Golf_ The Mind Game - Marlin M. Mackenzie [1]
What I offer is a practical, down-to-earth system that uses the mind and emotions to regulate skills in golf—and it works, whether you’re a weekend enthusiast or a world-class professional, a 30-handicapper playing from the white tees or a scratch player. The system works because it quiets the conscious mind and engages your unconscious resources. An active conscious mind acts like the hazards on the golf course—trapping, drowning, or blocking balls from their flight to the cup because you’re thinking too much about your swing while playing. My techniques get you to do all your thinking about your swing on the practice tee so that your mind stays out of your way as you swing on the course.
Although golf is a complex mind game, it’s also supposed to be fun. So are the exercises in this book. In Part 1 I describe the fundamentals of the mind game—how your mind operates, how to deepen awareness of your mental processes, and how to improve your game by capitalizing on your inner resources.
Part 2 contains descriptions of specific techniques, about thirty in all, that can be applied to your method of thinking and the unique way you respond emotionally to competition. These techniques are designed to help you achieve better concentration, heightened motivation, consistency of performance, increased self-confidence, recovery of lost skills, and more enjoyment. A few of them focus on the mobilization of energy when tired, faster healing after injury, and pain control.
I’ve coined a word that describes my perspective of how the mind works—Metaskills. It refers to the interaction between emotions and thoughts that regulate skillful athletic performance, most of which are out of conscious awareness. After years of coaching and thinking about the unity of mind and body, I became dissatisfied with the methods of coaching that stressed conscious thought. The methods are okay up to a point, but they don’t fully represent what superb athletes really do in their minds to control their behavior.
To eliminate my dissatisfaction I studied psychology and counseling in a search for knowledge that I knew existed although I did not know exactly where to look. Finally, I decided to go to the source. I asked athletes directly how they used their minds and emotions to develop and control their skills. My training as a master practitioner in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) provided me with the knowledge to ask the right questions and the refined skills to uncover their conscious and unconscious processes.
I then created counseling techniques out of what the athletes told me. I combined their information with what I’d learned from psychology and from my coaching experience. To refine my metaskills techniques I worked directly with eighty elite athletes (male and female, ages eight to thirty-five) in eleven sports over a two-year period. The model that evolved has been working successfully for about seven years with all kinds of athletes. This book contains those techniques that are most appropriate for golfers.
The psychological perspective that I emphasize is one of understanding how golfers, at every level, regulate their performance, not why they don’t play well. Believe it or not, you already possess all the necessary internal resources for playing better golf. The trick is to uncover them and put them to work. Trying to figure out the reasons why you don’t hit the ball well is counterproductive. This kind of thinking taps and reinforces negative stuff in your mind, the stuff that makes you continue to swing badly and feel worse.
The mind games in this book were designed to swing your golfing mind from conscious control to automatic pilot. The ultimate goal is to have your unconscious mind in complete control