Golf Flow

matter how severe, is unlikely to weaken our belief in our capability if that belief has been powerfully nourished across time and experiences. For example, poor rounds and distant finishes in particular tournaments were unable to jolt Jack Nicklaus from the conviction that he could win any tournament on any course. That same hardy and unshakeable self-efficacy is evident in Tiger Woods today.

Blame Your Amygdala
    Human beings are more likely to have their confidence undermined by failure than to have it boosted by success. The feelings that accompany success are frustratingly fleeting, whereas the self-questioning and angst that accompany failure, particularly public failure, can undermine our self-confidence for a long while—often for a lifetime. The reason has to do with a little almond-shaped module in the brain called the amygdala. During negative experiences such as missed putts or drives that sail out of bounds or into the water, the amygdala uses hormones and neurotransmitters to highlight the experience. In the same way that students use yellow highlighters to emphasize important parts of a text, the brain uses those neurochemicals to emphasize negative or painful memories (which is why it can be so penetratingly difficult to forget and get over a breakup, the death of a loved one, or a childhood trauma). This highlighting process is at the heart of posttraumatic stress disorder. The phenomenon explains why, when asked about a missed 3-footer (1 m) on the 72nd hole three weeks after the event, Boo Weekly said, “That putt, still to this day, that three-footer, that still gives me a little bit of a jitter.”
    Golf history is strewn with examples of tremendous players who nonetheless suffered permanent blows to their confidence from traumatic losses. Tony Jacklin admitted that he was never the same after he followed Lee Trevino’s unlikely chip-in on the 71st hole of the 1972 British Open with a three-putt from 18 feet (5.5 m) that cost him the championship. Arnold Palmer was badly shaken after losing a seven-stroke lead to the ultimate winner, Billy Casper, on the final nine of the 1966 U.S. Open. Greg Norman never again contended in a major championship after entering the final round of the 1996 Masters with a six-stroke lead only to collapse.
    Research has also shown that whereas we often remember positive experiences as a general sensation, we remember negative experiences in richer and more complex detail, and for a longer time. Hence, the more negative experiences that a golfer remembers, or the more intensely and emotionally the golfer remembers even a single bad experience, the bigger the effect is on the golfer’s self-efficacy. The mind’s diary has good recall for pain.

Don’t Fertilize Your Failures
    An elite-level amateur golfer who had made playing competitive golf central to his life came to see me one day. He explained to me that two years earlier he had been in contention on the final day of a tournament when he came to a par 5 that began with a demanding tee shot. He had missed the fairway the previous day, and that was on his mind on the last day of the tournament. While trying not to drive right as he had the day before, he drove right, just as he had the day before. Out of bounds. He began feeling even more nervous, so he teed up another ball. Now fully conscious of the trouble right, he tried again to guard against hitting it right. He opened his stance, aimed way left, and sliced it right again. Out of bounds. He rushed to put another ball on a tee, made a swooping swing, and pulled it left. Out of bounds. He then hit a 5-iron into the fairway and walked away from the hole with a 14. He followed that up with a 9 on the next hole. Since that experience, he hasn’t been able to play a competitive round of golf. And although he was a USGA 1 handicap at the time, he hasn’t broken 80 since.
    Despite all the success he had experienced up to that fateful tournament, a single experience undermined his confidence in himself and in his ability to hit shots that he was clearly capable of hitting. If our success experiences can be thought of as the bricks with which we can build our self-efficacy, then the interpretations that we make of those experiences, as well as the memories that we store of them, can be thought of as the mortar required to build our confidence with the bricks that we acquire.
    Successful experiences can enhance and build our confidence only if we can recall them