About five years ago I started experimenting with a Mental Method that allows me to significantly improve my performance under pressure on the golf course.
The truth is that the results so far have been spectacular, and since September 2007 I have won over 50 tournaments, some of them of great significance to me. Two top flight Club Championships (I play at the Prince of Wales Country Club, home of the Nationwide Tour´s, Chile Classic) and three Chilean National Senior Championships (2008, 2009 and 2012), and many others.
Everything started with a simple observation: How our performance changes on the golf course when we are "under pressure", nervous, or forced to make a score, or a critical shot. Week after week we watch on TV how the best players in the world “choke” when the stakes are very high, or when severe pressure hits them.
In the last 30 years, a flock of sports psychologists, performance coaches and mental golf gurus have been advising leading golfers and writing a bunch of books on how to “manage” the mind on the golf course. But really, judging by the results, most have failed.
I am not, by training, a psychologist. I´m just an avid golfer who loves competing, and who put together a Mental Method to avoid “choking” under pressure.
My objective with this english language Blog is to hopefully replicate my success with my 15 month old blog in spanish. Here go my initial observations on why there is so much choking in golf.
First, 99% of the teaching of the game is technical and mechanical. From the start, we are taught the fundamentals of the golf swing but almost nothing about the mental side, or how to manage our way around a golf course. When I was a kid nobody taught me how to concentrate better or what to do when I got nervous. “Just practice your butt off and consciously think about getting your swing right”, was the only formula.
Second, it happens that the conscious mind is a pretty limited processor. It can´t retain more that six or seven items of information at a time, it´s extremely rational, critical and fearful, as it remembers many negatives from the past,and it´s very bad at processing large quantities of information, such as needed to properly execute the golf swing under pressure.
It´s the “right” brain (that controls the unconscious mind) that is powerful. In fact, a million times more powerful than the conscious mind. It´s the one that stores every golf swing we have ever done, remembers trends, patterns and manages our body movements. The unconscious mind also generates target awareness, and knows all about depth of perception. It is not fearful as it does not have critical faculties of its own.
Third, on the other hand, the unconscious mind tends to do this really well. Not surprisingly. When we are playing relaxed and loose (usually a friendly, or when we are just playing alone) we tend to play very well. Everything comes easy, our putts tend to drop and our score tends to be very good . But just let us play a tournament, and give us a card, and things change ....... "this is serious, I have to do well, I have to remember the new swing tip I was taught last week. And let´ s not do anything stupid”.
The conclusion is simple and obvious. We play better when we just “let go” and play with our “instinct”, or with our unconscious mind. But just put a card in our pockets, a few bucks on the line, or participate in a tournament, and we try “consciously” to play our best golf. And when the pressure hits, we consciously try even harder. But, as we have already mentioned, the left brain, that controls the conscious mind, is a pretty darned limited processor with which to swing a golf club. By contrast, when we're just playing for fun, calm and relaxed, what happens is that we are in the mode that best fits golf: the automatic, intuitive or unconscious mode.
So what we need to develop, therefore, is an effective Method that allows us to stay in the "unconscious" or "automatic" mind when we are under pressure. We must recognize that it is not easy and that even the best of Mental Methods will not always work all the time.
However, based on my personal experience of these past five years, I´m convinced that any disciplined and motivated golfer can significantly improve his performance under pressure by incorporating a solid Mental Method into his game.
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