Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

up.”

    • Babe Ruth is famous for his past home run record, but for decades he also held the record for strikeouts. He hit 714 home runs and struck out 1,330 times in his career (about which he said, “Every strike brings me closer to the next home run”). College basketball coach John Wooden once explained that winners make the most errors.

    • The great tennis champion Stan Smith was rejected as a ball boy for a Davis Cup tennis match because he was “too awkward and clumsy.” He went on to win Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. And, incidentally, he led the U.S. team to eight Davis Cup victories.

    • Johnny Unitas’s first pass in the NFL was intercepted and returned for a touchdown. Joe Montana’s first pass was also intercepted. And while we’re on quarterbacks, during his first season Troy Aikman threw twice as many interceptions (18) as touchdowns (9), and he didn’t win a single game.

    • Michael Jordan and Bob Cousy were each cut from their high school basketball teams.

    • Cyclist Lance Armstrong was cut from his high school football and swim teams. He turned to cycling and in his first race as a professional, he finished dead last. He endured the next five years of being despised by the European racing community, who would put tacks and glass in the road hoping he’d pop a tire. His first five attempts at the Tour de France resulted in dropping out because he couldn’t finish the race. After surviving stage three cancer and trying to mount a comeback, he was turned down by every single sponsor he contacted (one sponsor remarked, “That guy will never race again”). In 2004, Lance Armstrong won his sixth Tour de France in a row!

    As these examples suggest, healthy, hearty, and resilient beliefs in one’s abilities serve as buffers between failure and eventual success. They foster the determination to keep working in the absence of immediate or sometimes even remote rewards.
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    Self-efficacy differs from what people refer to as “self-esteem.” Particularly in today’s world, self-esteem has come to represent the feeling that one has about one’s self. When you hear on television that someone has “low self-esteem,” you automatically get an image of someone who doesn’t like himself very much, someone with a low sense of self-worth, someone who feels unvalued. Such a person clearly needs attention and affection, perhaps even a little sympathy.
    Self-esteem is an emotional judgment that speaks to how people “feel” about themselves, perhaps even whether they like themselves or not. Self-efficacy is different in that it is a cognitive judgment of what a person believes he can or cannot accomplish, independent of how he feels about the task. I have met my share of golfers who, for varied reasons, have very low self-esteem (they don’t feel very good about themselves). In some cases, these golfers have powerful personal problems and problematic backgrounds of all sorts. Interestingly, despite their low self-esteem, many of these golfers possess rather strong self-efficacy about their golf skills. That is to say, they believe they can play good golf even though they don’t like themselves a good deal of the time. Similarly, I have also met a good number of golfers who have wonderful self-esteem and are relatively content with their personal lives despite the fact that they suffer debilitating crises of confidence on the golf course. The key to successfully helping these golfers improve their performance does not lie in helping them like themselves more, as many television and radio psychologists might recommend. Rather, helping golfers improve their performance means helping them develop confidence in their ability to manage themselves and their thoughts so that they can produce the type of golf required to be successful when it counts, the type of golf they clearly have the capability to produce.

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    david toms and confidence grade

    The power of a strong sense of self-efficacy isn’t a constant even for an accomplished tour pro. David Toms knows that there are times that his confidence isn’t strong enough, but he also knows that maintaining a strong enough baseline prevents disappointment from turning into disaster. I spoke with him during one of those lulls, and his assessment of himself and those around him illustrated how the game in your head holds power over the game in your hands.

    On a scale from zero to one hundred, my confidence is probably about an 80 right