Golf Psychology Newsletter - 30/01/05

Welcome again to the Golf Brain newsletter.

Monty’s Ryder Cup Magnificence
Team Pleasures

If you stop to think about the last two Ryder Cup matches, the magnificent victory at the Belfry led by captain Sam Torrance and then the recent stunning victory on U.S. soil with Bernhard Langer at the helm, one man stands out head and shoulders above the rest in terms of outstanding performance. Colin Montgomerie has been an absolute giant in the incredible European team successes of the recent past few years.

What is it that lifts this man so much in the face of such a demanding personal examination as the Ryder Cup, particularly last year when life off the golf course had been pretty tough for Monty?

I personally think that the Ryder Cup changes a golfers perspective from an often self- absorbed quest for personal glory to a collective collaboration where the individual is less important than the team itself. Suddenly you aren’t playing for ‘me’ instead it is all about ‘us’.

And as that ‘us’ mindset takes over and you lose your personal absorption in your own troubles and worries, you are able to set yourself free to play at your very best.

In many ways golf can become a lonely pastime and for many that is absolutely fine but I urge you all to take the opportunity wherever you can to play golf in a team environment be that at National or County level or the club team or even organising your own team match against work colleagues or in your golfing society.

In pursuit of becoming the best golfer that you can be do not pass up the opportunity of enjoying the fun and camaraderie that team golf gives you. It is true that unlike Monty it is highly unlikely that you will hole the winning putt to win the Ryder Cup but I promise you that you can still feel pretty good about yourself if you happen to par the last hole, win your match and see your team, whatever it is to a memorable victory.

Effective Practice

Play it again Sam!!

One theme that we have constantly maintained in the newsletter is to make your practice more difficult than the actual game itself, as opposed to most golfers who practice in a way that is so much EASIER than the game itself.

With this in mind I want you to play regularly with a partner a 9-hole game that really trains your golfing brain and toughens you up mentally. The game is the ‘Recall Game’ and you need to pick a time when your course is relatively quiet.
With a partner you aim to play 9 holes and you both have six ‘recall shots’, so that when your opponent hits a great shot into the flag to four feet, you smile at him and ask him to play the shot again. He then has to take the shot that is furthest from the pin i.e. the worst shot to count as his score.

You can imagine how it feels when you have just holed a great 10 footer for a birdie and you get the call to ‘play it again’.

What does happen thought with this game is when you bring off the sot for a second time your level of confidence and self- belief begin to grow and grow. The fact that you are creating a pressure that is even tougher than the real game has a real sharpening effect on your overall performance.

As you can guess though the best part of this practice game is the fun that you can have winding each other up.

Striking Image

Thinking Zone / Playing Zone

If there was one problem that I have encountered more than any other over the years it is golfers who think too much about swing mechanics whilst they are out on the golf course, yet at the same time many players say that they feel lost without some kind of swing cue.

The solution I believe is to create 2 Golf ‘Zones’ the Thinking Zone and the Playing Zone.

Imagine that six feet behind your golf ball is a line, a coloured line and behind that line is the ‘thinking zone’. Whilst this side of the line you get to do all of the thinking that is necessary to play your shot, thoughts like shot selection, club selection, wind direction, pin position will all be assessed BEHIND this line.

You will also take your practice swing behind this line so that if you are working on any swing mechanics you still get to think about them behind the line. It is as if you are programming in to your brain and body the desired move you want to make on the golf ball.

Now after you have done all of that thinking, the line in front of you is ready to be crossed but you will only cross that line when you are ready to play what I call ‘Nike’ golf. ‘Nike’ golf is where you ‘just do it’. You become engaged with the target.
So the line is in effect a commitment line, whereby you will only cross over the line when you are fully ready to go.

The beauty of a line is that we are conditioned to respond to lines, we keep our car in the right place on the M1 by virtue of a line, when we run out onto some grass we know we are playing football by virtue of a line, the brain responds beautifully to lines.

The key point here is that you need to practice with a line, get yourself a piece of wood and colour it with a colour that you know for you means ‘go’, it may be red or blue or yellow, the colour doesn’t matter so long as it is your PERSONAL colour.
Take the piece of wood to the range and practice with the piece of wood, I have found many golfers get dramatic results as they are able to switch from thinking to doing by virtue of stepping over the line.

Not unlike the rituals in most martial arts the line becomes a trigger to your brain to perform the swing in a free flowing and unconscious mode.

Frame Game

A different kind of score

The letters P, E, and L stand for Performance, Enjoyment and Learning and the basic formula is this, if your triangle is in balance you will be the best that you can be in ANY activity. However if your triangle gets out of balance and you focus too much on only one element of the triangle you can get into big trouble and your whole golfing experience will suffer.

In golf it is pretty obvious how most people get out of balance by focusing almost entirely on results. I want you to experience a different kind of game when you go out to play golf, a game that I guarantee can put your triangle back into a healthy balance. When you begin your game you are going to keep TWO scores, you will have your obvious score against par where you are trying to shoot as LOW as possible against the course par. The other score you are going to keep is your enjoyment par.

On each hole you have a maximum enjoyment score of 5 so that your optimum score would be 90. After each hole you note your normal par score down and then you rate your enjoyment score on that particular hole. The enjoyment score is NOT dependent on how well you have played the hole. It may be that you have really enjoyed a conversation on the hole or that you hit a terrible second shot but you enjoyed the fact that you manage to deal with it instead of beating yourself up, it could well be that you simply took notice of how good it felt to look around you in the open air as opposed to being stuck it the office.

The great beauty of this game and the contrast to normal golf is that you are trying to score as HIGH as possible. The cynics amongst you might be already thinking that you only enjoy golf when you score low and what is the point of a game like this, in my experience I have found over and over again that as your enjoyment score goes UP your par score comes DOWN. Not the other way around because the irony of this is that you can’t totally control your par score but you personally have TOTAL control over your enjoyment score. It is actually up to you whether you get something out of your golfing experience or condemn yourself to round after round of torture and misery.