Mental Golf Newsletter

For faster change, borrow something from yourself

I've played golf with many successful business executives. They drive their organizations forward using valuable skills such as discipline and routines. Surprisingly, many of these talented people apply none of these skills to their golf game. Golf seems to be a place they abandon all of that "work" and do whatever they feel like doing on the course. They say they play to relax. Then they get frustrated with their game and never improve. Sound relaxing? It's common to equate fun and relaxation to a lack of structure and discipline. High-performing athletes know differently - in fact their way to relaxation and high performance is through these abilities. We all have them in some area of our lives, and we can take advantage of them in our golf game.

Our brains have a way of transferring skills from one area of life to another if we prompt it correctly. It duplicates itself much more easily than trying to start from scratch. Research has proven that if you imagine performing in a certain way, as if it's already true and in vivid detail, it activates our brain and body in a manner that's nearly the same as actually doing it.

What you can do:There are many powerful NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) techniques that accelerate this process, but they're difficult to convey in a short newsletter. However, you'll have a great deal of success if you do the following:

  • Select one specific quality you have in one area of your life. For example, if you have a really strong routine in your life (like brushing your teeth when you go to bed) use that as your base.
  • Now, see yourself having the same consistency, and bring in the same feeling of routine in reading every putt or visualizing every tee-shot. It brings results faster with less work than if you started to practice a routine without this transfer.
  • Spend 3 minutes a day doing the above exercise. For even stronger results, spend an additional 10 minutes twice a week actually doing it in your course's practice area. After a few weeks, you might be surprised to see how natural and automatic the new habit becomes.

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Play well.