Golf Psychology Newsletter - 19/10/05

Welcome again to the Golf Brain newsletter.

Very interesting to read of the work of renowned psychologist Dr Martin Seligman

Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D., works on positive psychology, learned helplessness, depression, and on optimism and pessimism. He is currently Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is well known in academic and clinical circles and is a best-selling author.

who has pioneered the concept of Positive Psychology and the study of happiness.

Seligman concludes that the truly happy life is not just about instant pleasure (eating that ice cream that you just had to have or buying those shoes that you couldn’t live without!) but of what he calls gratifications whereby the pleasure is not instant but more of a long term commitment to something be that a relationship, building a business or finding out how good you can be at sport.

Short-term pleasures are over in an instant and then you need the next fix. Gratifications build a very strong sense of self over a period of time but they don’t wither away.

Golf can be such a powerful way of developing true gratification as you make a commitment to train your brain and find out what you are really capable of.

The Power of NOW

Get your handicap down inside a month! Make massive improvement! Take your game to another level! Just some of the headlines that entice us into thinking about how great we can be at golf. Unfortunately whilst planning to improve is a great concept and should be encouraged it tends to put our mind in just about the worst place that it can be for golf, the FUTURE.

It is almost as if we are training our mind to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and then we wonder why we get ahead of ourselves when we are actually playing.
You are probably very familiar with the story where you are stood on the fourteenth doing ever so well and the mind just wanders to the idea that if you can just par the next four holes then you are bound to win the competition!
Somehow it never seems to work out that way. Nerves and anxiety all exist in the future as you are playing out on the screen of your mind what you think might happen.

For me a satellite navigation system in a car gives us the ideal way to use our mind to get what we want.
Once we have programmed in our destination (goal) then to get there we actually need to forget about the endpoint and focus totally on the road ahead at this very moment and react to what is in front of us.
The more you train your brain to be in the now the better you get at it and the improvement in your game can be dramatic as a result.

Follow these points to be in the NOW:

• Get completely absorbed in your routines on each shot. Focus on something that is happening now like taking a sip of water, cleaning the club or ripping the Velcro on your glove.
• See each and every shot on the course as a separate ‘job’ or task. Each job has a start and an end point then it is over.
• Actually tune in to your senses as you play what can you see, what can you hear what can you feel as you walk the course.
• Catch yourself doing mental time travel into the future and bring yourself back to the NOW.

Questions

I am getting to the point where I can’t take the club back from the ball because my mind is so full of different swing thoughts it is as if I am about to freeze. What should I do?

Your mind is so ‘busy’ thinking that you are getting to the point where you are incapable of doing.

What I want you to do is use a technique that Jonny Wilkinson employs when he is place kicking called ‘Centering’.

Take your attention away from your busy mind and place it on your physical centre a couple of inches below your navel. With your attention here, the ‘one point’ as it is known in the martial arts your mind will become much quieter and settled and you can allow your body to take over and ‘just do it’.

I hear all lot these days about things like ‘Natural Golf’, do you think that golf is instinctive and we don’t need lessons?

First of all there are very few things that we do ‘instinctively’, sneezing is one of them, blinking another but golf is not hard wired into our genetic make up. We do need to learn how to swing a golf club. However playing golf may not be instinctive but learning is and the most important part of instinctive learning is the ability to explore and find out for yourself what works and what doesn’t. Work with a coach who helps you discover about your own game as opposed to just giving you lots and lots of technical information. Feel for yourself what makes the ball bend to the right and then to the left and you will be able to adjust. This is exactly how you learnt to walk by falling to the left, then the right and being able to find a balance point in the middle.!

RESEARCH

NOVELTY
From Lawrence Katz Ph.D.

Brain imaging studies show that novel tasks activate large areas of the cortex, indicating increased levels of brain activity in several distinct areas. This activity declined when the task had become ROUTINE and AUTOMATIC. Much greater ‘brain power’ is exerted from novel verses automatic (rote) tasks.

The message is clear your brain needs to be stretched in practice!