Golf_ The Mind Game - Marlin M. Mackenzie [18]
Now that you are aware of your mental-detective skills—the tools of sensory awareness—you’re ready to uncover your internal resources and apply them to improve your golf game. The metaskills mind games in this part of the book are designed to: (1) identify and stabilize in your mind and body the just-right states that make for consistent play; (2) discover how to take advantage of the pro within yourself; (3) develop a refined sense of effort regulation so that you know how hard to strike the ball during the short game; (4) expand your ability to use the power of self-hypnosis; and (5) learn how to control pain, unleash stored energy, and speed up healing so you can play at your physical best. In short, you’ll be learning specific mind games to control your golf game.
Read leisurely through this section of the book. When you discover a technique that fits a goal you have in mind, put it to work. Follow the instructions precisely. Evaluate the effectiveness of the technique in terms of whether or not you achieve a desired outcome.
If you’re not sure about the application of a particular technique, go to “The 19th Hole,” the final chapter. This chapter, along with Appendix C, will help you select appropriate techniques.
There’s a 15th club in golf. You don’t hit the ball with it, or even see it, for that matter. Call it mood, the emotional state you bring to the course, or to a shot, that determines how you use the other tools at your command. That mood can change as quick as lightning, depending on your values and how your mind works, consciously and unconsciously.
Some days you’re hot. The ball flies so true, it’s as though someone were standing far down the fairway with a large magnet in hand; frequently trees uproot themselves and step in front of the few badly struck shots, bumping the ball out of harm’s way; the four-inches-in-diameter cup all of a sudden seems crater wide.
On other days it’s hot of a different sort. You’re hot under the collar. Glaciers hustle along faster than the gang ahead; somehow, blades of grass on the fairway turn into steel and redirect a solidly struck ball into a jungle jail. You don’t know whether, as the country song goes, to shoot yourself or go bowling.
Mood swings are as important as the golf swing; and your mind controls both. Fortunately, you don’t have to be the victim of your not-so-good states; you can either maintain a good state or quickly change it from lousy to just right. You can learn to make all the between-shot time work to quiet your mind during each shot and to have all the necessary mental and physical resources readily and automatically available for making good shots. If you don’t, golf might regress into Mark Twain’s description of it as “a good walk spoiled. ”
In Part 1 you learned how to use your mind to access your inner resources. This and the next two chapters deal with the process of how to use your mind and inner resources to control and swing your moods, since they dramatically affect the swing of your club. If you’re a scratch player, say, and take a quadruple bogey on the second hole, I have a way to keep that instant anger from making the remaining 16 holes almost as miserable. I’ll teach you how to uncover and remain in touch with your feelings of confidence so that you can perform comfortably at the peak of your capacity when the chips are down. In essence, you’ll learn how to get into the just-right states that are conducive to hitting all sorts of shots well, using the anchoring process described in the previous chapter.
A few golfers I know use a natural, unconscious process of anchoring just-right states. For example, David Graham unconsciously repeats to himself the rhyming phrase “Low and slow” as an auditory anchor to activate the proper form and mood to regulate taking away his club on tee shots. Whenever he approaches a tee in tournament play, Peter Jacobsen automatically looks at the gallery as a visual anchor, and in some way absorbs spectators’ energy as a means to get more power into his tee shots. My wife, Edna, says to herself,