Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

ability to succeed at a particular activity is strongly influenced by how successfully we’ve accomplished that activity in the past. Successful golfers should certainly be confident golfers. Make no mistake about it: Winning is the most powerful confidence booster, and all the psychological card tricks in the world can’t undo that simple fact. Winners know what it takes to win. Indeed, their sense of self-efficacy goes into hyperdrive the moment they come to be aware that they know what it takes to win.
    Conversely, as we all know, there is no greater confidence buster than failure. But the sting of failure is especially devastating to those who have little confidence to begin with, for they are poorly immunized against the self-defeating feelings that typically accompany that failure. In competitive golf, the rookie golfer who is unsure of his competence is far more likely to encounter debilitating thoughts of self-doubt when he encounters a mild slump than is the veteran golfer who has successfully overcome such slumps in the past. To the habitual self-doubter, every missed cut, pushed putt, missed fairway, or duffed chip registers strongly in the mind.
    Average golfers are particularly prone to this negative pattern, because obviously they do not have at their disposal the wealth of success that better players have experienced. To me, the challenge to the average golfer is to narrow the range of focus. They must learn to remember the good shots so that those are the ones that the mind flashes to in a crucial moment.
    Those whose confidence is rooted in a great deal of prior success aren’t battered by such pangs of fear in the clutch. Their success has strengthened their self-efficacy beliefs to the degree that those beliefs act as a buffer against self-doubt, fear, or panic.
    Of course, those for whom success comes easily must also be on their guard. Failure is especially hard to digest when one is accustomed to quick results and easy success. A resilient confidence requires battle-tested experience in overcoming obstacles through hard work and sustained effort. Past difficulties, setbacks, and hard falls in pursuing the things we desire can be powerfully energizing, for they teach us the value (and cost) of the successes we finally attain. Such challenges simply provide us with the opportunity to learn how to turn failure into success by improving our skills and learning how to do better the next time around. Once we learn how to rebound from failures, subsequent failures get interpreted merely as springboards to future success. As the wise Confucius once observed, “Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall.”
    When our memory is full of past failures, losses, and setbacks that did not lead to ultimate success, it is unlikely that we are going to have much confidence in our attempts to endure a current challenge in golf, be that challenge to hit a narrow fairway, or make an important putt. Conversely, when our memory is replete with successes and victories, difficult tasks do not fill us with apprehension or fear. Rather, the subconscious brain sends out a message saying something like, “You’ve succeeded at this before. You can do this. No need to worry, it’s all under control. Just do what you did last time.” Indeed, there is no better or stronger source of information about our capabilities than how we’ve performed in similar situations in the past, for our past performances provide a mental road map for us to follow.
    A golfer facing an important 7-iron in a clutch situation feels confident and poised or nervous or edgy based on how he’s performed in similar situations in the past. If in past and similar situations he has been able to successfully hit the shot, the brain sends out a “don’t worry” message. This is usually accompanied by clarity of focus and a serenity of purpose, precisely the right ingredients required to replicate the previous shot.
    Conversely, golfers whose prior experiences in such situations have resulted in disappointment usually feel the crippling anxiety that such pressure situations create. Though they may consciously tell themselves to stay confident or to stay in the present, their belief in their ability to hit the shot is blurred by images of previous mishit shots under similar circumstances. The mind sends out a “panic” message, and they are likely to begin to ask bad questions such as, “What if I blow it