Executive mindset is everything—and if you’ve ever walked out of a high-stakes presentation feeling like you completely blew it, even when you didn’t, this episode is for you. Executive coach Shayla King sits down with two of her clients, Lynn Mulligan and Scott Bender, to unpack the mindset parallels between golf and corporate leadership. And no, you don’t have to own a single club to get something powerful out of this conversation.
Lynn leads a data governance and strategy team in financial services and has been playing golf since she was eight years old. Scott is a corporate controller and director of finance who literally received golf clubs at birth—and eventually walked away from the game entirely because he was so angry on the course. Sound familiar? Because that arc—love it, grind it, hate it, walk away—is something a lot of female leaders in corporate environments know all too well, just with careers instead of clubs.
What brought both of them back wasn’t a better swing. It was a better mind. This episode is a masterclass in how to stop playing angry—in golf and in life.
What You’ll Learn
- Why your brain defaults to the negative (and the simple trick to redirect it)
- The difference between “I sucked” and “that shot sucked”—and why it changes everything
- How to use an After Action Review to grow faster than your competition
- What anger actually costs you—shot by shot and meeting by meeting
- How to get into flow state more consistently, both on the course and in the boardroom
- Why “two silvers won” beats “two golds lost”—and how to apply that mindset daily
Why Your Brain Keeps Going to the Rattlesnake (And How to Stop It)
Here’s a question: if someone handed you nine puppies and one rattlesnake, what would you be paying attention to?
That’s the neuroscience of automatic negative thoughts—what Shayla calls ANTs. Our brains are hardwired to scan for the threat, the failure, the worst-case scenario. It’s a survival mechanism. The problem is that it plays out constantly in our professional and athletic performance, long after there’s any actual danger.
Lynn described it perfectly with a golf example: you’re standing on the tee, water on the right, trees on the left, and your brain says don’t go right. But the moment you say “don’t,” that’s exactly where your attention goes—and often, where the ball goes. The same thing happens in a big meeting. The moment you’re internally saying don’t mess this up, don’t forget the numbers, don’t seem nervous, you’ve handed your brain the rattlesnake.
The fix isn’t positivity for its own sake. It’s intentional redirection. Give the puppies equal air time. Ask yourself: what’s going right, why am I actually in a great position, what is there to be grateful for in this moment? Your brain doesn’t automatically go there—you have to send it.
Does Anger Mean You Care? (Spoiler: It’s More Complicated Than That)
Scott punched a hole in three golf bags by the time his coach told him he was done if he didn’t stop. He thought the anger was passion. It wasn’t.
“Anger was a way to show that I cared to others,” Scott said, “when the reality is it wasn’t caring at all. It was me being selfish.” He was so focused on his own frustration that he wasn’t actually processing anything useful—he was just performing emotion. And that performance came at a real cost: he eventually quit the game he loved.
What Scott described maps directly onto what happens to corporate leaders. You get the feedback you were dreading, the presentation doesn’t go the way you planned, someone interrupts your big moment—and rather than processing it, you spiral. You tell yourself a story about how you failed everyone, how this was your one shot, how it’s not working. Shayla calls this catastrophizing, and it’s one of the fastest ways to sabotage your own potential.
The shift isn’t about becoming emotionless. It’s about separating your identity from the outcome. As Shayla put it: “My value as a person did not change at all based on that swing or that hole, based on that presentation or that meeting.” Anger is, as Scott now describes it, a parachute—it doesn’t just slow you down in the moment. It drags you backward through every shot, every meeting, every decision that follows.
The After Action Review: The Tool That Grows Leaders Faster Than Anything Else
This is one of the most actionable frameworks in the entire episode, and it’s deceptively simple.
After any high-stakes event—a golf round, a board presentation, a job interview, a difficult conversation—do this:
- Feel sufficiency first. Before you analyze anything, remind yourself that you’re safe. Nothing about your value, your relationships, or your future has fundamentally changed because of this one event. Your brain will not let you be intellectually honest about your failures if it still feels threatened. Safety first.
- What worked? Name it specifically. Not “it was fine”—actually name what went well.
- What didn’t? Be honest here. Not harsh, honest. There’s a difference.
- What do you want to do differently? Pick one thing. Not a laundry list. One thing you can actually control and act on.
Lynn uses this framework in her business world constantly, and she applies the same discipline on the course: pick one thing to work on. Maybe it’s your grip. Maybe it’s keeping your head down on putts. Maybe it’s just engaging with your playing partners more so you get out of your own head.
What makes this work is the safety step. Shayla shared a story about a surgeon client who was convinced she had terrible follow-through—despite the fact that she’d completed a decade of medical school and was in a category of less than 3% of women in her field. That belief wasn’t evidence. It was a story. The After Action Review, done correctly, forces you to look at actual evidence—on both sides.
How to Get Into Flow State (And Stay There Longer)
Every athlete and every high performer knows the feeling: you’re not thinking, you’re just doing. The decisions are instant, the work feels effortless, you lose track of time. That’s flow—and it’s not magic, even if it feels like it.
Both Lynn and Scott described their best rounds of golf as the ones where the mental swirl was completely gone. No swing thoughts crowding the brain. Just tempo, execution, and presence. Scott put it simply: “Tempo, head down, swing through. Boom, boom, boom—it all worked.”
The path to flow isn’t a technique—it’s reps. First, you have reps under pressure: the uncomfortable early stages of learning something new, when everything feels hard and nothing feels natural. Everyone hates this phase. But you have to move through it to reach reps with confidence, where you’ve done the thing enough times in enough situations that your brain can finally relax and let your body do the work.
Lynn used to script every presentation from start to finish. Now someone asks her to present on a topic and she says, “Sure, I’ll wing it.” That’s not carelessness—that’s confidence built from years of reps. The same goes for Shayla writing newsletters: what used to take a week now takes an hour and a half.
The practical implication for leaders? Stop expecting flow to show up before the reps. Volunteer for the uncomfortable assignments. Ask to present. Take on the project that scares you a little. Flow is waiting on the other side of enough practice.
Key Takeaways
- You are in control of your thoughts and your mood. Your brain will default to the rattlesnake. You have to redirect it to the puppies—and give them equal air time.
- Your identity is not tied to this round, this meeting, or this presentation. A bad shot doesn’t make you a bad golfer. A bombed presentation doesn’t make you a bad leader. Separating your identity from the outcome is the foundation of everything else.
- Consistent thoughts create consistent results. Where your brain goes between shots—and between meetings—determines the quality of your next execution. Direct it intentionally.
- Anger is a parachute, not a motivator. It carries you backward from shot to shot and drains you of the mental energy you need for what comes next.
- The After Action Review accelerates your growth. But only when you start from a place of sufficiency. Safety first, then honest assessment.
- Flow comes from reps. You can’t shortcut it. But you can set yourself up for it by showing up, doing the work, and getting enough reps under your belt that your brain finally trusts your body.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does golf improve mindset for corporate leaders? Golf creates a unique mental training ground because there’s so much time between each shot—time your brain can use productively or destructively. Practicing intentional thought redirection on the course builds the same skill you need in high-stakes business situations, where your reaction between events matters just as much as the events themselves.
What is an After Action Review and how do I use it at work? An After Action Review is a structured reflection done after any important event. You start by grounding yourself in safety—reminding yourself your core value is unchanged—then identify what worked, what didn’t, and one specific thing to do differently next time. Picking just one improvement point keeps you focused and prevents the spiral of trying to fix everything at once.
Why do high performers get angry and how can they manage it better? Anger is often a learned response to not knowing how to process frustration or unexpected outcomes. For many high performers, it masquerades as passion or intensity. But anger works like a parachute—it slows momentum and pulls your focus backward to what already happened rather than forward to what you can still influence. Recognizing it as a choice, and finding alternative ways to process frustration, is what changes the pattern.
What is flow state and how do leaders get into it more often? Flow state is the feeling of effortless, fully engaged performance where conscious thought gets out of the way and skill takes over. You reach it most reliably through accumulated reps—first uncomfortable reps that build skill, then confident reps that build trust in that skill. The more you’ve done something under a variety of pressures, the more available flow becomes.
How do you stop catastrophizing after a mistake at work? The key is separating a single outcome from your overall identity and trajectory. Ask yourself: is this actually evidence, or is this a story my brain is telling? Then look at the data on both sides—what’s going wrong and what’s still going right. As Scott demonstrated in his club championship, you can be losing in one area and winning in the aggregate—but only if you allow yourself to look at the full picture rather than the story your brain defaulted to.
🎙️ Listen to the Full Episode
The conversation goes even deeper in the full episode — including real comeback stories from the course, the heart attack story that changed how one executive handles stress, and more on how to build the kind of mind that performs under pressure and actually enjoys the climb.
▶ Listen to this episode of The 5% Club Podcast Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube and wherever you listen.
About Shayla King
Shayla King is an executive performance coach and the founder of Evolve-Career. She works with female leaders and executives in corporate environments — typically at the Director to VP level — who are done with the grind and ready to get to the top without burning out on the way there.
Her coaching is built on four pillars: Results, Relationships, Rituals, and Mindset — because lasting performance and genuine happiness aren’t a trade-off. They’re a strategy.
Shayla is the host of The 5% Club Podcast, where she brings together high performers from sports, business, and beyond to break down what it actually takes to operate at the top of your game. She also offers 1:1 executive coaching, the Performance + Happiness Lab (PH+ Lab), and her leadership program, Land the Leadership Role.
📍 Learn more at shaylaking.com
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