Golf_ The Mind Game - Marlin M. Mackenzie [36]
Evaluate the shots. If there is no difference, repeat to make sure.
If there’s a difference, adjust your internal visual and auditory processing to include the difference when you are not playing well.
Developing New Golf Shots
After you’ve developed a fairly well-grooved swing, it’s natural to want to learn new shots that require skills beyond merely swinging the club—shots requiring drawing and fading, getting up and down from sand, lifting the ball from the rough over trees, chipping from thick grass on the collar around the green, and others. For those who have had to lay off golf for a season or two, it’s important to get back some of the skills that inevitably were lost in the interim.
I’ve developed two metaskills techniques—the Get-It Process and the Get-It-Back Process—that have proven to be successful, not only to golfers but to athletes in many different sports.
The Get-It Process
Here’s how George Burns, a PGA Tour golfer, used the Get-It Process with me several years ago at his home club on Long Island. He was playing a practice round as I was accompanying and teaching him some metaskills techniques. He was preparing to hit a shot which, he said, he had never faced before—a short, 70-yard approach to a rather small elevated green. The pin was cut about twelve feet from the front edge, which was guarded by a huge, deep bunker. George wanted to hit a very high, soft shot that would land with very little backspin.
I started the process by asking, “Since you’ve never made this kind of shot before, have you ever watched someone make a similar shot that was superb?”
George gazed into space for a few seconds and said, “Yeah. I saw Nicklaus make one like this.”
“Great,” I responded. “In your mind go back to the time when you saw Nicklaus make his shot. And put a motion picture of that shot here on the back of my left hand,” which I held a couple of feet in front of his face. “As you watch Nicklaus make that shot, feel his swing in your own muscles. ”
George focused on the back of my hand, moved his club slightly, nodded, looked up, and said, “Okay.”
“Now, what I want you to do is to change the picture of Nicklaus to become you, George. See yourself in the clothing you have on now making that shot, and feel your muscles working as you watch yourself stroke the ball. ”
I remember the day George and I were working. It was cold and windy. He was wearing a rain suit and a winter wool toque. George continued to focus on my hand, nodding. Then I said, “Now change the image from watching yourself from the outside to seeing what you would be seeing if you were right there making the shot. Change the image from a meta picture to a regular picture and see only what you would normally see while setting up and swinging. And really feel the swing throughout your entire body. ”
After about fifteen or twenty seconds I asked George, “What happened, in your mind, as you did that?”
“I made the shot,” he answered.
“Okay. Step up to your ball and reproduce that imagined shot when you’re ready.”
George reproduced the shot, high, soft, and several feet from the pin. His remark after the shot was “I can’t believe it. It really worked.”
The Get-It Process doesn’t always work on the first go-around, as it did with George. Usually, there are several steps of visualization followed by a change or two in swing mechanics before the golfer “gets it”
To help you understand the extra steps in the process, here’s a vignette of my work with Billy Musto, who wanted to get his smooth swing tempo back. The extra steps consisted of combining metaphorical representations of parts of Billy’s swing so that they were “chunked” into one swing concept to facilitate concentration. Notice that Billy used the Get-It-Back Process, almost identical to the Get-It Process. I’ll make the difference clear as we go along.
The Get-It-Back Process
The day I worked with Billy, I told him to go inside himself and return to a specific time when he was swinging smoothly and hitting the ball well. Billy remembered