Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

situation they are in (for example, Jack Nicklaus asking
“How am I going to win this golf tournament?”
before his final round at the 1986 Masters), the best golfers in the world typically focus on three key questions before and during a round of competitive golf to guide their thinking and keep them focused on playing mastery golf. I call these golf’s guiding questions, and you don’t have to be playing for a green jacket to make them work for you.

    before a round: what are my obstacles/what is my strategy today?

    If you study those individuals who have been able to rise to the summit of their respective domains, what becomes clear is that the approach to success begins with a controlled attitude. Although my primary area of research and practice is golf, there is much to be learned from other competitive domains as well. I have not only studied successful businessmen such as Cornelius Vanderbilt and Henry Ford, but also great military and political strategists, scientists and artists, and legendary coaches who have paved the pathway to understanding how to help athletes perform their best. Regardless of which sport you are talking about, there are some common themes that all great coaches address in their philosophies. The ideas of confidence, optimism, hard work, perseverance, and discipline are timeless and universal across all pursuits.
    Another universal aspect to success in sports, perhaps the single most important aspect that all great coaches talk about, is the importance of
preparing your mind to win
. In fact, the historically great leaders in every competitive domain have spoken at some point or other about the importance of preparing yourself for victory. We all have heard the military strategist Sun Tzu’s immortal words that “all battles are won before they are ever fought,” or the simple guidance offered by UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, who was fond of saying, “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”
    But what does it mean to be prepared to play great golf? Is it simply a function of believing in yourself, or feeling confident, as some would have you believe? Is simply visualizing putts going in the hole the essence of great preparation? Not necessarily. My interviews with the best golfers in the world suggested that rooted in their preparation are guiding questions that allow them to gauge how well they are swinging and putting so they know what they will and won’t be capable of that day.
    A key distinction between fearless and frightened golfers is the tendency to either try to ignore obstacles and adversity, and pretend they do not exist, or to identify and acknowledge those obstacles in advance, and prepare as well as possible to overcome them. Note that their questions are not about who they are playing with, what they get if they win, or how badly they want to beat their opponent. Rather, their questions focus on their games and the golf course, and how they are going to get the most out of their games to play that course as well as they can. This question often has to do with aggressive or conservative approaches; whether to aim at flags near hazards or centers of greens and try to make longer putts.
    The reason it is important to ask these questions before a round of golf is because golf is, by many accounts, the most difficult game in the world. To me, that makes it also the most interesting game in the world. Golf’s difficulty doesn’t lie in simply hitting a golf ball; any beginner can do that. The difficulty lies in the fact that golf is so very, very sensitive to psychological and mechanical fluctuation. Even subtle changes in an individual’s mood, tension levels, confidence, muscular stiffness, or swing path can result in dramatic differences in shots and in subsequent scores. Thus it requires a precision and consistency that other sports do not. And, as an added bonus, it offers plenty of time between shots to think about that difficulty. These are the obstacles that golfers face, and the obstacles that they prepare for before they play golf.
    Almost by default, top golfers ask effective questions that prepare them to play their best. For instance, Jack Nicklaus would warm up on the driving range being guided by the simple question
“What are my parameters today?”
In other words, Jack wanted to know how well he was hitting the ball that day so he knew how risky or conservative he had to play. He wanted to know whether his swing was a bit loose so that,