Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

reaction to circumstances.

    Confidence Drill: Built-Up Obstacles

    Philosopher and psychologist William James once offered up the idea that we all should “do something every day or two for no other reason than its difficulty.” One hundred years of psychological research since confirms that the presence of challenges and overcoming those difficult obstacles builds confidence.
    To build confidence, press yourself to try new things. That means dropping a few balls 250 yards from the green and seeing if you can reach it if you’ve never tried before. It means maybe playing a round with only a handful of clubs. You’ll learn how to get the ball in the hole, without getting bogged down in the minutiae of calculating which iron is your 167-yard club.
    If you don’t play enough golf to where dropping balls or playing with half a set of clubs is practical, use the practice green as your obstacle course. Like the Tour players, try holing 100 five-foot putts in a row or holing out a half-dozen bunker shots before you leave the area. The point is you’ll never need to make 100 five-footers in a row when you’re really playing a round, but if you get in the habit of holing putts of this length, having one on the seventeenth hole in your next round won’t be a new challenge for you. You’ll have figured out how to get beyond that putt. You’ll know you can do it, and knowing is the first step toward doing.

    Self-efficacy most clearly demonstrates itself when golfers are at their lowest ebb. Self-efficacious golfers do not fear failure because they know that ultimate success is a function of how they deal with that failure. The term I heard over and over when I spoke with PGA pros was how they must “weather” adversity. Success is the result of learning how to cope with setbacks in ways that golfers emerge from adversity stronger rather than weaker. As a result, true competitors welcome adversity knowing that it will weather them in adaptive ways.
    No human endeavor is better than golf at exposing a person’s shortcomings. In that sense it is the most revealing of games. Regrettably, some golfers are doomed to repeat their mistakes over and over until they eventually lose their love of the game. Golfers who practice sloppily tend to play sloppily under pressure. Stubborn golfers who refuse to adapt find themselves surpassed by technical and technological innovations. Golfers who have bad tempers play badly on courses that require patience. Golfers who are too passive have difficulty tapping into what American psychologist William James called “the fighting instinct” required to conquer life’s many battles. And finally, golfers who do not find effective ways to nurture their own self-confidence are doomed to be victimized by the type of paralyzing fear that leads to choking, and which ultimately ensures they lose their love for the game.
    In fact, adversity is the very ingredient necessary to cultivate mental toughness. Just as strong currents yield more resilient fish, and resistance training leads to strong muscles, adversity leads to mental toughness. On that note, the role of adversity in golf is best summarized by Professor Pajares’s observation that “when failure is normative, resilience becomes second nature.”
    I urge the golfers I work with not to be afraid of golf’s challenges and inherent difficulties, but rather to acknowledge them and learn to deal with them effectively. In fact, to welcome them. The golfer who cannot deal with slumps, mechanical and motivational setbacks, injuries, and life’s day-to-day challenges will never be a top-notch competitor. On the PGA Tour as in life, growth occurs from rigorous challenge. As Stanford professor Albert Bandura once observed, a robust sense of self-efficacy does not come from ignoring the odds. Real self-efficacy requires knowing the odds and feeling confident that you can beat them. We must welcome the tough times and view them as a down payment for subsequent success.

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    nietzsche and chris dimarco

    Usually, we come to know the benefit of adversity only in retrospect. Maybe we should learn to take comfort in the knowledge that hard times make us better. We have to believe that.

    Existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche isn’t exactly remembered as a motivational speaker, but his understanding and assessment of the power of difficulty and struggle is more poignant and more succinct than anything you might read from Tony Robbins.