Mindset & Patience

Golfing potential depends primarily on a player's attitude, on how well he plays with the wedges and the putter, and on how well he thinks.
Improvement takes patience, persistence and practice. Big improvements require working and chipping away for years. A golfer has to learn to enjoy the process of striving to improve.
That process, not the end result, enriches life. I want the people I work with to wake up every morning excited, because every day is another opportunity to chase their dreams. I want them to come to the end of their days with smiles on their faces, knowing that they did all they could with what they had. That's one reason golf is a great game. It gives people that opportunity.
Never let events control the way one thinks, rather take control of ones thoughts and use them to influence events.
"You're going to have to learn to think consistently if you want to score consistently, "I went on. "You wouldn't be foolish enough to try a different swing on every shot, would you? "No, he said. "It's the same way with your mind , "I said. "You're going to have to decide before the round starts how you're going to think, and do it on every shot . You have to choose to think well."
Not many people think that their state of mind is a matter of choice. But I believe it is. Unfortunately, major branches of psychology and psychiatry during this century have helped promote the notion that we are all in some sense victims — victims of insensitive parents, victims of poverty, victims of abuse, victims of implacable genes. Our state of mind, therefore, is someone else's responsibility. This kind of psychology is very appealing to many academics. It gives them endless opportunities to pretend they know what makes an individual miserable and unsuccessful. It appeals as well to a lot of unhappy people. It gives them an excuse for their misery. It permits them to evade the responsibility for their own lives.
In contrast, the disabled kids we worked with focused on what was in their control — their chance to learn to play. And they learned, despite their limitations. It started to hit me that attitude, self-perception and motivation heavily influenced success in life. I realised that happiness had more to do with what you did with what you had than with what you had.
People by and large become what they think about themselves. The idea is so simple that it is easy to dismiss. People become what they think about themselves. It's almost all a person needs to know about how to be happy. If someone came to me and asked me how to be happy, I would reply that it's simple. Just wake up every morning thinking about the wonderful things you are going to do that day. Go to sleep every night thinking about the wonderful events of the past day and the wonderful things you will do tomorrow. Anyone who does that will be happy.
Jim Flick , one of the best of today's golf teachers , says that a player has to pass through three stages : unconsciously incompetent, consciously competent, and unconsciously competent.
Attitude is what makes a great putter. Putting is largely mental, and you have control over your mind and attitude. To become a good putter, you must make a commitment to good thinking. You have to fill your mind with thoughts that will help you, not excuses for poor putting. You have to decide that, come what may, you love putting and you're glad that every hole gives you a chance to use your putter, because that's where you've got a big advantage over all the players who dread putting .
"Which is it, Gary ? Do you love slow, Bermuda greens" he asked, "or fast, bent greens?" "You just have to love whatever greens you're playing on," Player replied. To someone unfamiliar with the way great athletes think, Player's attitude would seem to verge on foolishness. A golfer might like fast greens or slow greens or medium greens, but he cannot rationally like fast greens one week and slow greens the next. And only a fool could stand over a twenty-foot putt and be absolutely confident of holing it, when he has a lifetime of experience to prove that his chances of doing so are really about one in ten. But this kind of foolishness is precisely what all great putters have in common.
Losing that foolishness is what happens to players when they get what are commonly called the yips. There is no neurological basis for the yips. Nothing about the physical ageing process dictates that a golfer cannot putt as well at sixty as he did at twenty. The great players usually start out as confident putters, even bold putters. But over the years, even the great ones have trouble maintaining this attitude. Maybe playing for years with major championships on the line inevitably produces memories of missed putts in crucial situations. After a while, those memories become so burdensome that the golfer can't keep them out of his mind as he stands on the green.
One of the most common mental errors committed by golfers under pressure is letting the score distract them from what they ought to be thinking about. “Doc,” Val told me later, “I didn’t want to look at that leaderboard. But it was like that leaderboard was looking at me.”
Tom had the ideal attitude toward competition and his fellow competitors. He recognised that the other people on the golf course are not the real opposition that a golfer faces. The first opponent is the game itself. The course, the club and the ball are all idiosyncratic and unpredictable foes, and they will humble the best golfer more than occasionally. The second opponent is the golfer himself. Can he discipline his mind to produce the best score his body is capable of?
A golfer has to choose someone to believe in. It had better be himself.
team on its home court, and we’re playing against guys I loved to watch on television when I was in high school?” I was impressed with the candor of Olden’s question. He didn’t care that the coaches were listening. All he knew was that he had to get ready to play Jordan, Perkins and Worthy. “You’ve got to go in there with the attitude that you’re better than they are until they prove otherwise, rather than the attitude that they’re better than you are until you prove otherwise,” I told him. “Put the burden of proof on them.” “That’s a good idea,” Olden said.
They embody an old Satchel Paige aphorism. Someone once asked Paige, the great African-American pitcher who was in his forties before segregation ended and he got to the big leagues, if he could still pitch at that advanced age. “How old,” Paige replied, “would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?”
In the end, you will realise that you love golf because of what it teaches you about yourself.

Free Will

A golfer has free will. He can choose how he will think. Free will enables him to develop the kind of memory that promotes good shotmaking: a short-term memory for failure and a long-term memory for success. A golfer can learn to forget the bad shots and remember the good ones.
I harp on free will with the players I work with. Free will means that a person can think any way he or she wants to think. He can choose to be a happy person or a miserable person. She can choose to think of herself as a great golfer or a born loser. Free will is the greatest gift anyone could have given us. It means we can, in a real sense, control our own lives. A golfer can and must decide how he will think.
To me, the act of striking a golf ball belongs in that category of sports events in which the player need not react to what another player does, as a batter must react to the pitcher. Major variables are constant and under the golfer's control -- the moment the action begins, the position of the ball, and his position in relation to it.
The second thing that impressed me about what Pavin said was his commitment to learning about himself and his game. He didn't care what anyone else, including his peers and competitors, thought. He was intent on learning what he had to know to get better.

Subconscious Mind

All I can say is that if you want to score well, attach your ego to how well you think, how well you manage your game, how well you hit your wedges, how well you putt. The long-drive swing won't be in the slot every day. But you can always think well, manage your game well, and play the short game well.
But, pro or amateur, whatever their specific concerns are, they all know one thing. They're better players than they're showing on the golf course and in tournaments. This raises one of the essential issues in golf. Why is it that a golfer cannot simply command his body to repeat the motion that has brought success thousands of times on the practice range or the putting green? The answer has to do with connections between the brain and other parts of the nervous system that we still only vaguely understand.
The brain , at some level, cannot seem to understand the word "don't." If your last thought before striking the ball is "don't hit it in the pond," the brain is likely to react by telling your muscles to hit it in the pond. That's why it's doubly important, when facing a hazard, to focus your attention sharply on your target.
Pretty soon , the only thing the golfer can think about when he stands over an important four - footer is, "The whole world knows I can't make this kind of putt anymore. "At this point, fear infects the player's mind, and fear destroys putting. A good putting attitude is free of fear. A good putting attitude blends ideas that almost seem contradictory. The golfer has to believe the putt will go in the hole, but he must not care if he misses. He has to try enough to maintain a disciplined routine focused on sinking the putt, but not try so hard that he tightens up. He has to find a balance between determination and nonchalance.
Mark Twain was not, as far as I know, much of a golfer. But he had an insight that can help any golfer develop confidence and play better. The inability to forget, Twain said, is infinitely more devastating than the inability to remember. The question is, as you stand over a ball and prepare to hit it, which shots do you choose to remember? A lot of players tell me they don’t choose—that the memories of bad shots jump, unbidden, into their mind. Others say they have realistic memories, that they recall both the bad and the good. But a golfer can indeed choose.
It’s important to differentiate between fear and nervousness. Nervousness is a physical state. It is sweat on the palms, adrenaline in the bloodstream. There’s nothing wrong with it—it can even help a golfer. Fear is a mental state. It’s being afraid of making a mistake when you swing the club
He learned what all successful athletes sooner or later learn. Courage is fear turned inside out. It is impossible to be courageous if at first you weren’t afraid.
Positive thinking, in my opinion, does not mean taking a rip at every risky shot the course presents. It is, rather, the development and execution of an intelligent strategy that weighs risks and rewards and gives a player a chance to shoot his best possible score. This is not negative thinking. It’s honest thinking.
A golfer chokes when he lets anger, doubt, fear or some other extraneous factor distract him before a shot. First of all, choking is not synonymous with being nervous. The fact is that, at one time or another, all golfers are nervous. The body can and probably will stay excited. The mind must not.
I sometimes tell young players that being nervous on the golf course is a little bit like being nervous the first time you make love with someone you really care about. Nearly everyone is nervous in that situation, but nerves are part of what makes the experience so exhilarating. If it didn’t make you nervous, it wouldn’t be so gratifying. In fact, it might be a little boring. Ask any prostitute.
All I can say is that if you want to score well, attach your ego to how well you think, how well you manage your game, how well you hit your wedges, how well you putt. The long-drive swing won't be in the slot every day. But you can always think well, manage your game well, and play the short game well.

Self Confidence

He trusts that his body will produce the swing needed for the shot he envisions. If you don't trust right now, you will have to go through a period of conscious awareness until you learn the difference between the feeling of trust and the absence of trust. You will have to work at developing thoughts and habits that promote trust. You will have to learn to focus your mind on your target and your pre-shot routine rather than on swing mechanics.
It's more important to be decisive about a read than correct. Once you've read a decisive read, you need to think about, or visualise, the line of the putt. As with full shots, this step depends on individual idiosyncrasies. Some golfers can envision the line of the putt as clearly as they can see a yellow line painted down the middle of a highway. Others don't see anything in their mind's eye. But they nevertheless convince themselves that the line is right and the putt will drop. That's all that's important.
Once you have selected your target, focus on it exclusively. Don't let your eyes wander to the cup.
Without confidence, you can’t trust your physical ability. You can’t perform at your best. But a lot of golfers that I speak to about confidence have misconceptions that hold them back. They think that confidence is an attribute that they cannot choose to seek and acquire. They think it’s something that descends on an athlete, like a revelation from above, after he’s performed perfectly for a long time.
Sometimes, a player struggling with this kind of misconception will ask me which comes first, confidence or success. They understand that a player cannot win tournaments without confidence. But they think that you have to win tournaments before you can get confidence. If that were true, no one would ever win a tournament for the first time.
In fact, anyone can develop confidence if he or she goes about it properly. Confidence isn’t something you’re born with or something you’re given. You control it. Confidence is what you think about yourself and your golf game. People would understand this better, I think, if confidence guaranteed success. It doesn’t.
Standing on the tee and thinking about your drive going to the target doesn’t guarantee that it will go there. It only enhances the chances. If it guaranteed success, people would more readily get the idea. But they try thinking confidently, and as soon as a shot doesn’t succeed, they think, “Well, that doesn’t work.” But look at it another way. If you’re not thinking about your drive going to the target, what are you thinking about? Obviously, you’re thinking about it going somewhere else—into a lake, maybe. And that kind of thinking definitely works, assuming you want to hit the ball in the lake. Negative thinking is almost 100 percent effective.
By its nature, golf will try to sap your confidence. On every round, even the best golfer will mishit some shots. Over the course of a year, even the best golfer will lose more tournaments than he wins. So, maintaining confidence in golf is like swimming against a current. You have to work hard to stay where you are.

Game Plan

First, stay in the present and keep your mind sharply focused on the shot immediately in front of you. Second, avoid mechanical thoughts. Instead, strive to become looser, freer and more confident. You should want to feel that you trust your swing more on the 18th tee than you did on the 1st. Third, stick to your routine and to your game plan.
If there’s a rain delay, it’s even more essential to unwind and distance yourself from golf. Read a book. Change clothes. When the rain stops, make up your mind that the delay is going to help you
No football or basketball coach whom I’ve ever heard of would send his team into competition without a game plan. Coaches in those sports recognise that an intelligent game plan can take advantage of a team’s strengths and camouflage its weaknesses. More important, a good game plan makes the mental side of the game easier. Players don’t have to make as many impromptu, possibly emotional decisions. They can instead execute decisions made in advance, calmly, outside the heat of competition.
The same considerations apply to golf: You must play every significant round with a game plan. Amateur golfers, particularly high-handicappers, frequently don’t understand this. They play spontaneously, making up strategy on the fly. As a result, they make more bad decisions. A good professional never plays a tournament round without first examining the course and preparing a plan to play it. The plan encompasses target and club selection for each tee shot, the preferred landing area on every green, and hazards to be avoided.
But whenever possible, plan in advance. The best way to prepare a plan is to walk or mentally review each hole backward.