Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

“confidence” has been so often used in the world of athletics that it has almost become a cliché. Everyone realizes its importance. Golfers need it. They lose it. They find it again, and lose it again, and then just when they are ready to give up looking for it, they find it again (or more often, it finds them). They don’t know why. They don’t know where. They don’t know how.
    Some talk about the idea of being “in the zone,” an almost undefinable state of grace that great champions seem to find when it matters most. In 2004,
Golf Digest
even tried to investigate the subject in a wonderful cover story by award-winning writer Jaime Diaz. Though the article detailed the advancements made through technique, approach, and technology, it concludes, “Though there’s a good chance the zone will become more accessible, none of these advances guarantees it won’t remain rare and elusive. It’s a possibility even the most aggressive seekers placidly accept. Something elemental tells us that the mystery of golf was never meant to be solved.”
    Of course, I’m a big believer that mental success is not a mystery. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to achieve. It is the old chicken and egg dilemma: Confidence produces good shots. Good shots produce confidence. But which comes first? Playing well requires confidence. Confidence depends on playing well. Most golfers I meet have given up trying to understand the whys and hows of confidence and have instead regressed to just hoping it’s there when they need it most. Yeah, confidence is a chicken and an egg: as fickle as a chicken and as fragile as an egg.

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    davis love iii: confidence confidential

    For a successful golfer, confidence isn’t just a word, it’s a state of being. It affects every circumstance, every situation, every interpretation, every sentence. Davis Love III knows how much of a difference it can make:

    On a scale of 1 to 100, I would say my confidence is around 90 because it is not perfect. I think I see a few players whose confidence is always better. Guys like Tiger and Mickelson always have a swagger. Sometimes I doubt myself a bit, and get down on myself, so my confidence isn’t a hundred all the time. But I think it’s close to it. When I am not confident I’ll say something like, “I wonder if I can play well this week.” When I am confident, I don’t wonder that. When I am feeling more confident, I am more patient and I am more forgiving. A bad shot doesn’t stress me out. You don’t ever hit a shot and ask, “What happened there?” Instead you let it go and go on to the next shot. I am more into just playing the next shot rather than dwelling on the last shot when I am confident. I say, “The next one I’ll chip in. The next one I’ll hit close.” And I am also, it’s easier for me to get going into a round mentally when I am confident, when I am excited I can’t wait for tomorrow morning. When I am striping it, sometimes the eagerness gets in the way, but I have an easier time.
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    Another thing about confidence is that we can see it in others as clearly as we can see it in ourselves. Think of the memories confidence has given golf fans:

    1996 Masters: Greg Norman losing it.

    1999 Players Championship, eighteenth green: Hal Sutton rediscovering it.

    1951 U.S. Open at Merion: Hogan masking it.

    1975 Masters: Nicklaus protecting it.

    2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach: Tiger exuding it.

    2004 PGA Championship, first playoff hole: Vijay Singh seizing it.

    Moreover, it must be had in the proper quantity. Have too little, and your opponent looms larger than he really is; have too much, and you attempt risky shots that invariably cost strokes. Defeat is imminent in either case. Balance has to be found.
    But note that the word “confidence” can be used in all sorts of ways. It can refer to other people (I can be confident that Zach Johnson will win the next British Open). It can refer to the actions of inanimate objects (most days I am fairly confident that my car will start). Even when we use it to refer to ourselves, it may be unrelated to what we can or cannot do (I can be confident that my boss likes me). The confidence we need to speak about, the quiet assuredness that mastery golfers display, actually requires a different term. It’s what psychologists call
self-efficacy
.

    what is self-efficacy?

    In a landmark book entitled
How We Think
, philosopher, psychologist, and master educator John Dewey put