Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

shots must come from passion for learning and playing the game.
    Mike’s story is still being written. He has begun to understand the ironies of golf and has begun to approach golf from a mastery perspective. He still finds his mind distracted sometimes with ego-oriented thoughts, but those thoughts do not cripple him as they once did. Mike is definitely having more fun at golf now than he was having before, and this fun translates across practice sessions, recreational rounds, and competitive rounds of golf. The first thing he does on arriving at the course for tournaments is to introduce himself to the golf course. Now he knows what Hogan, Nicklaus, and Woods always knew. That golf is a private matter between two players: a golfer and the course on which he’s playing.

    When you require the approval of others, you give them the key to your emotions—and you forfeit a fair amount of control over your confidence, too. Ego golfers view a bad round of golf as humiliating, debilitating, and embarrassing. As a result, they play with the ever-present sense that humiliation is just around the corner. That, friends, in a clinical setting might otherwise be described as neurosis; for our purposes, here it’s called playing with fear.
    For ego golfers, a golf round can be an emotional roller coaster—euphorically high at certain times, excruciatingly low at others—all depending on how they think they are being viewed and evaluated. (Note: That sense of evaluation isn’t limited to outsiders, either. An ego golfer’s self-evaluation can be just as destructive.) They move through the golf course trying to show off with good shots and trying to avoid hitting embarrassingly bad shots. Curiously, they have an equal tendency to play overly conservative at times, and wildly aggressive at others. Facing any kind of pressure, ego golfers inevitably must do a dance with the dreaded “c” word, choke. Whether they are trying to hold off opponents, protect leads, or play “just good enough” to maintain whatever slight advantage they have, choking is never far from their perspective. Again, you don’t have to be trying to hold on to a one-shot lead at the U.S. Open to know this sensation. You can be one-up on your buddy on the seventeenth tee, or you can need bogey on 18 to break 90.
    This difference between seeking approval and avoiding embarrassment can be well understood as the difference between “playing to impress” or “playing to avoid looking foolish.” Spanish legend Seve Ballesteros once quipped that in the days when he was at the top of his game he would cry on the tenth tee because he had only nine chances left to make birdie. Now he cries because he has nine holes left to play, which leaves him nine more chances to make bogey. This certainly illustrates the difference between playing fearless, mastery golf or playing fear-filled, ego golf.
    The confidence of ego golfers often fluctuates depending on the stakes attached to their golf, as well as on where they stand in relation to those stakes. Professional ego golfers can easily be influenced by the prestige of a field, the amount of prize money, their playing partners’ scores, who they are playing with, or the attention and respect they expect to garnish depending on how well they play. For recreational golfers, if their boss is part of their foursome, rest assured that the confidence of the ego golfer rests securely in the boss’s hands rather than in the golfer’s skills, where it should be.
    I once began a lecture to the Georgia PGA by asking the following question, which I believe is one of the most interesting in all of golf:
Why do competitive golfers typically play to the level of their “competition” rather than to the level of their “capability”?
As I hope you now better understand, different achievement orientations are often the reason why some golfers play to the level of their competition, either falling back to the level of those behind or responding to the challenge of those ahead. This is because they are not playing the golf course to the best of their ability and trying as hard as they can on every shot. They have not learned what Tiger meant when he said that “there are two opponents in the game: yourself and the golf course. If you can somehow combat those two, you’ll do all right.”
    Instead, ego golfers in a tournament setting see other players as their primary opponents. For recreational golfers, they see the