Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

“What if I slice?” he begins a chain reaction that almost instantly dredges up images in the mind’s eye of failure, of an undesirable ball flight and of out-of-bounds and penalty strokes. Do these images breed confidence? These images trigger apprehension, disappointment, and uncertainty. This process is the creation of the most destructive force in the golfer’s body: fear. That’s right, fear isn’t merely debilitating from a mental standpoint. It also has a physiological manifestation.
    In addition to the inability to concentrate, there can be body tension, loss of sensation in the hands, increased heart rate, dizziness, shortness of breath, sweating, and in extreme cases, nausea, constipation, diarrhea, muscular pain, skin afflictions, and even impotence. No wonder making a decent swing could be the least of your body’s concerns the moment it senses fear—even when that fear is entirely self-created. In an instant, by asking a bad question, a golfer can create his own anxiety and undo the confidence required to play this delicate game.

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    words of a champion: nick faldo

    The greatest champions find a way to adapt and they find a way to summon up a new kind of courage at the biggest moments. Nick Faldo had gained the reputation of being a tireless perfectionist, completely rebuilding his golf swing in the mid-1980s and becoming a great champion in the late 1980s and early ’90s, but one of his biggest victories came only after all seemed lost. Leading by four shots in the final round of the British Open at Muirfield, Faldo came to the finishing four holes suddenly trailing by two shots. He then summoned his courage and played his best golf of the day right at the exact moment he needed it most, on some of the most demanding finishing holes the game knows. Faldo birdied 15 and 16 with magnificent iron shots and held on for gritty pars on the final two holes, tapping in the final putt through tears. He had learned much about himself in his effort to build a championship swing and develop a new attitude to playing the best he could possibly play. He told reporters later:

    I’m not trying to achieve the clinically perfect round of golf. Nor am I lessening my search for perfection. It’s just that I’m being less hard on myself when I fail to achieve it.

    The point is accepting what is bad and just going on. Learning to be lighter, that really helped.

    And when it got the bleakest, trailing late after victory seemed assured starting out, where was his mind? Well, in Faldo’s reflections, there’s a lesson for those who want to win championships
and
for those who want to break 80 for the first time: “I just told myself, ‘It’s all gone, just forget it and, for the good, start over. Just forget the whole of the week, what’s gone is past. This is the most important part.’ It made me feel light again, not heavy.”
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    You see, fear is not simply the product of irrational thinking. Fear is not merely a thought or emotion. In actuality, this physiological response in the body to fear is what’s commonly known as the “fight-or-flight” response, inherent in the nervous system of any marginally evolved species. It’s the self-preservation instinct that has been part of human makeup since well before man got off all fours and began walking upright. In short, it’s part of our DNA. Just as our eyes evolved for seeing and our teeth for chewing, our brain is a biological adaptation designed to promote survival in the environments in which our human ancestors evolved. A brain that evolved to survive in a harsh world had to learn to effectively respond to threats in the environment, and the way the brain effectively responds to threats is with fear. In fact, scientists now understand the anatomy of fear so well that they have named the biological functions and processes “the fear response.” An understanding of these processes has important implications for golfers.
    Although I have worked to keep this book nontechnical, I believe that the following explanation will be helpful for golfers because to understand the fear response, one first has to understand the different regions of the brain that developed at different times of human evolution. The
cortex
, which is responsible for rational and conscious thought, is a relatively recent evolutionary development. Before the development of the cortex, humans developed the
amygdala
, also known as the fear system’s command center. The