Field Trials Canada
Vol. XIV, Week 19 May 12, 2025
The Importance of Resetting
So you are at a trial or a test and something crazy happens that rattles you. How do you deal with it? Here are some ideas.
By Steven Goldstein, a respected Executive Coach:
“McIlroy needs to reset.” Those words were spoken by a TV commentator after Rory McIlroy's disastrous first hole and shaky start to the next during the final round of The Masters yesterday.
The ‘Reset’ is a crucial activity that I explore in ‘Mastering the Mental Game of Trading’ and which is common to all of us, in whatever we do in life, in business, in leadership, in sport, in relationships. - We are all fallable, we are all human, we all at times fall below the standards we set for ourselves.
The need for a Reset, though mental, is visible in your body language, your behaviour, and the manifestations of your Self-Talk. Hence the value of acute, in the moment, self-awareness.
Resets are needed, because often our 'heads are gone', caused by some sort of preceding outcome that didn’t pan out the way you had hoped, or by a fear (usually exaggerated), or some other manifestation of unhelpful internal dialogue or self-talk.
An effective reset should momentarily take you into a space that us Performance Coaches call the "Fertile Void." This is a headspace where your thoughts dissipate, allowing you to transition from a state of anger and frustration to one of calm. It’s a "fertile" place because it helps you restore balance and rebuild your mental capacity, enabling you to become present to the task you are facing again.
Easy as it sounds, this ability is incredibly challenging to do in real time, in the moment, and to the degree needed to excel. It’s moments like these which separate the good from the great, and the great from the truly exceptional.
There is a quote from the iconic Netflix documentary, "The Last Dance," in which sportswriter Mark Vancil reveals what he believes truly separated Michael Jordan from all the other players around him: “His gift was not that he could jump high, run fast, shoot a basketball. His gift was that he was completely present, and that was the separator. He didn’t allow what he couldn’t control to get inside his head. He would say, ‘why would I think about missing a shot I haven’t taken yet?’”
Jordan, like McIlroy, was someone who could Reset, in realtime, in seconds, and made it fundamental to everything he did. - Like Jordan, McIlroy has now earned his place alongside the icons of his craft.
Rory McIlroy's genius and victory yesterday was as much about his ability to Reset, which he had to do multiple times yesterday, as it was about his amazing strokeplay and shot selection.
Retriever Classifications
Back in the day, retrievers were classified according to the texture of their coat: Flat coated retrievers, wavy coated retrievers, and curly coated retrievers. Early retrievers were also black, but some dogs had a recessive yellow gene. In fact, at one time, Golden Retrievers were considered a color variation of Flat Coated Retrievers.
Conversely, some people believe there is such a thing as a black Golden Retriever. Note to them: There isn’t.
A purebred Golden Retriever’s glorious color is the a result of two recessive alleles. The MC1R gene (or the E-Locus) controls the production of pigment in melanocytes which controls the color of a dog’s skin or coat. The dominant allele, “E”, allows a dog to produce the black pigment, eumelanin. The recessive allele, “e,” turns all the eumelanin to phaeomelanin which means that the coat will be yellow or red in color. Since all purebred Golden Retrievers have the recessive “e/e” genotype, it’s impossible for a purebred Golden to pass along the dominant “E” allele. They’ll always be some tint or shade of gold or red, but they will never be black.
Genetic mutations do occur, but a color mutation in a Golden Retriever will appear as a patch of black hair like a pigment somatic mutation. If a somatic mutation takes place during the development of the embryo, black patches can appear on recessive Golden Retrievers. It won’t show up as a pure black coat, and this is underscored in the AKC breed standard which reads, “Rich, lustrous golden of various shades…Any noticeable area of black or other off-color hair is a serious fault.”
Unfortunately, there are plenty of websites that say otherwise. One site writes, “Black Golden Retrievers are a variety of the Golden Retriever dog. They have all of the same characteristics of a Golden but come in a midnight shade… They can even be purebred! They are likely black because of genetic diversity that was added to the bloodline in the development of the breed.”
No where does the site mention “genetic mutation” or somatic mutation, possibly because a potential buyer hears “mutation” and runs away from a possible sale. Disingenuous or ignorant breeders (or both) hawk “black Golden Retrievers” as rare and even charge more for them than a heritage Golden Retriever breeder does for a well bred, health tested puppy.
Black marked Golden Retrievers can make marvelous pets, but potential buyers should know that their “purebred black Golden Retriever” either isn’t a purebred, that its “rare” color is a mutation, and that the parent club considers it a fault.
