Golf

Golf is one of the most mentally fragile sports. It doesn’t take much of a negative thought to tighten up the wrong muscles enough to change the angle of your club face, sending your ball into a different zip code. It’s no wonder that so many of the players on both the men’s and women’s tours have been regularly meeting with sports performance consultants to work on their mental game.

If you want to consistently knock strokes off your score, you can’t leave the mental part of your game to chance. Maybe you don’t need convincing. Perhaps you’ve had the heart-warming experience of choking before. Maybe you had a 3 or 4 stroke lead going into the final few holes only to self-destruct and steal defeat from the closing jaws of victory. Or perhaps you were shooting out of your mind until you got to the 14th hole, only to have one of your “friends” inform you that if you keep it up, you just might break 80, 90, or 100 for the very first time. Isn’t it interesting that for the rest of those rounds your ball finds every sand trap, water hazard, and out-of-bounds possible?

Or maybe you’re the kind of golfer who regularly allows your frustration and self-directed anger with a bad shot, unlucky lie or bad hole to hang on, bleeding into the next several holes and blowing up your round?

1. Concentration is THE key to playing championship golf
2. What you focus on both before and during your shot can affect your self-confidence, ability to handle pressure and therefore, the quality of your play.
3. You want to train yourself to stay focused on one shot at a time, in the “NOW.”
4. When your focus drifts ahead to score, or pages behind on a bad shot, you want to quickly “reset.”
5. Keep your focus on YOU, your game, your shot and NOT on what others are doing.
6. Championship golf happens when you focus on FEEL and NOT your THINKING

Playing your best, regardless of your skill level, requires that you put yourself on automatic and hit “engaging” your thinking. This doesn’t mean that you should try to “stop thinking, “ which is impossible! The mental skill you need to learn is to allow your negative or score-related thoughts to go by getting your focus more on what you’re doing: That is, your pre-shot ritual, the feel of your swing, etc.

Thinking distracts you from the proper focus, tightens your muscles, and undercuts your confidence. In sum, thinking will kill your golf game. Herein lies golf’s biggest problem. Golf is the kind of game where it takes only a second or so to hit the ball and then you get to spend 5-10 minutes thinking about what you just did and what you’re going to do on the next shot. It’s during this dead time that far too many golfers plan their next mistake.

To get out of that mental trap, your very first step is awareness. You must figure out what you are doing wrong! You can’t correct any problem in your game unless you first become aware of exactly what that problem is. From there, you can begin to apply the right mental toughness techniques to improve your concentration and get in the zone of peak performance on autopilot.

We can help get you there!

As a Sports Performance Consultant, Dr. Alan Goldberg works with golfers at all levels from PGA and LPGA pros all the way down to junior competitors, helping them develop mental toughness and play to their potential. He is the author of the revolutionary book, This Is Your Brain On Sports. contributor to many sports magazines, and a regular speaker at coaching clinics around the country.

Developing good concentration skills will help you believe in yourself and have the self-confidence to perform your best when you’re under pressure on stage. These focusing skills will also help you manage the last-minute negativity and self-doubts that are so common to big performances.

With a little work, these mental skills as well as a few important others can be systematically trained to the point where you develop the reputation as a mentally tough dancer.

Dr. Alan Goldberg is an internationally recognized expert in the field of performance enhancement. As a Sports Performance consultant, Dr. G works with dancers around the world. As a columnist for a number of national and international publications including Irish Dance & Culture Magazine, Dr. G writes on the subjects of peak performance training and mental toughness. He is the author of the revolutionary book, This Is Your Brain On Sports. Be sure to check out his popular Mental Toughness Training Package.

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