Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

understanding the game’s mysteries. In
kaizen
, you embrace the process on your own terms and you are totally in control of your own improvement. In
kaizen
, the game lies subservient to your process of improvement. Improvement is a constant goal, yet it happens not simply because it is a goal, but because the focus on the process allows it to happen.
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    If you golf for recreation, no doubt you love the game as well, and perhaps you enjoy competing against your buddies. It’s likely that you find golf a great way to relax and recharge the batteries. If you’re a recreational golfer, you likely have reasons for playing in the annual company outing or the club championship that are unrelated to playing a leisurely round with your friends.
    In professional psychology, the reasons why individuals choose to engage in a particular task or activity are called
achievement goal orientations
. That’s fancy language, but what it means essentially is that we choose to do something for a certain end, a particular objective; in short, we are motivated by the activity because in some way it enhances our sense of self, our personal well-being. Those objectives govern our approach to the activity from the outset. These orientations are critical factors that influence a person’s level of motivation and achievement, as well as the degree of anxiety and fear they experience as they engage in those activities.

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    ben hogan’s real secret

    Ben Hogan won sixty-four times in his professional career, nine of them major championships. Fifty of those wins, including all of the majors, came after his thirty-third birthday. While many observers of the game suggest that Hogan’s improved mechanics were the source of his success, Hogan himself believed at least a little bit that there was more to it than the famous Five Fundamentals he and author Herbert Warren Wind wrote about in their famous instruction book. Certainly, Hogan was relentless in his pursuit of perfecting his golf swing. That’s the
kaizen
we’ve talked about before. That attention to constant improvement led some to suggest that Hogan had unearthed some sort of secret to the technique of the golf swing. Because Hogan never really answered questions about what his secret might be, books and magazines in the years since have often tried to discover what this minuscule bit of mechanics was. Maybe there was something Hogan did with his left wrist or right forefinger that keyed his repeatable swing, but what keyed his success in the game may not have been totally physical. Indeed, Hogan suggests it went beyond the mere execution of the golf swing. Hogan relentlessly focused on the task at hand. His mind was constantly occupied with the variables that might influence the next golf shot. In other words, his battles were always personal, always between himself and the golf course. Ben Hogan’s real secret? Concentration. “I didn’t win in the 1930s because I hadn’t yet learned to concentrate,” he once wrote, “to ignore the gallery and the other golfers, and to shut my mind against everything but my own game.” Have you learned to narrow your focus and to shut your mind? You don’t have to be Ben Hogan to learn that kind of skill.
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    The primary motivation for some golfers, whether they are average golfers or tour players, is to earn recognition from others. For these golfers, what others say about them is powerfully important, sometimes more important than improving and developing their game. While preparing to hit an important shot, their minds are often divided: One side of their mind is trying to focus on executing the golf shot, but the other side is busy worrying about what other people will think if they blow the shot. One can easily understand how such extraneous concerns can interfere with the mechanics of golf. Rather than being lost in the thought of hitting the precise shot they want, golfers whose attention is focused on raising their personal stock in the eyes of others often become indecisive and uncertain with the club in their hands. These motivations, these emotions are not necessarily at the forefront of our thinking, but they lurk in the shadows, and their presence can be a subtle but powerful influence. Of course, as all golfers know, the quickest way to unravel a golf swing is to introduce any type of uncertainty and indecision into one’s mind. It doesn’t matter if you’re a professional golfer who is preoccupied with the fear