Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

improvement, not a cause for despair. “You have to learn your parameters with your new swing, so bad shots simply mean I am learning. Each bad shot I hit means I am learning something.”
    I frequently see scenarios where a golfer wins a tournament but loses confidence because of ineffective thinking. Imagine that? You win a tournament and lose your confidence? How can this happen? Through ineffective framing. I recall one year seeing a college golfer let a lead at the beginning of a day diminish so that he had to fight down the stretch to get the win. Afterward I spoke with him and he told me that he felt like a “choker and a loser.” I could hardly believe my ears. He won the tournament! And though he won, he allowed his confidence to suffer a blow due to poor framing.
    I also see golfers who frame situations such that their confidence is constantly being nourished. For example, in the 2002 PGA Championship Tiger Woods trailed Rich Beem by four strokes with four holes to play. Tiger birdied the last four holes in a row, a feat which he said, despite not winning, gave him a great deal of confidence. “To know you can do that when it counts is a great confidence builder.” Even in defeat, Tiger found a way to let his confidence grow.

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    david toms and framing

    You would think those who’ve been successful would get their highest motivation from repeated triumphs. Certainly, that is true to a great extent. But, as we’ve seen, no less a contributing factor to the development of a successful player has been adversity, even failure. David Toms shows how that vital sense of self-efficacy lets the ultimately confident golfer almost embrace the lessons disappointment provides:

    I went through Tour school and breezed right through the first two stages. At the final stage, I was still doing well, and was in third place going into the last two rounds. Then I shot 78 and 80 to miss getting on tour by two shots. That was a huge setback, and the hangover lasted a long time. Then, the real rough times began. I went to Asia and played for a year, got back to the U.S. in ’92 and then lost my card again in ’94. I finally got my card again in ’96 and moved up the ladder ever since. In retrospect, though, those years traveling in Asia, sleeping in crap hotels, being hardly able to pay my sponsors, those years were important for me. I needed them. They made me tough, made me hungry. They weathered me. And now I feel like, “Hey, I paid my dues. I paid the price. I deserve it. I deserve what I’m doing now. I earned it.” I used to chase the golf ball around the world, driving from California to Massachusetts for a $10,000 first prize. Like I said, it weathered me. You can’t buy those sorts of lessons.

    Is it any surprise that when Toms won his first major at the 2001 PGA Championship he stared down the much more highly regarded Phil Mickelson? Is it any surprise that he won, even after being forced to lay up on the finishing par-4 final hole? Is it any surprise he rolled in a fifteen-foot putt to win on the last green? I don’t know for sure, but I bet the answer might lie in some of those crap hotels in Asia.
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    Vicarious Learning

    People do not rely solely on their past experiences as determinants of their sense of self-efficacy. After all, even in the face of continual improvement and numerous successes, people often lose their confidence. In part, this is because when competing people gauge their own performance in relation to the performance of others.
    Recall the chapter on mastery and ego where we talked about the importance of framing golf as a game between a golfer and a golf course. Golfers who see their opponents as other golfers can raise their efficacy by beating those golfers, but their self-efficacy is also likely to take a hit when they get beat. Psychologically, there are two key problems with rooting your confidence in how you perform relative to other golfers. The first problem is that in competitive golf you lose much more often than you win. Every week on the PGA Tour there are 140 golfers in the field and only one winner. Even the best golfers in the world win less than 5 percent of the time. The numbers are the same for most contests across the world. When golf is viewed as a competition among players, confidence becomes reactive and unstable, but it remains stable and fixed when one plays the golf course.
    The second problem with rooting your confidence in how you perform