This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.

As Cameron Young prepared for The Players Championship, a fleeting thought crossed his mind:

What if I win this week?

But just as quickly, he dismissed it, recalling a realization he had come to not long before:

If I’m focused on that, it’s probably not going to happen.

For Young — long known for a string of runner-up finishes on the PGA Tour — it was the product of more than a year’s worth of deliberate mental work with a sports psychologist, Dr. Bhrett McCabe.

Young won The Players Championship over the weekend and moved up to No. 4 in the world rankings. He said during big tournaments in the past, he often had negative thoughts, focusing too much on results; he used to worry before tournaments that he “really needed to finish in the top five.”

He’s worked hard to change that. And that change in mindset, ironically, has produced the very outcomes he used to chase.

Early in his career, he consistently found himself near the top of PGA Tour leaderboards without ever breaking through for a win. The issue wasn’t talent. It was where his mind drifted when things didn’t go according to plan.

To illustrate the change, he gave a hypothetical example of his ball bouncing to the left and into a bunker as opposed to bouncing right onto the green.

“In the past, I would have said something negative about myself just because my ball ended up in the bunker,” Young said. “Now it’s more like, ‘I executed my process well there — now I just have to go hit a bunker shot,’” he said.

Much of that negativity was subconscious. But he’s worked to develop an awareness that allows him to recognize negative thoughts in real time and, crucially, revise them to focus on small, tangible steps, rather than results.

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The difference became noticeable to him at last year’s PGA Championship at Quail Hollow Club, a course he finds difficult. To make matters more complicated, he entered the week in bad shape.

“I was deathly ill trying to play a major championship,” he said. “And it was just one of those things where I was looking up at the leaderboard, and I was in 30th or something, and it just seemed so impossible to move up.”

Physically depleted and making what he called “dumb mistakes,” he found himself at a familiar breaking point. But this time, something shifted.

You still have to hit every shot.

The simple phrases McCabe had drilled into him surfaced at the right moment.

“Like, I have to hit all the shots here whether I feel good or not,” he said to himself. “I might as well take a swing — I’ve got nothing to protect. I haven’t even hit it yet.”

Essentially, he shouldn’t let the score, or his mood, influence making a good swing on each shot. Each shot is its own opportunity.

He encountered a similar mental test at the Ryder Cup, where, despite the U.S. team’s loss, he performed well.

“It was real proof to me that this works,” Young said. “That we’re doing the right things to get the results we want.”

Just two weeks ago at the Arnold Palmer Invitational in Florida, a few strokes behind the lead, Young opened a text from McCabe.

It read: “Today, just run your own race.”

Young understood. Whether someone else got out to a fast lead or Young struggled early on, he needed to just focus on each shot and see what happened.

By the time he arrived at The Players Championship, his guiding phrase had become simple: Be where my feet are.

“Anytime one of those unprompted thoughts creeps in,” he said, “I remind myself, ‘That thought is about three holes ago. That’s not where I am. I’m walking down the 10th, not standing on the seventh green.’”

The work is ongoing. Winning the Players was a great result, but it raised the question of how to process that big of an achievement without becoming overly results-focused.

On Tuesday morning, Young spoke with McCabe, who offered a simple framework: “Let yourself think until Wednesday night. Then we go to work on Thursday.”

The idea isn’t to suppress ambition or emotion. Young allows space for both — dreams, expectations, even anger after a bad performance. But each has its limits.

Ultimately, every path must lead back to the same place: the process. The small, controllable steps along the way. Never the results.

“I’m still in the discovery phase,” he said. “The next step is figuring out just how good I can get at this — how much of a weapon my mind can become.”