The swing may feel good, the body may feel good and you may feel in excellent physical shape.
So how does that thought creep in as you approach the golf course?
“I’ve put it in the trees on the right hand side of the 1st hole a lot lately, I hope I don’t do that today.”
Sometimes a negative thought arrives before you even get the bag out of your car.
They can also happen in the middle of the round and right before a shot.
“You always pull it left on par 3’s like this.”
These thoughts create unhelpful pictures in our mind.
When I think to myself: “I don’t want to put the ball in water” the mind comes up with an image of the ball going in the water.
It’s a little bit like when a young child is walking along with a cup of drink. The child will be walking along perfectly fine when the mother, father or guardian will say: “Don’t spill it!”
What happens a lot of the time? The child spills the drink! The image of spilling the drink moves across the child’s mind and the body did what it thought the mind wanted it to do.
What if I say to you, as you read this…. “Don’t think of the zebra!”. What does your mind do? You just thought of a zebra. Your body can often go where the mind directed it (and it doesn’t understand the word “don’t”.) In Golf’s case it might be the water, a bunker, out of bounds or the trees.
Alternatively, you could get super conscious about the hazards and you open the clubface and then you put it totally 50 yards to the other side. Both, ultimately extremely far away from what you ‘really’ wanted.
The challenge is, we get involved with these thoughts. We agree with the negativity, “I do put it in the water a lot on holes like this”.
Always remember: The thoughts aren’t you.
Here’s something you can practice at home and on the golf course.
Picture yourself sitting alongside a busy freeway. Cars are shooting past at 70 miles an hour.
Would you run out into the traffic? Of course not. Let’s view thoughts in the same way. Thoughts move across our mind and we can observe them, not get involved with them, just like the traffic.
The first step to take control of these thoughts, is to be aware that they are actually not you. “You are not your thoughts” is a key idea. I know it sounds like a strange idea but practice, watching your thoughts, because then you’re training yourself not to get involved with them. If you think something like: “I always put it in the trees on this hole”, rather than getting involved with it just watch it go by. This takes some practice and once you’ve mastered this idea of just being aware of the thoughts and letting them go by, you can then become intentional about what you WANT to happen.
You can think something like: “what is my specific target on this shot?”
“What is the best way for me to execute a smooth swing that sends the ball towards my target?” Your brain is going to answer these questions: “The best way is to relax, take a deep breath, go through your routine, really get into your target and swing freely towards it.”
Notice what that does to the image. None of that creates an image of the hazard. It just creates the image of where you want the ball to go.
Does this mean you’re going to send the ball to the target every time? Of course not.
We’re talking about playing your best golf, more often.
We’re talking about playing consistent golf, more often and out of every 1000 shots that you follow the process the more regularly you will play your best golf and execute the shot you wanted to.
Be patient with it, be patient with yourself and watch what happens to your golf game, and the consistency of your results.
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