Golf_ The Mind Game - Marlin M. Mackenzie [15]
Golfers have more anchors than the Sixth Fleet. Unfortunately, most of them are negative, similar to phobias. Teeing up on the first tee, for instance, is enough to create intense anxiety in many golfers. Even the thought of participating in a tournament can evoke discomfort in some people or arouse excited anticipation in others. Water hazards seem to evoke gloom or fear in some golfers, resulting in golf balls drowned with regularity. All an uncertain golfer has to do is to look at the water and splash, in goes an old substitute ball.
Other anchors consist of some form of compulsive, superstitious behavior. Superstitious anchors range from wearing certain pieces of jewelry or clothing for good luck to believing in a “trusty” club that is expected to produce a good shot every time, even though another club would be more suitable for the shot at hand.
All of these uncontrollable phobic responses and compulsive, ritualistic behaviors override the ability to make intelligent choices about your actions. Ritualistic behaviors create internal pressure and can distract you from absorbing important external information, such as the distance to the pin, the strength of the wind, or the contour of the fairway and green. Moreover, they interfere with the internal state that is most appropriate for executing a well-hit golf shot.
On the other hand, metaskills anchors automatically evoke good feelings, without the need for conscious thought; they will utilize your talents and emotional states so that you play well consistently. This will free you to enjoy the game, the scenery, and your playing companions.
Retrieving Past Experiences
Let’s see how we can use the Sherlock Holmes Exercise to retrieve past experiences so they can be anchored for practical use while playing golf. In that exercise you learned how to go inside your mind and retrieve or remember a past experience. You learned how to run your brain by modifying sights, sounds, and feelings. And you identified the condition or state of consciousness when your mental thoughts, emotions, and muscles conspired to create as fine a golf shot as you had ever made.
This process of “going inside”—actively remembering what you saw, heard, and felt during a particular past experience—is, as I’ve said, central to practically all of my mind games, because it’s there, in your brain and muscles, where you have all the resources you need to play golf as well as your physical condition and skills will allow, or to do anything else worth doing.
Sherlock Holmes Revisited
Let’s revisit the Sherlock Holmes Exercise as a way to learn how to anchor. Quickly reread the instructions on this page of Chapter 2. When you’ve finished reading, go inside and go back to that wonderful shot that you examined as Sherlock Holmes before. See, hear, and feel again what you saw heard, and felt when you hit that shot. Be sure to make regular pictures, not meta pictures, because regular pictures elicit stronger feelings. Especially feel the emotions you felt while you were hitting it. Pay attention to the bodily sensations of that emotional state. Perhaps it’s a tingling feeling, goose bumps, warmth, a rush of blood, a feeling of energy or power in some part of your body, or whatever.
Intensify these sensations until they’re as strong as you can make them. As they get stronger, press one finger against any one specific part of your body. Increase the amount of finger pressure as the intensity of the emotional sensations increases; as they subside, reduce the amount of finger pressure. That’s the anchor—a K-anchor—the pressure of your finger on a specific part of your body. The central idea