GOLF - The MIND FACTOR
NEWSLETTER - 20 June 2008
by
Dr Karl Morris
www.golf-brain.com

Features in this newsletter are :
  - Tiger Woods' US Open Glory
  - Know Your Right from Your Left!
  - The Secret will be Revealed

TIGER WOODS' US OPEN GLORY

“It’s about DEALING with it, giving it your best and seeing what happens. And there are NEVER any excuses. You just GO and PLAY and that’s the beauty of it – getting out there and enjoying the opportunity to compete whether you are 100% or not. You are out in the environment, so let go.”

Image Courtesy of Getty Images

I think that we can ALL take SO much from the words of Tiger Woods after what in the fullness of time may well go down as being THE most remarkable tournament victory of ALL time.

It does get to the point when words actually begin to fail you about this man. I think it is just fortunate we currently belong to an era which gets to see this man play. It also is very exciting to understand a lot of the mental tools and techniques Tiger applies CAN be learnt. He wasn’t born with these skills, he developed them over a period of time. Interesting that he talks in his quote about DEAL WITH. A full CD is dedicated to this very topic in The Players Programme CD series (see www.golf-brain.com). Much of this information has NEVER been revealed before.

KNOW YOUR RIGHT FROM YOUR LEFT

To get really good at this game, I think it is important to understand something that really puzzled me for years and years.

In the early days working with tour players, I was always somewhat confounded by the fact some players who I knew where working with very technical coaches and provided them with lots of positions and angles to think about, yet they still played some great golf. I would then also see players who had let go of the technical side of the game and they had gone off and worked with a sports psychologist or mind coach and they would be out on the course following the advice of the mind guru to think about target or ball flight or think nothing at all and yet they also were playing great golf and winning tournaments. Then it seemed there were a whole bunch of guys sitting in various states of confusion somewhere in between. With a basic question in their mind ‘should I think about my swing?’ or should i think about the ‘target’?

Players would tend to jump from one camp to another and, at various times, completely rebel against the ‘opposing camp’. You had players saying they would never work with a swing coach again because they completely messed up their head to then players getting to the point they thought all mind coaching was a load of baloney and not much use if you were hitting the ball sideways because their swing mechanics were all over the place.

The other startling thing when I looked at it was, apart from a tiny minority of players headed by Tiger Woods, it seemed the levels of consistency with really good players was about as constant as the weather patterns. Most good players were ALL OVER the place with their form. Great one minute desperate the next.

Now I know golf is not a straightforward game but the sheer inconsistency baffled me.

I myself jumped around in my own thinking and, for a time, got even more and more confused until with the help of what isn’t necessarily a groundbreaking book but, for me, this book started to paint a clearer picture of an effective pathway for players to produce some lasting consistency. It actually gave me a framework to bring some ideas together I had been working on before but hadn’t really been able to put together into a coherent pattern.

The book the ‘A Whole New Mind’ with the emphasis on the word whole made clear how we have misunderstood and misapplied the workings of the human brain in a way that leaves people frustrated and underperforming.

In a nutshell, and in an oversimplified (but useful) way, think of your brain as being divided into two halves - the left and right side of your brain.

Your left side is the thinking, analytical, information hungry, processing side. This side loves facts and figures, details and formulas, then you have the right side which is the instinctive and reactive side. This is the side that just ‘does it’ it is artistic, creative and works on the whole rather than the parts.

In the Western world we have tended to become very much biased towards the left brain. Nearly all our academic awards are granted as a result of an ability to think logically and be able to remember facts and figures. In golf, too, there is an amazing array of left brain biased books which deal endlessly with the minutae of technical coching in terms of positions, angles, pressure points and the like.

The key point here and the one which really hit home to me as the point that I had so BADLY missed, was the fact we are looking for a BALANCED brain operation. We do not want to suddenly throw out the baby with the bathwater and try to get everybody becoming right brained.

We are looking for BALANCE. More of this will be revealed in my new programme shortly to be released.

THE SECRET WILL BE REVEALED

What did the England Cricket Captain, Michael Vaughan ,work on to recover his dismal batting form and engineer a remarkable turnaround and series victory against New Zealand?

What insights did the management team at Hull City work with to create a remarkable transformation and achieve the ‘impossible dream’ of Premiership football against all odds?

How did Darren Clarke turn a potentially career threatening slump in form to record an emotionally charged victory in China on the European Tour?

The thread that runs through all of these remarkable stories is the work of Dr Karl Morris, one of Europe’s leading Mind Coaches, and some of the secret tools and techniques which have made such an impact, will be revealed for all.

Techniques which are PRACTICAL and APPLICABLE as opposed to the ‘New Age’ mumbo jumbo that is now all too apparent in both the sporting and business arenas.

Coaches , psychologists, parents and players from all over the world will gather together in Manchester in November for the unique MIND FACTOR coach certification.

Last year, 100 attendees from Holland, Sweden, Australia, Germany, Belgium, Spain and even Columbia, received 4 days of training to become MIND FACTOR coaches and are now working with the tools which have been used so successfully at the highest sporting level.

Are you going to go to the NEXT level and BECOME a MIND FACTOR coach BOOK NOW!!

Visit www.golf-brain.com for further information on products and services by Dr Karl Morris.