursuing feeling fully alive and make golf a part of that? That’s the whole candy store.