Golf_ The Mind Game - Marlin M. Mackenzie [39]
Holographic Viewing is quite precise. Immediately after you watch a golfer swing, close your eyes and make an internal movie that reproduces it. Consciously feel your muscles become active while looking at the movie. When you’re reasonably certain your internal movie accurately reproduces the golfer’s swing, move to a different position and watch him swing again. Make another internal movie and feel the swing in your muscles as before. Repeat this process until you have viewed your model golfer perform the same shot from various positions “around the clock.”
Now you have a set of criterion movies of a swing that you want to match in the Get-It Process described earlier. Not only do you have a model to copy, but you have already put into your brain much of the neural activity needed for you to reproduce the desired swing.
The imagery techniques presented in this chapter can be used for any kind of shot; they will be particularly useful in developing new ones. Putting yourself in Paul Azinger’s body in the sand and Ben Crenshaw’s on the green might not put you on the pro tour, but it’s worth the effort to improve your swing.
Paradoxical Intention
One evening I received a call from a client—a professional—who was depressed about his performance in a tournament. He was discouraged with his usual habit of getting bogeys and double bogeys on the first couple of holes, followed by pars and an occasional birdie on the remaining holes. He wanted to change that programed scoring pattern.
This is what I told him to do: An hour or so before his tee-off time he hit several buckets of balls on the practice range; I told him to deliberately hit lousy shots—shots that he would normally hit during early tournament play when his swing pattern was disrupted. While doing this he paid attention to how he controlled his bad shots—what he did in his mind and how he swung.
After about five minutes of hitting poor shots he corrected them by paying attention to his normal swing keys. With this process he learned how to make corrections readily. The result of this paradoxical practice routine was a consistently good scoring pattern with only an occasional lapse in his swing during competition. When those lapses now occur during tournaments, he has the ability to correct them quickly.
This seemingly odd process is called paradoxical intention. The way out of a bad behavior pattern is to go further into it so you not only understand how you goof, but you also gain control of goofing. When you develop the power to goof deliberately, you have increased control over your behavior, and you build confidence, too. In this way it becomes relatively easy for low and middle handicappers to learn how to correct defective swings. Shades of Willie Carter’s instructional process—sound familiar?
You have gotten to the green, or come fairly close, but can see no reason for joy. That’s because you’ve been there before, and realize all too well that the final dozen yards of a hole can be harder than the first few hundred. On the half swings and gentle pings so necessary on those shots, you’ve been halfhearted. This chapter focuses on the mind games of the short game. Without a good short game, power hitters off the tee become scoring weaklings. And even if they get on the green in regulation, the “yips” can bring them to their knees. Although metaskills techniques for this aspect of golf come from deep within the nervous system, they can be easily learned.
Effort Control
What is central to shots taken from off and on the green? A bunch of clichés heard on the course point to the answer: “bite,” “get legs,” “one more turn,” “I babied it,” “too many Wheaties,” “never up, never in.” The key to the