Why negative golf and anger are so bad

Once, at the height of his career, Seve Ballesteros was asked why he didn´t get angry when he missed a short put.

"I have instant amnesia", he responded.

Ballesteros like other greats, such as Jack Nicklaus, who never lost his composure on the course, knew a lot about Mental Golf and how the mind works.

Man, I play a lot of golf and a large majority of the players I see get angry when they hit a poor shot, complain about the course set up, whine about slow play, cry about how badly they usually play on this type of course, and so on and so forth.

Last January I played an Open tournament with a couple of teen age kids, and I was amazed at how fast they signed their scorecards so that they could run off and complain to their friends about the two or three disasters in their rounds.

Andrew Fogg, the "Golf Hypnotist", wrote a great article about the subject, called, "The Psychology of letting everybody else complain while you win". He describes how the mind works and tells the story about how Jack Nicklaus used to listen to his opponents whine and complain, and he would know they wouldn´t be beating him that week.

It all comes down to the psychological principle of reinforcement. This principle says that our powerful unconscious mind will do its utmost to carry out whatever we consciously talk, think or write about.

So when we get angry about hitting it out of bounds, or hitting it in the water, in all probability it will happen again, because we have recorded these events with intense emotion (anger) in our unconscious minds.

And it so happens that our unconscious mind does not understand  that what we got angry about was bad, and that we don't want to do it again. This is because the unconscious mind, as opposed to our conscious mind, does not posses the power of rationality, and is not able to judge if something is good or bad.

So while anything bad that occurs on the golf course should be ignored or forgotten immediately, on the other hand, great shots or positive situations should be savoured, and celebrated, so that we make sure we are making a strong and lasting positive recording on our powerful unconscious mind processor.