Do you like the idea of being more confident on the golf course, but don’t know where to start?
Visualisation could be the answer.
My clients both amateur and professional often ask: “Jermaine, how can I possibly be confident when things aren’t going well?
One possible take is that you can take previous confidence into where your golf game is right now. Tiger Woods actually did this many times. The confidence that he had winning tournaments when he was five, beating eight and nine year olds, he took that to the amateur ranks. Then he made the step up into the professional game and won in his first few tournaments, and then he went on to win the Masters shortly afterwards. He kept transferring the confidence to each different level. Most golfers will tell you that this is a hard thing to do.
What if you could transfer your confidence from when you were first able to consistently get the ball off the ground to where you are now?
A fast track to confidence is to mentally practice, through a process called; visualisation.
You can create a feeling of “déjà vu” in advance, it’s like working it the other way around.
You can use your mind’s eye to see yourself ripping it off that first tee. And then you can do it again in real life.
We know that the brain doesn’t really know the difference between a real-life event, and an imagined event. Consider how you felt when you woke up from a nightmare. It wasn’t really happening, but your heart was racing, you were still sweating and you were breathing fast.
At my events I take people through an exercise where they literally visualise cutting into a lemon, seeing the lemon up close to their face and then biting into the lemon…even though there’s no lemon, they start to produce saliva.
My first real experience with this was when I was studying sports psychology through a gentleman by the name of Steve Backley. He used to be the world record holder for the javelin in Athletics. In the build up to breaking the record Steve was injured, so he used this process of visualisation. He was relaxed, lying down and visualising throwing the longest ever distance with the javelin. He got so good at this, they wired him up to electrodes and his muscles were actually firing.
The way YOU can do this is to first get in a relaxed state. This can be sitting or ideally lying down. Really focus on your breathing, slow your breathing down and the more you relax, the clearer your mind will be. Once in a relaxed state, I like to start with the first tee, or even before the first tee arriving to the golf course.
You want to see things going well but you don’t necessarily want to visualise the perfect round of golf (you can do this as well). It might make more sense to visualise yourself, overcoming challenges from different parts of the course that you’re playing or your local course. Visualise yourself hitting beautiful recovery shots.
Key point here: Do not visualise the shots that put you in trouble, skip those, but visualise yourself holding putts, overcoming challenges, getting up and down, great bunker shots. Visualise all of these different scenarios. Of course, with the tee shots, you know exactly where they’re going to be from, so you can visualise exactly how you want them to be.
Include all of your senses. Smell the grass, feel the wind on your skin, hear the sound of the ball and the sounds of your playing partners, see through your own eyes. Really feel how it will feel to hit those great shots and recover well.
There are many different ways to do this.
Some people like to really focus on the images, other people like to focus on the feelings and some people like to focus on both.
Some people will see in fast forward, some people in slow motion.
There’s no right or wrong way to do it in that sense.
One sure-fire way to do it is to view it like an actual practice session that you’re committed to.
Just sort of having a little go at it won’t do anything for your mental game or for your confidence in the same way that just popping into the gym and casually picking up a couple of dumbbells won’t do anything for your physique. You’ve got to commit to this practice, and then watch what happens to your confidence on the golf course because your brain has already seen it before.
I hope this helps my friends!
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