Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

as a failure. Heath was dejected, gloomy, downhearted, and spiritless, but his father was finally able to help him frame the situation and turn the negative into a positive. Heath’s father, whom Heath describes as “one of the most positive people I know,” told him,

    Heath, you can either look at this as a
failure
, or as an
opportunity
. Do you realize how close you are to getting on the PGA Tour? In order to get on the PGA Tour, all you have to do is finish in the top fifteen on this Tour, and you’ll be playing on the PGA Tour next year. You shouldn’t be disappointed for what you haven’t done, but excited for what you have done, and can do in the future.
----

    This advice helped Heath frame his experience differently. He saw opportunity where before he had seen only failure and disappointment. He felt energized where before he’d only felt drained. His hunger returned and midway through that season, Heath had won three times on the BUY.COM Tour and had earned a spot on the PGA Tour for the following year.

    the power of “because”

    Poet Alexander Pope once said that “to err is human.” One of the most consistently human errors is the tendency for people to attribute success and failure to perceived rather than actual causes. For example, it is quite common for schoolkids to say things like “I failed the test because the teacher hates me” or “I failed the test because Miss Crabapple is mean.” In reality, it is usually far more likely that the actual reason they failed was simply because they didn’t study correctly or prepare properly.
    The problem with misattributions is not simply that they are an inaccurate reflection of reality. Misattributing our failures—and our successes—has powerful consequences for subsequent behavior and corrective action. Students who believe they failed a test because the teacher doesn’t like them may try to get on a teacher’s good side, believing that this will bring them better test scores. From my personal experience as a teacher, let me assure you that this strategy is unlikely to succeed. What those students probably won’t do is correct their faulty study habits, the actual cause of their poor performance. Unfortunately, it is often just such misattributions that launch the cycle of academic failure for many students.
    On the other hand, students who believe that their poor test scores are rooted in poor study habits (regardless of their feelings about their teacher) are more likely to spend some time trying to develop better study habits. This is certainly more likely to produce better test scores down the road than relying on the good graces of a buttered-up teacher. The important point is that the steps that students take toward trying to improve are directly determined by the reasons they “believe” they failed in the first place.
    Golfers make attributions about everything from why their drives fade to the right (my feet are too close to the ball) to why they miss putts (this putter has no feel) to why they invariably underhit shots from the sandtrap (my club is allergic to sand). Interesting to me as a psychologist is how much time golfers spend practicing to get better but how little time they spend trying to make accurate attributions to ensure that what they are practicing is the right thing for the right reasons. Woe to the golfer who focuses on a grip change to fix a slice, when the real culprit is poor alignment.
    Similarly, golfers who attribute bad shots to poor mechanics rather than to grip pressure may try to make unnecessary, and ultimately unsuccessful, changes in their swings. Golfers who believe that their poor play is the result of poor equipment often spend a good deal of cash purchasing equipment and then long months adapting to it. Sometimes their attributions are correct. After all, new equipment can, and often does, make marked improvements in one’s game. But for golfers whose actual shortcomings are rooted in swing flaws or unproductive thinking, new equipment is as unlikely to improve their game as a new pen is to improve a writer’s prose. In both cases, the underlying causes for the poor results are rooted in poor habits or poor thinking, not poor equipment.

    Fearless Golf and the Dreaded
Four-Footer

    Putting can be the most insidious source of frustration in the game. A lack of success on the greens easily creeps into every aspect of a player’s game all the way back to the tee box. And it can