Lawrie Montague The World’s Best Golf Coach

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Andrew McCombe:
Hi there. I’m Andrew McCombe and welcome to Outlier. In this week’s episode, I’m in Jakarta, Indonesia, where I’m going to be speaking to Lawrie Montague. He’s one of the world’s best performance coaches. Well, guys, Lawrie has so much to share when it comes to human potential and performance. So let’s go and meet him. Lawrie Montague. Welcome to Outlier.

Lawrie Montague:

Thanks Andrew.

Andrew McCombe:

We’re in the middle of Jakarta and the Bogor Highlands here. Beautiful place. But not normal. And you’re the one on the world’s best golf coaches. How did you end up here?

Lawrie Montague:

Long story short, that’s a long story. We’re five years into this, my business partner and I, David Milne, some ten years ago had a conversation one night where we talked about if we could do golf coaching from a coaching experience, again, all over, what would we do differently? And so we talked at length about what he’d learned over the years. If he was going to do it again, what would he do differently?

And I did the same thing. And we came to this conclusion that we could have a clean slate, start again with a new Academy that focused more on developing holistically, developing a lot more skills because we found that the one common denominator in the golf instruction industry is that it is very focused towards swing technique, which you can understand whit average players. That they’re not hitting the ball well, and they want to play better.

So, of course, it’s going to be directed more towards getting people to hit the ball better, but elite players, that is, golfers that are representing the state or province or territory or even representing at the national level. And of course, professional players as well. We found that the focus was still so much on that, that the indoctrination of this way of thinking, and this swing focus from a very young age make it very hard for them to escape it. So when they’re not playing well, they continually go back to, “I’m broken in some way, I need to fix my golf swing.”

And we said, “well, what if we had a different approach? What if we looked at all the skills that weren’t being focused on that actually have a huge impact on the way someone performs?

And so over the course of six months of preparation, building websites and all the things that you need to, I then made a move from the gold coast in Queensland, Australia to Perth, where Dave had been based for a long time.

Originally he was from Singapore, and he moved there in the early eighties. And I’ve known David since the years I played on the pro tour. When I played in Perth, played the tournament’s over there, David a club pro there. And so we got to know one another, and over the years I’d be back there and catch up a bit, and we grew closer and closer. Then we’d make some international trips together. We worked well together, but we’re very different, but we figured that would work as well.

I moved across there. We set up this what’s called pro tour golf college. And we started building the program and testing our theories, with the students, based on the idea that what we would ultimately do is we would not be there. We would be in Asia some way. We saw the future was being Asia, we saw ten years ago, we saw that the center of the universe was going to be Asia for golf.

Koreans were already great Japanese who were already great players. The Indian tour. And they were growing ties, and we thought we’ve got to be more there. So over four years in Australia, in Perth, we developed the systems, fine-tuned them. And then we presented a proposal to the Indonesian golf association, to the chairman and his board.

They liked what they heard. Now, we didn’t get an initial response, but they liked what they heard. And then to cut a long story short, we got to do that, and we’ve done that for five years, and we’re moving to a second five-year phase now. Dave decided to focus a little more on going back to Perth. And he’s coaching a really good club there because he wants to be with his family. He’s got grand kids and a whole lot of things.

I’ve just had my wife, Susie and myself, so I was going to stay on and go into this next phase of the program, which is to expand. We’ve been pretty much Jakarta centric. And now, we expanded throughout Indonesia. That’s the plan, big challenges, of course.

Andrew McCombe:
But you are coaching the Indonesian golf team?

Lawrie Montague:
Yeah. We both coaching the team, preparing them over time, and I’ll continue to do that until such times as they want to change that situation.

Andrew McCombe:
And so obviously it didn’t start here. It started earlier than that. You didn’t just become a world-class golf coach. How does it begin?

Lawrie Montague:
I’ve nearly been 30 years doing. Elite level coaching, literally coaching Very good players. I started as a national coach in Australia in 1992, 29 years ago. So I’ve been coaching at an elite level for that long. And one of the really great breaks for me early in the piece was, firstly, I was coaching at camps and things and getting known to people and supporting the local junior camps. We’d have summer camps in Sydney around Christmas time.

So I was doing those and got to know Ross Herbert, who was at the time working at the Rothman’s Foundation, running all the programs for the new South Wales golf association and through my support of that program, And Ross getting to know me, Ross was moving on from Rothman’s foundation to being the first AIS golf coach.

Stratton Institute of sports. So he moved into that role, and I applied for the Rothman’s job. And because I’d been really supporting the program. I think up to that point in time, probably ten years in a row just doing the camps and doing whatever else I could do. I got the position with Rothman’s Foundation, which was a national position where at the time, Rothman’s company was well into the sport. They’re into motor racing, all sorts of things.

So I was running the golf division, and we had other sports, the athletics, you name it. And they were all in one place in Kent street in Sydney. And the cool thing for me was as a fledgling coach, if you like, working with elite players, I knew practically nothing. I was a good player when I played professionally, but I didn’t really know how to get people to be better at what they did.

But I was in this very fortunate position where I was in an office with senior coaches, my age now, or older, who’d been coaching in their craft for 30 years. And they started introducing me to a whole range of things that I just had never been exposed to before, predominantly around sports science. And I realized in those early days that this was very different for golf because I was attending conferences. It was still mostly about swing, you know, this guy’s theory versus the next guy’s theory and studying swings.

I thought I’m working with these elite players now, and they swing the club pretty good, Andrew, you know, they are hitting the ball Good. I can’t really do a lot with that. How do I make them better? And so that was the key question.

So the coaches at our weekly coach meetings, we’d sit around, and they say, “how can we help you?” And some of them knew a bit about golf. And I said, “I really don’t know the first thing about how to improve someone.” So they introduced me to some books that were extremely helpful at the beginning.

When you went through your sports science degree, the theory and methodology of training would have been one of your texts for sure. I learned about periodization. I needed to understand how to take a calendar year, look at the schedule of tournaments, and then learn how to break it down and then learn from that place how to insert all factors involved in performance improvement.

I still have that book, and I still read it almost every day, along with a whole lot of others. It was that initial time; I was so fortunate that those guys took me under their wing, and they genuinely wanted to help me to be a better coach. And so I moved from being this golf teacher role of standing on at one-on-one, even though I was doing a lot of that at the time, to this idea of this holistic approach.

There are so many more factors involved in developing the human.

From that position, from that place, with the Rothman’s Foundation, or then I became one of the youngest national coaches in Australia.

Andrew McCombe:
So you coached the Australian Women’s team?

Lawrie Montague:
Yeah. From 92, nearly 93 to 98. I traveled to a bunch of world championships with them, worked with them. I worked with them when Karrie Webb was still a junior player in the side and stuff.

So I saw firsthand young players that went on, in her case, legends status, she became one of the most famous golfers of all time. But I worked with a lot of guys too at national, I get AIS camps and so on. I was really getting thrown into the deep end, working with elite talent, elite golf talent.

Andrew McCombe:
Just before you go on with that, you were also a professional player, right? So obviously you had a path going in one direction at one point. Why did you change to coaching?

Lawrie Montague:
It’s a great question. Like so many people, I just wasn’t good enough. And it bugged the hell out of me. But in a strange way, I wasn’t good enough. I had a modicum of success. I got better, but I didn’t know why I was getting better. I was practicing a lot like everyone else. And when I’m practicing in the range, and I’m next to successful players, I couldn’t see really a lot of difference. if I was playing in big events, I might be next to a world-class player. And I’m watching them hit the ball, and I’m like, “well, I hit it good.” But I walk in off the golf course in these scores alone. As a professional, one of the first things you learn is that, when you look up the leader board at a tournament when you arrive at a tournament, it could be round one, but you got a one o’clock t off.

You might arrive at 10. There’s probably already 64 on the board or 65. And, “okay, welcome to this world.” It’s a scoring world. A lot of golf performance is, bottom line, is about the score. But here’s the interesting thing about that. As I moved into the coaching role, I kept getting feedback from different sources in and around golf, saying, “stop, focusing on the score.” And I was a bit confused and going, “well, how does one get better If you don’t focus on the score?” What I learned from the coaches at the Rothman’s Foundation was score is Everything, that they measure times swinging or running around a track or whatever it happens to be. There’s a whole lot of measurement. As you get deeper into sports science, you realize there are a lot of measures that you have to look for. It is performance markers if you will.

So I kept bumping into this stuff, and I’ve gone, “what’s that all about?” It was this thing about the early days that some of the sports psychologists early had suggested that having an outcome focus was not very helpful, which is fair enough. But the people who were saying this didn’t understand what they were really saying, because, at the end of the day, you can’t get someone better at the game If you don’t have a score focus. And to this day, the interesting thing about Dave and my program is that it was completely score focused. So we were a golf scoring school, not a golf swing school, of which there are many.

Andrew McCombe:
You’re using score as a benchmark to aspire to in your training process. Is that right?

Lawrie Montague:
Yeah. Actually we want the players to believe in their heart of hearts, that they can shoot 64, but to do that, they’re going to go through a process that leads to that 64 or whatever score it leads to, but that they had to build the confidence to stand on the first team, knowing that it’s very possible that that could happen, that if they got themselves into a position where they’re five, six, seven under for the day that they actually embrace that place. And just go deeper. And so I had the experience through that process of working with a young Korean golfers. I worked with a few Korean golfers that ended up successful on the ladies pro tour. And I started them with as juniors and I’ll work through this process that I’d been influenced by, by the coaches from the Rothman’s Foundation. And early days, there was a girl by the name Gloria Park. I coached her when I was in new South Wales, she got to the LPGA tour and won on the tour. And then later on, a girl, who’s now one of the top players in the world, Amy Yang. And she was one of the early breakthroughs for me in understanding that this type of process could net great results. because Amy won the Australian lady’s master, she got an invite as an amateur as a 16 year old and went out and won, beat all the pros.

When the press started to interview me about, because Amy didn’t speak much English, So I had to take care of a lot of the press, they would say, “how do you get a 16 year old to win a tournament?” Well, it wasn’t long after that. Lydia Ko started to do the same thing in New Zealand. And now it’s a more regular thing to see. But the point was that there was this process in place that was leading to low score development. That’s what I felt was a different path that I was on moving away from that technique of swing development path. All these different performance markers are involved that you look at to help drive scores, which, to this day, makes us quite unique still.

Andrew McCombe:
Where’d you come from originally, like back in the day?

Lawrie Montague:
Really early in the day I grew up on the central coast in the New South Wales, went to school there, just into high school and then moved to the Mid North coast, finished my high school there and then moved to Sydney and trained as a golf professional, at the Australian golf club in Sydney.

Andrew McCombe:
So that’s important to me, the reason I asked that question for all the Outliers that are out there and the young entrepreneurs, etc etc. Central coast of Australia, for those that don’t know, isn’t very populated. It’s a long way out of anywhere. Not so much nowadays because it’s the cities But I guess why I’m asking the question is you’ve gone from there to here. That’s one of the best coaches in the world running a whole organization, general manager of the Indonesian golf team, I guess, is that how you’d put it?

Lawrie Montague:
Basically the foundation is that it supports all of this, and that’s the new role.

Andrew McCombe:
I just want to, in your journey, highlight, you don’t have to start from anywhere, do you?

Lawrie Montague:
My dad was a bricklayer; my mum was pretty much stay-at-home. Money was tight, So she’d go out and work at times, doing all sorts of things. So there was always more month at the end of the money, right. I had this motivation to get good at this. I used to surf, I still love surfing, but I had to make a decision. I was playing a lot of rugby. I was surfing. And then I was playing golf, and it got to a stage where I had to make a decision, and it turned out to be golf. It’s an interesting story.

I was 17 years old, and I was at the summer camp that I ended up teaching at. The club that I was playing at the time Foster golf club, which is the Mid North Coast of New South Wales. I was a junior member there. I was the current junior champion. And they paid for me to go to Sydney to attend that camp for a week. A lot of golfers in Australia start from the country areas. They will come to the city, and they get some coaching for the first time. They get some serious coaching with some good pros. One morning, at daybreak, I was at the park down at the bottom of Narrow Bay, where the sports areas are.

I was down hitting golf balls. And one of the pros was out having an early morning stroll and he stopped and he said, “what are you doing?” I said, “well, you know, I’m getting some practice.” And everyone was still asleep in their rooms. He said, “why?” I said, “well, I want to be a pro.” And he asked me a few questions about that. And he said, “well, I might be able to help you.” The guy’s name was Mel Wilson, and Mel was finishing his training at the Australian golf club. And he said, “I’ll contact Darryl, my boss, who’s the head professional here and see if you can get an interview.” And that came out of the blue. But think about it. I was standing down there on my own practicing, we had big garbage bins full of bowls.

And I was just practicing as I normally would do. I was the only person there apart from Mel having a walk pass. But isn’t it interesting? The irony of that situation is that he happened to be walking by at that time. And one thing led to another, and I got the job there as a trainee professional at one of the top clubs in Australia. This poor kid from the bush, but the club had sent me down. And so it’s one of those things we’ve talked about so many times where things happen. How do I get from being from there to there? That’s how it happened. The bridge was literally that moment when I was down there practicing on my own. I didn’t expect anybody to be around.

I just wanted to get something before breakfast. Breakfast was like eight, seven 30, and I wanted to get some practicing in before that because there’s a bit of a scramble for bowls when all the guys are down there. And I trained at the Australian golf club and a bit of time at a couple of other clubs, got through my training and got better. Although there were some challenges along the way, I had to change some technique, and I struggled like crazy with that because I was so used to doing it my way without much coaching. And then all of a sudden I’ve got to do it a different way. And so scores went higher.

Andrew McCombe:
So you went from the Australian golf club as a junior pro, you obviously qualified as a pro, you played professionally, you then converted to coaching. Then you had the Rothman’s Foundation, then you moved to the Australian women’s team. And then what happened?

Lawrie Montague:
And the state team, as well as, I was coaching the state women’s team and the state junior boys team all at the same time. I had a ton of coaching going on. My big challenge was getting people to get better. And so I kept thinking about why I wasn’t good enough. I kept reflecting back on while I was practicing a lot. I was practicing a lot. But I didn’t understand the process of how you actually get better. How is it that some of those guys on the range were shooting all these scores, what were they doing differently? I’d been playing with them, I played with some world-class players, and I’d be taking note Of what they were doing. But somehow, and in some way, they were getting to a lower score, lower than I was getting.

Andrew McCombe:
Some examples of the players?

Lawrie Montague:
I didn’t actually get to play with Norman if I played plenty of times in and around, and he was at the height of his power. He was number one in the world. I remember at New Zealand Open where I was drawn, Curtis Stranger standing over here. It was just before winning US Open twice, two years in a row. I was in and around players, played with a lot of good Australian players. But the thing was, I was just doing a lot of hard practice for hours. But I couldn’t stitch it together. And it was my curiosity and understanding of what I needed to do. I like to read a lot. And I still do to this day, lots and lots and lots of books.

Andrew McCombe:
The biggest library I’ve ever seen. Well, similar to mine, I guess I’m a Kindle, but yours is massive, isn’t it?

Lawrie Montague:
It’s physical library, got to think about how I’m going to get rid of that. It’s massive and then all my online stuff. Which I continue to do because one thing I realized, I’m not very smart. I left school early, but because of my curiosity and because I want to get better, I just study things, and I teach myself how to understand whatever it is that I need to understand, to make progress that way. When I was a kid, Andrew, I was dyslexic. So I had a real learning challenge. When I used to read things, and I write things, I’d write them backwards. And I don’t remember who helped me to get out of that, but I was learning challenged.

So school was tough for me. And there are a lot of Outliers that actually have had learning challenges. I found that reading was one of the greatest gifts that I ever got, that when I could read, I should read a lot because I didn’t consider myself very smart, but through reading a lot, and reading a lot of different things. And I’ll explain as we go along about some of the mentors that came into my life that guided me in a totally different direction. Actually, I have a mention one. My very good friend who I’ve known now for a long time. Who’s my first mentor. When I moved to Sydney to coach 30 years ago, John Hugo, and John said, “Lawrie one of the first bits of advice I want to give you as a very successful businessman, when they go that way you go that way.” That’s the first thing he said to me, “do not go with the crowd, whatever they are reading, find something else to read, find something different. You will see in your industry, as you move along, that they’ll all have a trend towards..They get excited about the same things. I want you over there, focusing on different things.” What that actually helped me to understand was, my role in the Rothman’s company, And then working with these other coaches, they were thinking about it differently. And it was performance based. It was much more about the school, but how to be a faster swimmer, how to run faster or run further, and so on. Through John’s great early guidance,

When I moved to Sydney to do all of this coaching, I was coaching the national team and state teams and I was coaching at three driving ranges all at the same time. So it was crazy amount of work, driving around all over the place, then flying. And then reading as much. And in those days without online, I was carrying books, bags full of books, and that’s what I do at night. I’d sit there in the room after working and I would just read, textbooks, things I didn’t know about these.

Andrew McCombe:
Did you have to drive for this or was it just a night happening at the time or you just decided..

Lawrie Montague:
I had to drive to get better and know more. And know more about why at the time, why I couldn’t get better. And then that turned into, “how do I get someone else to get better?” Through just reading enormous amount of stuff outside of sports, business, the areas that I focused on in those days with business, a lot of business, because John encouraged me to read a lot of business books. I’d read business. I was reading golf instruction books still, but moving away, I read a lot. My library actually goes back 140 years. So I’ve got books that I’ve read going way back to the first books published. But then I got into the military. I started to study the military because I wanted to understand, they are training people, and they’ve got a record of thousands of years of training people. So there’s this massive wealth of knowledge about how they get people to be better. So I went through this period of studying special forces and seal teams and SIS.

And I would study that. At the same time, I’ve got bumpers book over here, you know, studying that. And I suddenly look at it, and I’m seeing all of these conclusions that were similar about getting people to get better. That went on for a long period of time, but it went in trends, particular directions, and I’m going this direction. And then there’d be some reference to another book and not stop there. It’s like a tree of life, if you will, a tree of knowledge. And was just going along all these branches. Eventually, it led to me to Western philosophy versus Eastern philosophy. I started to study martial arts because I wanted to know that there’s an ancient art, way of training. When you look at it from say Japanese or Korean or Chinese, and you see the very early forms of how martial arts and military training or altogether intertwined, I started to read that as well.

So I was looking at what were the ancients doing? And to this day, I’m sitting here still reading those books, books on samurais, techniques, you name it. This tree just keeps going and going and going. There’s just no end to it. And I’m caught in it. I can’t escape it now. I got interviewed last week for something and Terry, a friend of mine, who you’ll meet, Terry said, “uh, I’ve never known, whenever I went to your place, It would always be 20 books piled up beside your chair, that you’re reading, currently reading all this stuff.” And I said, “man, I’m sitting on my bed having this interview with you, just finished training. And I’ve got 18 books sitting beside my bed.” So I haven’t escaped it.

But point being, the drive has always been to know more. I realized how I knew so little. I know so little. I wake up every day with the beginner’s mind, at the white belt every day, I wake up with a white belt. I actually feel embarrassed if someone tells me I’m good at something, I don’t see myself. I see myself as someone who just genuinely wants to get up every day and learn more.

Andrew McCombe:
So Lawrie, it sounds to me like humility is extremely important to you.

Lawrie Montague:
I think it is. And I’ll tell you why I think it is. I’ve met a lot of pretty successful people in my life, Andrew, through golf. I’ve met heads of state and very famous people. One day, just a quick story, I’m a trainee pro at the Australian golf club. It’s late in the day, probably an hour before sunset. And this old man turns up with an entourage. And my boss, Darryl, was just leaving for the day. He said, “Lawrie, I want you to take care of this.” So I go out to the golf cart, and I sit down, and the old man sits beside me. And his entourage stayed up. He said, “you gotta stay here. I’ll go down with a bucket of balls.” He’s going to hit some balls on the range. It was Bob Hope. Here am I at the time, I’m 18 years old. And I used to watch Bob Hope movies all the time. So huge star in Hollywood, there are just Bob hope and me, sitting on the driving range. And he said, “you just sit in the cart.” And I’m watching Bob Hope hit golf balls. And just two of us, no one else around.

Andrew McCombe:
Fascinating. Isn’t it? Would you say synergy and humility kind of work together. Cause that’s another synergistic moment in your life that he happens to be there at the time you’re there.

Lawrie Montague:
I’ve had a bunch of those throughout my life, Andrew. I wanted to mention this one, when I finished training as a professional, I got no money. This was after Bob Hope; I finished my training. So I go back to my hometown. And I get a job; Peter Craig was the head pro there. And we just built a new course on intern Carey. I became the pro under Peter, the assistant pro. And I spent lots of quiet days there because there are no golfers, it’s brand new, no one even knows about it. So I’m sitting there, and I’m thinking about going and practice, there’s no one around. There wasn’t much grass around; the course was being laid out.

I’d be hitting balls off the sand. So I’m practicing. Anyway, one day, there was always, someone would drive up this dirt road and come and play the short course, 13 holes. So this guy turns up, and I’m sitting behind the counter, and he asked me a couple of questions, and I don’t know how this relates to it, but it is strange. That morning, the greenkeepers would read the newspaper and leave it there for whoever came in the day. And it’s an old house. I think it’s still a house there, I haven’t been there for years, but the little house, it was a two story house was the clubhouse.

I was reading the sports section. I read the stars, and then stars said, I’m an Aquarian. I’m reading the stars and, and they said something like, “something that you really want is going to happen to you. It’s going to open the doors up for lots of things.” One of those nice positive messages. And I left it at that. Anyway, not that long later, this guy turns up, and he said, “can I have a lesson?” And I was doing a few lessons then, but not many. And I said, “sure.” So I go down to the practice, watching him hit some golf shots. And I’m like 20 years old, 21, maybe just qualified. And I’m watching this guy hit balls. And he says, “what are you doing here?”

And I go, “well, I’m here to save money so I can go out and play on the pro tour.” And he asked a few more questions. And he said, “how much would you need to do that?” And I went, “about X amount.” And he said, “maybe I can help you. You seem like a reasonable fellow.” Anyway, John Darling turned out to be one of these moments in my life.

Andrew McCombe:
So this guy is John Darling?

Lawrie Montague:
Yes, and John Darling had an interesting story as well. He helped his best friend. John had won a small lottery. He’s a geologist working in new Guinea, prospecting for gold. This is the story, John told to me years ago. He said, “my friend is living in a mining house that he wanted to buy. He’s got a family. He married a local lady up there and he was going to lose the house.”

He didn’t have the money. And John said, “I’ll lend you the money, no problem.” In return, John got shares in his friend’s mine. And long story short, that mine ended up becoming one of the, one of the great mines there. And on the stock exchange, it came out in New Guinea Gold, shares that John got went through the roof. And at one stage, when he would travel with me to some of the tournaments, caddying for me. “I know,” he said, “Lawrie, the shares were at $16.” So he became wealthy through his generosity, through his friend, and then he was being generous to me and helping me out. So he sponsored me to play and discover whether that was going to be what I needed to do. But you see how it just, again, one of those moments out of the blue. That was the second time because the first time was when I was practicing on my own, then the pro gets me to the club. This is the second time. Now I can get onto the tour. The third time when I became the coach…

And I’ve always believed that. And more so since those things have happened, but John Hugo has always been there for me, even though I don’t speak to him as much Now, he lives in Sydney. he’s always there for me. He was like a father figure for me and gave me enormous advice, helped me out in so many ways. And I think that that’s critical as well: you have someone you can bounce ideas off, or when you’re troubled by things, you need the old head with experience and wisdom. And John is just full of wisdom and experience.

Andrew McCombe:
speaking about that, mate, you’ve got this facility here. Obviously, it looks a bit industrial. It wasn’t even there in the first place. I want to talk to you about a little bit about that journey and then back to wisdom, how that then transfers to the young students you’ve gotten there, and the results they’re getting.

Lawrie Montague:
Sure. When Dave and I arrived here in Indonesia, we were actually working at the opposite end of this driving range down there. Just running some camps and things, but we thought, “this could be the spot.” it’s just out of Jakarta. It’s going against traffic in the morning. So all those things were good ideas. This seemed like a good idea. And this T area that we’re on was already here, but the green wasn’t, and the general manager at the time build a grain. We thought, “this could be the ideal place.” We needed obviously funding for that, which we pitched to the Indonesian golf association about helping them develop a national program from nothing.

Andrew McCombe:
Had you seen this place before you put the proposal forward? Y.

Lawrie Montague:
Yeah. We ran a few camps here. So we knew that this was a good location. I mean, knowing the clubs in the area, but that this was a good location for it because thinking about it, you need space. You’re coaching players, and so on, you need space, and you need privacy. The other thing is, we didn’t want to be with the public because if we got to build a program, we don’t need the public in and around us. There’s plenty of places for the public to practice.

Andrew McCombe:
It’s interesting that ,Lawrie, you had a vision of what you wanted to do, but you didn’t just go out anywhere and make it happen. You actually took some time about it.

Lawrie Montague:
We had to go through and get a (swab) analysis; whoever we were going to present to, we couldn’t just say, “we want money, and we’re good.” they didn’t know who we were. But we went through it; it was a detailed proposal that took two hours. And the chairman, who’s a very successful businessman, appreciated that we’d gone to that trouble. He said, “that makes you very different from the normal golf pro, who would just say, I want a job, put your hand up and get a job. You’ve pitched an idea. And that it’s a big idea.” It’s a 10-year longterm plan that Dave and I both believe in. As you know, it’s about, you’ve got to look at these things long term, but it’s not always easy to do. So put it down on paper. And one thing led to another, and it led to this. There’s functional, and there’s fancy. I’ve been to a lot of golf academies worldwide, and I’ve seen five stars; And we’re not fancy. We’re all about function. With the help of one of the directors of the company that was set up to assist us to be on the ground here, we went for containers, put them all together, and created a very functional place. (Andrew: It is for containers with a roof.) Yeah, absolutely. We had rain this morning, heavy rain and the guys were able to practice in it. It’s the only time they do. We like to practice on the grass.

Andrew McCombe:
the viewers can’t see it, but it’s one of the longest grass driving ranges I’ve ever seen.

Lawrie Montague:
it’s about 75 meters long and about 20 meters wide. So it’s quite a lot of grass downhill and uphill. But the whole idea was to come here and build a national program. Something that they didn’t have. Golf’s not one of the sports here. The big sport here is badminton, and they’re very good at it. So they have a world-class focus on badminton. They’ve got great players. They’ve had many but not golf. Golf was pretty much driving ranges, rubber mats, hitting from undercover. We stand outside for five hours in the sun and driving them hard.

Andrew McCombe:
To me, that’s your point of differences. You talk about functional, not fancy, but I also see you’re like a golf whisperer compared to a golf teacher, right? You look at the game and the person so differently to other instructors, I’ve seen. And obviously with my background in golf, golf university, et cetera.

Lawrie Montague:
Yeah. We have more experience with that. I know a lot of pros, my friends over the years, but I would probably fit into that classic introverted profile where I spent a lot of time on my own. I like it, my own time.

Andrew McCombe:
Having said that you spend many hours a week with people, right?

Lawrie Montague:
I do. Yeah. So I help people. And then I’m happy to go and switch off and put my headphones in and go read books and work on programs. Quite happy to do that for hours on end, without anybody being around.

Andrew McCombe:
I understand that. Cause I know you, so not only you’re doing something different here, off the bat, it’s a new vision. It’s a new way of golf development for a nation. But then it’s not just about that. The way you coach people as not normal. Do you want to explain a little bit more about that? You may not even realize that, but…

Lawrie Montague:
firstly from a golf point of view, I don’t look at the swing and say, “I need to fix something that’s broken here.” I just don’t see it that way. I listen to what the person says, how they describe their experience of what golf is to them, ask some clever questions that might stump them a little bit.

Andrew McCombe:
Do they think they came for a golf lesson?

Lawrie Montague:
Before I worked in this situation, when I was running my golf school; I’d do some private lessons; I got more and more out of doing private one-on-one. Our golf school model was what we like to do prior to me working with Dave, I had a successful golf school business that I set up in 94, and we would travel with groups to New Zealand, North and South Island, Gulf Harbor in the North and Queenstown in the South at Millbrook. I would Spend five days with people and do the golf school thing, which is just a much better model. And I did that all the way up to moving across with Dave and setting up this program. So I liked the idea of working with groups, not one-on-one.

Andrew McCombe:
Why is that?

Lawrie Montague:
Basically it fits the situation better. One-on-one there’s not a lot of leverage work. I mean, I’d have to charge. John told me, my mentor told me many, many years before, “you’ve got to get out of that habit of trading time for money, just stop doing it. You have to find a way to generate leverage.” And the best way is with groups, you know, a group of people paying X amount, not as much as they would pay one on one, but it would make a lot more. So when I was running golf schools on the gold coast, before I moved to Perth, what I could generate in a week from a golf school compared to someone standing on the range, giving one lesson, was probably in the vicinity of five times as much for less hours. from the very early stages, this is important. I stopped seeing myself as golf professional. I saw myself as someone who was reasonably skilled at the game, but I was in the business of developing golfers, but not as a golf teacher, per se.

Andrew McCombe:
So is it a system, is it a methodology or is it even a mindset? Is that the difference?

Lawrie Montague:
It’s all of those things. It’s certainly a system. I found that the best way to help people to get to where they want to get to is help to define the path for them initially. If they’re learning something that they’ve never learned before, give them a structure that they can learn and make it reasonably simple, don’t make it complex. One of the things I learned from Brian Tracy many years ago at one of the seminars, famous Canadian speaker is – he talked about this low of complexity where if you’ve got a level of information and he talks about one square equals one, if you can focus on one core thought, it’s easy to do, easy to work on and easy to do. Two core thoughts, He says, “it’s squaring upon itself. So it becomes a level four of complexity. And three things to focus on would be level nine of complexity. So it’s squaring upon itself.” I’ve always been influenced to keep things simple, but to define it very clearly. I think that’s important. from a system point of view, create simple systems that people can follow. From those places, They can then discover where they want to go to. in an algorithm sense, it might be going A to B, B to C, C to D, and back to the beginning again, but they can always expand that loop and bring an E to it and an F and a G to it and so on. Which is what you do in a lot of learning if you’re learning music or anything, you start with some basic cords and you learn from it.

Andrew McCombe:
And so from a business sense, that’s where the leverage came in. You started creating information products, a lot of video based stuff for learning.

Lawrie Montague:
I did. And I did one interesting thing back in the early days of golf lessons on YouTube, 10 or plus years ago when I did a whole bunch of videos. part of my studies over the years had been hypnosis and NLP, but particularly the hypnosis side – what I did is I embedded a lot of stuff into the content of my presentations on YouTube. And I think at this stage over the 10 years we’ve had nearly 7 million views. With no real marketing doing it. But, but clearly people found the message that was consistent, it was simple to understand, simple to do. And I think that’s important. being someone who struggled, maybe the reason I’m like that is because I struggled so much with the learning in the early days.

Andrew McCombe:
So it’s really interesting. You talk about systems and you talk about simplification of systems. But for the Outliers that are out there who are trying to fit into a system that ain’t simple, that doesn’t work for them. What would you say to them?

Lawrie Montague:
this is where your own personal education comes in. You got to read the books, watch the videos, listen to the audios, you got to find what other people are doing with their systems. my mind’s been a case of just basically creating the vehicle in the background. that’s made up of junkyard parts. I’ve got this car that drives around really well, but it’s made up of cars out of the car park, out of the junkyard.

Andrew McCombe:
So you’ve taken bits from everyone else and made it your own.

Lawrie Montague:
All sorts of bits, the pieces to find my own systems that have been tested and trialed enough times to see what works in most cases, not in every case, I would never suggest that it does because then it is too much like a methodology that doesn’t have any flexibility about it.

Andrew McCombe:
Well, it’s interesting that you had dyslexia, you struggled with learning and yet learning has become one of the biggest support tools for you to get where you needed to go. And it’s also helped your students because you’ve had to simplify it for yourself to understand it, that then allowed you to do it for the students. So isn’t that incredible that one of your biggest challenges is actually become one of your biggest strengths?

Lawrie Montague:
I would say So. that hasn’t been easy at any stage of the journey thus far. but I go out of my way to make sure that someone understands what it is I’m saying to them. I just don’t want to speak for the sake of it, to hear my own voice. I once was accused of that I don’t waste words. that’s the truth. I go out of my way, Andrew, to make sure that someone does understand what I’m saying. And when I say understand, I mean, they truly understand I’m not going to walk away if they don’t understand it, which means sometimes they’re going to hear the message again and again, but maybe I’m going to change the message. I have to be the flexible one, because if my message is not being understood, it’s not their problem. That’s important. It’s my problem. So for an entrepreneurial, someone building a business, they’re going to understand that if they think that they’ve got the right system and that they’ve just got to sell it, it’s probably wrong. That the fact of the matter is it’s always going to be flexible. If it’s so systematic that it doesn’t change, then yeah. You’ll get a few people will fit in the cookie cutter approach, but you won’t get everybody. the bottom line is successful Entrepreneurs tend to be people who have built a system that is flexible enough because they can actually attract more people. You’ve got some of your friends that own ski schools and things like this that you’ve actually interviewed that started with one and ended up with a lot of instructors, a lot of people coming through their businesses. Well, you have to have a level of flexibility. Yes. There’s systems in place, but you also have to have the flexibility to work around them.

Andrew McCombe:
Well, I think that’s what makes you a bit of an outlier in the golf space is you’re not making it about the swing and the swing has to fit. Everyone has to fit the swing. You’re making it the other way around where you, as the coach are asking the questions of the person and then making it about them.

Lawrie Montague:
four words, what do you want? And then I stop and listen, and then they may not know what they want. And I say, “well, if you didn’t know what you want, what would that be?”, they, “well, I still don’t know what I want.” Well, so maybe the first challenge is how can I help someone if they don’t know what they want? So I have to get to a place where we can build a bridge where I have some level of understanding of what they think they want. And it might be a case of, they don’t really know for sure. And then that may be my challenge. I’ve got to help them to find what it is that they want.

Andrew McCombe:
How would you suggest that? for the Outlaws out there who know, they feel different. They feel like they don’t belong, but they know they want to make a difference.

Lawrie Montague:
they have to know what difference means, because the thing about life is for every person on the planet, it’s different. It’s not the same. there is samenesses. and there are differences. Sameness is when you do have a system that is basically operating the same way. The difference is everybody’s got to experience that sameness differently.

Andrew McCombe:
Cause we all are technically one, but we’re also unique in that oneness.

Lawrie Montague:
We all look at the world differently. Every person that I work with, it doesn’t matter what they’re doing is going to share with me what they think, what they believe their experience to be of a particular situation, whatever the context happens to be. And the content for each person is going to be different. So they could be standing here say hitting golf shots, but they’re all different doing it. They’re thinking different thoughts. What the one common denominator with all of them is what do they want?

Andrew McCombe:
and which again, will be different for everyone. So you’ve got four questions. What do you want? And then what what’s next?

Lawrie Montague:
to understand what, what is, I explain that? What, what is, what is the behavior? So the thing about change is, when people talk about change your mindset, well, I believe you change your behavior to change your mindset. I think you’ve got to do the physical. You’ve got to do the work. One of the things that I constantly struggle with is I meet people, very bright people who stopped reading, who stopped learning. Once they left university, particularly university, they go, “That’s it. I read enough in university. I don’t want to do it anymore.” I go, “big problem for you. Life doesn’t stop. Everything’s moving. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, and you’re an Outlier, you need to study, you need to study your markets so much better than everybody else. If you’re going to be successful.” successful might mean that you just generate a level of profit. If it could be a profitable thing or you’re making a massive difference to someone’s life or a particular niche of people’s lives. Whatever it happens to be, you’ve got to really know what that is. One pro said to me, “learn a method, like throw your hat down and say, that’s the way you do it.” I’ve never been able to accept that. Someone would even say, “what’s your method of teaching Lawrie?” And I don’t know. I’m not sure. I literally am a white belt Every day. that’s where I’m at. I have a beginner’s mind every day, which is in Japanese is a shoshin. I have a beginner’s mind.

Andrew McCombe:
And so you you’d encourage the Outlaws, the entrepreneurs to have a beginner’s mind?

Lawrie Montague:
I think that’s where the humble is. Humble is in learning. I started humble. I couldn’t learn, I couldn’t write properly. I was having all sorts of trouble. I do remember that I struggled. And so homework writing, even the board, the teacher be writing on the board and I’m trying to write, and then she’d be wiping half the board out. I didn’t get to finish anything. I was lefthanded and it was just at the end of that period where they wanted you to be right-handed, but I was left handed.

Andrew McCombe:
Are You the devil’s child? That’s what I called you, wasn’t it?

Lawrie Montague:
I couldn’t be, I never got the slaps on the wrist or the canes on the wrists. Like some people did earlier generations than me, Where they made you into a right-handed writer. I struggled so much with learning in the early days that I had to do something different and there was that side. one of the things I also learned is that particularly while I work a lot of hours, as I have to be fit and strong and healthy.

Andrew McCombe:
So you got other support tools that you use to keep yourself sharp?

Lawrie Montague:
Gotta be in the gym. I’ve got to be as healthy as I can be. so that I can keep pushing at the level that I want to push at. I like being where I am. I like working lots of hours. It suits me. What I’ve learned is I work with people who don’t want to work Like I do, I struggled with that for a long time. Andrew, I struggled working with people who just didn’t have the same values or look at the world the same way on. Now. I’m a lot more relaxed about it. it’s tough. It’s a tough one because if I’m working with young players who want to be good, and I’ve played on the professional tour, I’ve practiced a lot and I’ve done all those things and I’ve always liked to play well, and I know what it’s like when I’m missing cuts and not being happy. And I work with players now that do those things. It’s very hard to explain to them from their young eyes to build that bridge, to say, you just don’t understand how hard you have to work to be good at something. Because threre are people around the world doing what you’re doing right now, but how are you going to be different to them? If they’re all doing one thing, if the sameness is that they all practice, then what is the difference?

Andrew McCombe:
Well, that’s the difference that I see in you. So before we get to that, and we’ve already spoken a lot about, to me, you look at golf more as a reflection of life. Yeah? Or life is a reflection of golf. It’s a great microcosm for each other.

Lawrie Montague:
It’s a great walk, but it’s terrible walk for some people, right?

Andrew McCombe:
But that’s really more of an internal thing. bringing their life to golf. And it starts to project out in the way they’re playing?

Lawrie Montague:
Particularly in the West, I find here in Asia, particularly Indonesia, we’ve got one of our practice screens next to one of the halls. I hear so much joy, people having so much fun out on the golf course, Indonesins know how to have fun. there are the guys that will do a bit of bedding and stuff. but if someone’s got a shot or something, they’re all so happy. They’re all celebrating. Even though one guy has probably lost a ton of money from it. whereas in the West, you get all these stressed out types. I’ve seen them on the golf course. I’ve seen people get angry or four. years ago, I had a friend, a professional, someone hit up on him and in the group behind. And they had words and the guy waited for him in the car park that night. And he got the hell beat out of him. it’s very different here. There’s a real love. I find that for a lot of people in the West, this perfection driven idea. they just give themselves a hard time about their learning. And instead of probably being a little humble with the walk and learning along the way and finding a good teacher, someone who they can relate to and taking some lessons. Even though I’ve got a good following on YouTube and stuff, that was just really for me and experiment to share a few ideas and hopefully help a few people out. But people that want to get better, you need to find a good teacher. if it’s in martial arts, you go to a good dojo and you find a good sensei, someone who has a track record who can teach you the things you need to learn. Golf. Tennis doesn’t matter what it is.

Andrew McCombe:
earlier, we had swing lessons. I haven’t played for a cup, well almost a year and a half, two years now. And you know, we did one swing. We changed my swing instantly and we changed the finger on a grip and instantly got more distance, got easier through the ball, et cetera. And if I had been to any other instructor or teacher, I probably would have, and a lot of golfers out there would know this. I probably would have come away confused, but you had the ability again, to simplify it, who would have thought a little finger shift could make such a big difference in distance and accuracy in ability to play through the ball. But to me again, I keep saying, that’s the difference, right? Do you feel different?

Lawrie Montague:
No, I just look at it that way. And I do want to convey a message that you understand. But one of the things that I learned many years ago with Richard Bandler, one of the co founders of NLP was, he gave you the idea that learning is easy. This is an important point. He said, “people don’t have learning challenges. it’s translation I have problems with.” So every person that comes along, it doesn’t matter who it is, in my mind, The very first thing I say to myself is, “this person is not learning challenged.” If they can’t hit a golf ball, or if they can’t achieve their goal, then there’s some translation going on. There’s some reason between where they are and where they want to get to that They don’t understand what that journey is. I want to share this really simple thing that will help enormously. At a business seminar, a long time ago, probably very early days of my coaching, Brian Tracy shared an equation. And at the time the equation was, “you times equals R.” And then later on, once I understood the equation, I changed it to R equals U times Z. And essentially what it is, understanding multiplied by effort equals the result that you get. What I did was I put the result at the front and said, “results are equal to your understanding times your effort.” for 30 years, I’ve used that equation almost daily. Me personally, remember, I’m not smart. I didn’t finish school. I’m just book smart. I’ve read a lot. And I’ve pushed myself to try to understand some things, but the equation is so simple because it starts with, “okay, everyone wants a result.” My responsibility is to find out what that result is to get really clear on what that person’s result is. Outcome, If you will. At the other end of the equation is effort. Everybody’s putting in some level of effort, young players here at practicing, hitting balls each day, but what makes the formula so unique. I said to Tracy, “that equation. it’s been so useful to me in my life.” He said, “you know what? it’s interesting. You bring that up. it’s an old Greek equation. that goes back to the dire times when they’re all sitting around Aristotle, asking the question about the universe.” the understanding that you’re part of it.

Andrew McCombe:
So if someone’s battling out there and struggling, is it them or they just don’t understand?

Lawrie Montague:
There are levels of understanding. There are layers of understanding and you meet people who are really specialized in something, could be an engineer, but have a very specific niche in engineering. They are very deep in that level. I saw something the other day, you would relate to this. Someone was interviewing Richard Fineman, the very famous physicist , about repelling magnets. They asked, “what’s that all about?” And he said, “I really can’t explain it to you because there’s no simple way to explain about the complexity of that. I would have to teach you so many things.” So why can’t they push together? They just don’t, accept that. If you want to know more than you have to understand.

Andrew McCombe:
There’s not a quick fix bullet. If you want to understand more, put more effort in, learn from great teachers.

Lawrie Montague:
There is no fast track. I don’t care how clever the marketing is online and what they tell you, if you are gullible enough to believe it. And I have plenty of times, I’m gullible enough to believe it. If it’s just that and realize, no, no, it’s still a lot of work. Right? And when you see people who are “successful in things” you realize they’ve done a lot of work.

Andrew McCombe:
Let’s summarize everything we’ve talked about so far. If You were to help the young Outlaws, Outlaws in general, entrepreneurs, creators, dreamers, innovators, what’s the little price. Other than the four questions is we never finished?

Lawrie Montague:
Let me start from this. John Hugo, my mentor, who said to me a couple of things that have been really instrumental in me understanding the world a little bit differently. He said, “number one, you will become what you think about all day long.” And that’s not from him. That’s from someone else, a very famous, speaker Old Nightingale. “You will become what you think about all day long. So what you focus on, you direct your energy to it, it will grow and expand in your universe. Lawrie, you will attract into your life, the people, the situations and the circumstances in harmony with your dominant thoughts.” And I can tell you that it comes out like a simple sentence for me, cause I’ve done it my whole life since he taught it to me, that when you direct your energy in a particular place and you stay focused on it, you learn about that thing. And you remove the interference along the way. It’s like, you want to get this perfect wavelength without interference, without an interference coming in or in a simple physics way, an object at rest remains, it’s not Moving until some other external force moves it. Life is like that. The more focused you become on something, the more you attract into your world, people that can help you move in the direction of that. That is what I found when I wanted to become a professional. I was practicing more. I wanted that. And Mel Wilson walked past and he said, “I think I can help you with that.” When I was practicing at a little golf course and no one around, then this guy comes in and has a lesson with me, asks me, “what do I want?” I ended up getting sponsorship to play on the tour. When I retired from playing on the tour. And I got a job with the Rothmans foundation. I worked with coaches from other sports who have been coaching as long as I have now. And they helped me to understand the books to read. that was a struggle. it’s been that constant focus on what I wanted to the exclusion of all else. The biggest challenge today for young people is the distraction factor is so high. The interference is so high.

Andrew McCombe:
How do they reduce that? two questions, How do they reduce it? Knowing that they’re focusing on what they really want to be focusing on? Because some people just focused on anything, things that’s going to make them money or whatever, but how do you tune into what you really are, Your calling is, and then not become distracted?

Lawrie Montague:
first things first. you have to look at the things that are getting in your way to begin with. For you to run the a hundred meters and run it in 10 seconds. What’s going to get in the way, well, it might be hurdles. You have to become a good hurdler. but let’s say it’s just an open track, but maybe you’ve got to dodge a whole lot of people along the way that want to, maybe you’re famous runner and they want to interview you. And that you just really need to break the tape at the other side, as fast as you possibly can. So here’s the first thing. Turn off all the notifications on your phone, turn your phone off, turn you iPads and your laptops off and everything else at certain times, read books. If it’s an online book, read the book, don’t have the phone on at the same time with notifications pinging all the time. Because actually the technology’s fantastic. The people that build the technology, understand how people learn and they go, “you know what? It’s just called addictive technology.” (Andrew: like The gambling industry, isn’t it?) you don’t want pings and things. What I do is at the end of my work here, then I’ll look at my phone and the messages will be there, but there’s been no pinging. I don’t even go to it. I don’t even want to have my phone. The only thing I use my phone for is for taking photographs.

Andrew McCombe:
So going back to the guys, right? So distraction, remove distractions.

Lawrie Montague:
Number one, you can’t do anything in life if there’s things in the way. it wouldn’t matter what it is. The thing is this, it’s like nature. You plant a little tree. The first thing you have to do.

Andrew McCombe:
Well, you’d water it or you’d nurture it.

Lawrie Montague:
Yeah, you would. But also the thing is that that little plant needs to be propped up for some time until it becomes strong enough to do its own thing. If you look at the Great Australian Bight, you see a lot of the trees that go down there with heavy winds; they’re all blown in one direction and bent over permanently. If you don’t start off life the right way, Andrew, if you don’t start off with good mentors, good teachers, good people to encourage you. Then you might grow a bit crooked, might get further away from where you really wanted to go to. If you don’t know where you want to go to, the stick also helps. Doesn’t it? Put the stick in the ground, a nice true and straight stick. The tree can grow true and straight.

Andrew McCombe:
Fantastic. Well, Lawrie, thanks so much for sharing your story and a beautiful location, an Outlier location. Thanks for coming on the show.

Lawrie Montague:
Thanks very much, Andrew. Great. I’ve had a great time here, mate, and thanks for having me.

Andrew McCombe:
Well, thanks Lawrie. You’re officially an Outlier. My friend.

Lawrie Montague:
Thanks so much, man. Appreciate it.

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