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Craft Perspective to Achieve Inner Peace

Mitch Arnold • April 20, 2024

The winner of the 2024 Masters golf tournament, Scottie Scheffler, is dominating professional golf in a way not seen since Tiger Woods’ peak years. Including the Masters, he has won three of the last four tournaments, and has been 100 strokes better than the world’s second-ranked golfer over the last two years. What he said after his most recent win revealed his not-so-guarded secret.


"Because, like I said, winning this golf tournament does not change my identity. My identity is secure, and I cannot emphasize that enough." He continued, “"I believe that today's plans were already laid out many years ago, and I could do nothing to mess up those plans. I have been given a gift of this talent, and I use it for God's glory. That's pretty much it."


That strong sense of self was critical to his success, especially when he temporarily lost the lead in the first few holes on the tournament’s final day. Many of the world’s top golfers have collapsed when entering the final round of the Masters with the lead, the pressure and fear of losing throwing them off just enough to allow the elite competition behind them to surge ahead. That didn’t happen to Scheffler, because he had crafted his perspective to find inner peace.


Imagine if we approached life’s challenges with a similar mindset – “. . . today's plans were already laid out many years ago, and I could do nothing to mess up those plans.” Easier said than done, I know, but it’s worth trying.


Despite being more than 25 years his senior, I’m still working on achieving the constant inner peace that Scottie Scheffler seems to have, and I suspect that I’m not alone. We forget that we don’t control as much as we think we do or might want to control, and we let minor challenges derail our perspectives. We can avoid all of that if we carefully craft our perspectives.


The first step to doing that is to trust yourself, and the first step to trusting yourself is to prepare yourself for success. Scheffler didn’t just show up at Augusta and start swinging a club. He had spent thousands of hours over his 27 years preparing for big moments like the final round of the Masters. He knows that he has done everything he can to be as good as he possibly can. When he temporarily lost the lead, he knew that all he needed to do was trust himself and his preparation.


The second step to building a carefully crafted perspective is to accept that you can’t control everything. Scheffler knew that the accuracy of his shots would be affected by elements beyond his control, like wind gusts and bad bounces. He also knew that his fellow competitors were extremely talented, and had worked hard to put themselves in contention to win the tournament. Any one of them was capable of playing the round of their lives and overtaking him. He couldn’t control that.


The final and probably most important step in building a carefully crafted perspective is to have faith that a higher power is orchestrating everything for an ideal outcome that we might not understand, but will have to accept. Having faith like that frees us from the fear of failure. If failure happens, it doesn’t change who we are.



Scottie Scheffler showed us how to succeed by remaining calm under enormous pressure. If we want to have success and find inner peace in our own lives, it’s up to us to craft our perspectives in a similar way. If we do that, there’s no way we can lose.

The Importance of Imagining Brighter Days

By Mitch Arnold • March 2, 2025
Nebraskans experienced what seemed like an entire winter in two weeks last month. Those, like me, who have been around for decades of Nebraska winters recognize that winter can be much harsher and last a lot longer, but for those two weeks, winter misery prevailed.  Then, it suddenly changed. In just a few days, we went from sub-zero overnight temperatures to temperatures in the sixties. Many areas experienced 70-plus temperature changes from one week to the next. The change was remarkable, and it not only melted the snow and ice, it also quickly erased our memories of the misery we felt just days before. Life is often like that. We can get so bogged down in difficult times that we can’t even imagine brighter days. Then, when brighter days happen, our memories mercifully tamp out the misery. The challenge is to resist unhappiness and frustration during trying times, and to remind ourselves that brighter days are ahead. It’s an exercise in hope, and one that’s crucial to our happiness, especially when things are not working out the way that we want them to. Amid the miserable weather of those two weeks, while the snow and ice kept me homebound, I slipped and fell when getting out of the shower. That left me with a diagonal slash across my back, sprained finger and deep bruising on my right hip and foot. Fortunately, no emergency room visit was needed this time, and I was able to continue on with my day and week, albeit much sorer and slower than usual. The worst of the injuries happened to my already weak right side, and resulted in that leg being much tighter than it normally is, which made getting around even more challenging than it already was. As always, I don’t share these challenges looking for sympathy. Rather, I want to acknowledge the occasional suffering that happens behind the scenes for all of us. Most of us try to put on a brave face and keep our problems behind closed doors, but everyone endures tough times at one time or another. It’s during those times that we need to find hope and optimism, and the best way to find hope and optimism is to focus on brighter days ahead. Like the weather, our fortunes can quickly change. I focused on that as ice and injury kept me homebound. I’ve been injured before and stuck at home by weather before, but rarely at the same time. In fact, the timing was quite convenient. Since the weather was already keeping me in, I could use that time to heal. Admittedly, those days were not without frustration and sadness, but I fought off those feelings with hope and optimism. Hope and optimism are almost always more elusive during difficult times, when we need them the most. That’s why we must make a concerted effort to summon them. If we don’t, we risk unnecessarily prolonging misery. As the weather improved, so did my body, like it had hundreds of times before. Before long, I was back doing the things I normally do, and my confidence level inched forward, as I proved to myself that I could survive another challenge and the brighter days I imagined came to be. If you are going through a difficult time, remind yourself that tough times never last, and that brighter days are ahead. If you do that enough, it becomes a defense mechanism that you can refine and use each time your days darken.

Take Control of Your Thoughts

By Mitch Arnold • January 5, 2025
Driving to the gym the other day, I caught myself thinking about a former client who inexplicably quit returning my calls. That led me to thinking about a former employee who started a competing business, which led me to thinking about an ex-girlfriend who broke my heart more than 30 years ago. In just a couple of minutes, my mind was swirling with negative thoughts about people who have let me down. Why?!? What good was any of that doing for me? One small, negative thought had sparked an inferno which threatened to obliterate any positivity lurking in my mind. I had a choice to make – change what I was thinking about or risk ruining my day, or at least part of it. That was obviously a pretty easy choice, but there was a time when it wouldn’t have been. I would have ceded my day to whatever thoughts crossed my mind. That was before I learned about the power of mindfulness. At its most basic, mindfulness is simply being aware of what you are thinking about in the moment. Mindfulness becomes more advanced when it’s used as part of a mental process to evaluate those thoughts and control them for psychological benefit. It is particularly useful when your mind grabs hold of negative thoughts and refuses to let go. In my experience, negative thoughts are insidious, opportunistic, and often more aggressive than positive thoughts. They will catch you in a moment of weakness, and quickly amplify before you are even aware of what they are doing. Whereas positive thoughts seem fleeting and easily lost, negative thoughts can be direct, intense and sometimes difficult to shake. If left uncontrolled, negative thoughts seem to multiply and intensify, like a relentless virus. They will squash your inner peace, kill your enthusiasm and sap your energy. That’s where mindfulness comes in. You can’t control negative thinking until you become aware of its presence in your mind, and we’re often unaware of it. We might just feel depressed or irritable, and point the finger at external circumstances, when our thoughts are really to blame. When we catch ourselves feeling that way, we should take a minute to consider what’s on our minds and if those thoughts merit the energy we’re devoting to them. In my case, with the unresponsive client, I had already examined the possible causes of the lack of responsiveness, and had come to peace with the reality that I’ll probably never know the reason. I had also reassured myself that I had done nothing wrong, so why devote any more energy to the situation? The thoughts about the former employee and ex-girlfriend were similar; I had already given them enough of my energy, and thinking about them was going to bring me nothing but negativity. Now aware that negative thoughts were flooding my mind, I focused on getting rid of them and replacing them with positive thoughts. I looked through my windshield at the unseasonably warm winter weather, and was purposefully grateful for the opportunity to be on my way to the gym for the exercise my body needed. I thought of the good things in my life, like my family and experiences with friends. As I did so, I felt tension that I had been unaware of leave my body. All because of mindfulness. Consider using mindfulness the next time you feel negativity taking over your mind. Take the time to consider what you are thinking, and, if needed, change it to optimize your day. You will be glad you did. “Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.” ― Lao Tzu
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