Harvey Penick: Suggestions and the Mind

"The golfing area of the brain is a fragile thing that is terribly suceptible to suggestion".

                                                                                                                      Harvey Penick

Tom Kite, Harvey Penick y Ben Crenshaw

Harvey Penick died 18 years ago but he is an unforgettable figure in the history of world golf.

It is highly recomendable to read about his life because he is the best swing instructor that ever lived.

Penick was a Texan that was passionate about teaching the golf swing and his ideas only became known in a massive way when he decided to publish, at the very end of his life, his thousands of handwritten notes that had been stored in a cardboard box, at his home, over a lifetime.

His first book, a masterpiece, was called HARVEY PENICK´S LITTLE RED BOOK and was only published some three years before his death.

Penick taught thousands of amateur and profesional golfers. His better known pupils are Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kite, PGA Tour stars. And Mickey Wright, Kathy Whitworth and Betsy Rawls, LPGA legends.

Mr Penick, as he was known, was the University of Texas men´s golf coach for 32 years and led his team to dozens of wins in USA intercollegiate competitions.

But, what I have discovered is that Harvey Penick also knew a ton about the mind and Mental Golf.

When his youngsters from the University of Texas had to face pressure packed situations, his advice was to "Just take dead aim". He knew what he was talking about, because, as the best modern Mental Coaches in the world know and subscribe to, this simple advice avoids negative thought entering the mind at crucial moments.

A few days ago I was skimming through the Little Red Book and I came across Penick´s frase that I placed at the begining of this article. I would like to reapeat it because I think it is of great wisdom:

"The golfing area of the brain is a fragile thing that is terribly suceptible to suggestion".

Enourmous for me because it fits in so well with my personal discovery two years ago of the method of Conscious Autosuggestion and that led me to write my first book, earlier this year, called: Mental Golf: The Power of Conscious Autosuggestion.

Penick didn´t like when his friend Jimmy Demaret named a shot for pressure situations as his "choke stroke". Demaret wanted to be able to hit a shot straight under pressure, however difficult the situation. It was a three quarter swing designed not to fail, hence the "choke swing".

Harvey Penick didn´t want to hear anything involving "choking" because he knew that the mind, being terribly suceptible to suggestion, could, in fact, lead the golfer to do just that.

This thinking by the great Mr. Penick is fully corrobarated by frenchman Emile Coué, the father of psychotherapy, and the creator of the Method of Conscious Autosuggestion developed at the beginning of the twentieth century.

What we say, think or write about our golf is tremendously relevant and consistent with the results we produce on the course.

Coué teaches us that there exist two types of autosuggestions: unconscious autosuggestions and conscious autosuggestions.

Unconscious autosuggestions can produce the best or the worst effects depending on the circumstances.

The eternal optimist,  by nature generates unconscious autosuggestions that are positive and confident, and tends to be a happy and successful person.

But, on the other hand, the enternal pesimist tends to generate unconscious autosuggestions that are negative, and almost always is a person that does badly in life and is a failure.

However (and this is the key proposal behind the Method of Conscious Autosuggestion), CONSCIOUS autosuggestions can be crafted carefully to ensure that these conscious messages are positive, confident and optimistic  in nature and, then, derived appropiately to the Unconscious Mind.

In this way Conscious Autosuggestion can become an incredibly powerful tool for life and, yes, also for golf.

This makes a lot of sense because golf is a hugely complex game. Every shot counts, played on a terrain full of difficult obstacles, and, furthermore, the hole, where we must put the ball into, is extremely small.

Not surprisingly, then, there is huge pressure in competitive golf and the game requieres a very sound and strong mind. This is why Chapter 2 of my book is called: "Golf will hit us when we are down".

It is common, then, that a golfer´s autosuggestions (unconscious or conscious) tend to be mostly negative. And, as our Unconscious Mind cannot make judgements and accepts what it recieves as true, it ends up carrying out a "programing" that is negative, not confident and pesimistic in nature, that explains why many great golfers cannot score well, especially under pressure situations.

This is why Harvey Penick makes so much sense to me when he rejected Jimmy Demaret´s "choke stroke"or when he advised his players to "try and go to dinner with golfers who are great putters".

Yes, because as the mind is terribly suceptible to suggestion, a good putter is always more confident and positive than a poor one, and Mr. Penick didnt want his players anywhere near somebody who talked about a "choke shot".

The conclusion to all of this is obvious:

Any golfer, of any handicap. must always feed his Unconscious only with positive, confident and optimistic autosugestions. Anything negative, pesimistic or lacking in confidence must be eliminated totally from thoughts and conversations, on and off the course.