Golf_ The Mind Game - Marlin M. Mackenzie [13]
Not only do conditions on the course affect your state, but whatever is on your mind—your business, your school, your family, or your social life—also affects your game. The capacity to leave outside interests out of your mind while playing is crucial if you want to play well consistently. The states you generate on the course that keep you attentive to the present moment are what count.
There are three underlying states of mind that are essential to playing well consistently. They are concentration, confidence, and a sense of mind-body unity. As you probably know, playing good golf requires riveted concentration on the shot at hand. When not concentrating, many golfers get ahead of themselves, imagining that they are on the next tee or in the clubhouse having shot a preconceived score. They forget that they still have a shot to make and more holes to play.
Confidence of your ability to execute a planned shot well is necessary if you want to play to your handicap or better. While in this state you know that a shot will be good even before you strike the ball. But if there’s doubt in your mind, shots start to fly all over the place.
As a result of concentration and confidence, you will develop an inner sense of unity. This state of mind has elements of resonance and harmony, rhythmic energy, and grooved coordinated movement that feels effortless. When in this state—some call it a “zone”—golfers sense that their mind, mood, and movement are all-of-a-piece, resulting in shots that are “pure.”
As you will see in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, there are a variety of metaskills techniques that facilitate the development and maintenance of these three states. But for now we will focus on general procedures to identify and retrieve specific internal resources that will make for more consistent play.
Your Inner Resources
You’ve done a lot of living and have all sorts of experiences stored in your memory that can be used to generate appropriate states of mind for playing good golf. These “resource states” include, among others, optimism, eagerness, determination, calmness, inventiveness, hopefulness, acceptance, patience, friendliness, sensitivity to nature, and a lot more. Optimism helps you to think positively about your shots; eagerness and determination keep you focused on the shot at hand; calmness keeps your swing fluid; inventiveness and hope are needed to create new shots to get out of trouble; patience and friendliness allow you to overlook the slowness and perhaps golfing ignorance of your playing partners; and sensitivity to the beauty of nature around you can be a counterpoint to much of the anxiety in your life, on or off the course.
Other useful resources include past experiences related to learning all sorts of physical skills; embedded in these experiences are the basic resources for playing golf well, such as balance, power, strength, energy, rhythm, coordination, and effort control. Finally, your past experiences of making good golf shots contain unconscious mental strategies, the resources that directly control your game.
Identifying the Right Resources
By now you’ve probably assumed that you’re about to learn to put yourself into the right frame of mind—confident, optimistic, patient—at will. But first you must decide which resource to call up from your past experience. You’ll know this by answering two basic questions: (1) “Specifically, what kind of shots do I want to make?” and (2) “What stops me from hitting the ball the way I want to hit it or the way I’m capable of hitting it?” Let’s look at the answers to these two questions, one at a time.
To answer the first question, knowing what you want comes from having alternatives in mind. These alternatives include remembering precisely when and how you’ve hit similar shots in the past,