Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

to operate, as it were, on automatic pilot. Through repetition and time, habits eventually bury themselves so deeply into the coding of human thought and behavior that they ultimately often override conscious choice. As the saying goes, we begin controlling our habits. In time, our habits control us. The process of change in golf is often, as David Duval and so many others will attest, the process of changing habits.
    James also argued that cognition and emotion work in a similar fashion. We develop not only habits of action but also “habits of mind.” For example, the positive concepts that we’ve talked about in this book—achievement goal orientations, self-efficacy beliefs, and the attributions we typically make—ultimately become habits of thinking that are developed like any habit of conduct. After a while, a person tends to think in habitual ways, feel in habitual ways, seek habitual stimulation, pursue habitual interests. Even our romantic tastes become habitual, as we come to fall for a particular “type” of person. Rather a confining description of human functioning, eh? Confining perhaps, but nonetheless true.
    What this means, of course, is that as people age, they become more strongly influenced by the behaviors and inclinations that they mastered earlier on. These habitual ways of behaving exert a powerful influence on the actions in which people engage and on the success or failure they experience as a result of those actions. As a consequence, habitual behaviors are the very stuff of which the self is made. Even the fear response can be a conditioned habit. The more frequently we give in to fear, the more sensitive the trigger becomes, and consequently, the more situations produce fear.
    Two important implications arise from these contentions regarding habit. First, it seems clear that it is far better, and much easier, to cultivate good habits than to try to break bad habits. For James, the critical challenge that humans faced was making their positive and adaptive behaviors, thoughts, and emotions automatic and habitual as early as possible. For golfers—in fact, for all athletes—these behaviors include the habit of keeping on top of one’s game, developing one’s skills, concentrating on important features of the game, working to overcome weaknesses, organizing time well, learning to block out distracting thoughts and events, and adopting a no-fear attitude toward the game of golf. According to James, when sound practices and basic behaviors and thought processes are handed over to “the effortless custody of automatism,” higher powers of mind are freed to engage complex and challenging tasks. In other words, the less one has to think about ordinary matters, the more room the mind has to think about extraordinary matters. Jack Nicklaus was a strong proponent of habit, beginning with his commitment to a steady and solid routine. His habits and routines were developed on the practice range, as he wrote:

    All my life I’ve tried to hit practice shots with great care. I try to have a clear-cut purpose in mind on every swing. I always practice as I intend to play. And I learned long ago that there is a limit to the number of shots you can hit effectively before losing your concentration on your basic objectives. I have to believe that some of the guys who virtually live on the practice tee are there because they don’t have anything better to do with their time. And I have to believe they often weaken their games by letting their practice become pointless through sheer monotony or fatigue.

    A second implication of the “laws of habit” is that habits are damnably and frustratingly difficult to change or break. Like the salmon who must swim upstream to spawn, golfers fighting bad habits are fighting powerful behavioral currents. Even the simplest and most innocuous habit exerts a powerful hold on us. Have you noticed how nonnative English-speaking adults typically have a nearly impossible time changing their accent? Henry Kissinger lived in the United States his entire adult life but still speaks with the same heavy German accent he developed as a youngster. Try typing “correctly” if you learned to “hunt and peck.” Nearly impossible.
    Golf instructors know that one of their most difficult challenges is to alter a particularly bad habit that a golfer has developed or fallen into. Indeed, after enough repetition and time, the golf swing becomes a habitual movement. Top