Golf_ The Mind Game - Marlin M. Mackenzie [4]
Neuro-Linguistic Programming
During the past fifteen years a new psychotechnology has emerged on the scene. It’s called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and was created by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. It is essentially a multipurpose technology of communication that is used to identify how people actually regulate their behavior with their minds. It is used to help people change their behavior rather quickly by changing mental processes. NLP is one of the bases of my work, along with cognitive psychology.
In my opinion NLP is one of the most useful, and perhaps the most powerful psychological tool for helping people change. It’s state-of-the-art theory and practice based on verbal and nonverbal communication processes. Increasing numbers of psychologists and psychiatrists are coming to recognize its usefulness. In case you’re interested, there’s a selected list of references in the back of the book.
The elements of the NLP model that apply to golf are information processing, mental strategies, emotional states, and beliefs and values.
Information Processing and Mental Strategies
Let’s look a little closer at the way your golfing mind works. How does someone know how to swing a golf club, drive a car, or do anything, for that matter? By reproducing in his mind the sights, sounds, feelings, smell, and tastes associated with how he did it in the past.
In a span of two or three seconds—the time it takes to swing a golf club—we will unconsciously process as many as a hundred bits of patterned, or programed, sensory information—sights, sounds, and feelings—to control our behavior. This programed information, or strategy, fires off just nanoseconds in advance of a behavior such as sinking a seven-foot putt. If the golfer’s putting program is wrong or is interrupted, he gets the “yips.”
The mental programing we’ve developed for ourselves over a lifetime is much more sophisticated than anything that could be put on a floppy disk. And the nice thing about our programs is that they’re flexible. We can change them at a moment’s notice when we sense, consciously or unconsciously, that they ought to be altered for our own best interests.
We often find several separate strategies in operation to regulate a number of different behaviors at the same time. For example, consider a figure skater who falls while doing her free-skating program. First, she must initiate her decision-making strategy to determine if she will continue skating. If she decides to continue, her motivation strategy is energized to carry out that decision.
Since the present situation (falling) is not exactly like any previous instance, she sets her creativity strategy in motion to put together the necessary movements to get her back in time with the music and the planned routine. Knowing where she ought to be in the planned program also requires that her memory strategy be set off. To actually perform the new movements that will get her back to a point where she can move her body and limbs to match the movements of her program, she activates her performance strategy.
Whew!
Within several seconds, or much less time that it took you to read this, she triggered five separate strategies: decision-making, motivation, creativity, memory, and performance. Each strategy was somewhat dependent upon the others. Unconscious thought, that which is out of awareness, was much more significant for her athletic performance than conscious thought. And the more streamlined the mental process, the faster her reaction time—or that of any athlete.
Although golfers have more time to think about their shots, they, too, go through the same kinds of mental processes quickly, and often unconsciously, when they prepare to hit a ball. Consider an errant shot that strays into the woods and becomes ensnarled in twigs and leaves under a low-hanging branch. Under these conditions the golfer must: decide how