Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

again?” Because they can only visualize previous disasters, the mind begins to race, and the body follows.
    This is what golfers often call “getting in their own way.” When they “think too much” or when their conscious thoughts interfere with their unconscious, automatic processes, it is almost always a function of low self-efficacy. Let me say conclusively that staying in the present does not by itself shield golfers from such experiences. After a series of setbacks and failures, the present can be full of panic and worry, so staying in the present is not, by itself, a solution. While staying in the present is a good objective for golfers, confidence is invariably rooted in prior experiences, so we need something to draw on.
    Just as coming through in the clutch can enhance confidence, disappointing losses can cripple people’s beliefs in their ability to execute skills they clearly possess. Unchecked, failure can flood the moment with dread. Too many setbacks and disappointments can result in real crippling self-doubt. Think back to football legend Vince Lombardi’s observation that “winning is a habit. So, unfortunately, is losing.”
    Indeed, winning and losing can both become what William James called habits of mind, and they are each rooted in the self-beliefs we develop that guide us through tough spots and treacherous times.
    Every golfer is going to have bad moments. The difference is some golfers will forget those times quickly while others will beat themselves up long after the moment is gone. Allowing bad experiences to fester is like playing a bad movie and watching yourself fail over and over again. Dwelling on failure often triggers a cycle of self-doubt and poor performance that in itself becomes self-sufficient. This reminds me of Hogan’s observation that he had a tendency to remember the bad a shade more vividly than the good. This is a tendency that no doubt contributed to his increasingly poor putting ability later in his career. Low self-efficacy leads to bad questions, which lead to heightened fear, tension, and indecision, which lead to bad golf swings, which produce poor shots, which further undermine self-efficacy and fuel self-doubt. There are cycles of success and cycles of failure.
    One need not have only supreme successes to develop a robust sense of efficacy. Because experience in any endeavor is a mixed bag of success and failure, individuals have the power to choose which memories they will attend to, the meaning they will give to those memories, and how strongly they will let those memories register in their minds. This is why how we
frame
our experiences is powerfully important to the self-beliefs that we develop.
    Nicklaus once suggested that a golfer has to do everything he can to protect his confidence, which is why, in his words, he has “made a lifelong habit of favoring the positive over the negative.” Indeed, failure is so prominent in golf that Jack began to explain failure as “so-called failure” as a way to illustrate how golfers should think about mistakes as opportunities rather than setbacks.
    In a book titled
Extraordinary Minds
, Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner introduced the idea of “framing” into psychological research. By framing, he meant the tendency for successful people to look at situations in a positive light and in a manner that gives them a competitive edge. By framing situations correctly, golfers are able to maintain their confidence in the face of any potential outcome.

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    david toms: underrated but undeterred

    There’s a difference between being great and playing great. As far as skills go, there will always be someone who does something better than you. For David Toms, his relative inability was never a deterrent. Instead, it gave him a game plan for optimizing his potential:

    I think what allows me to be successful is that I know what my limitations are, and know the best way for me to play a golf course: where to take advantage of certain parts of the course, where to totally shy away from. That is where I am good next to some other players who may not have quite “made it” I guess you can say. That’s really the biggest thing is I no longer look for reasons why I shouldn’t compete with the top five players in the world. I play with guys who hit it further, who hit it straighter, who hit it higher, who putt it better than me. But for me, it doesn’t matter. None of it matters because I am able to take what I