Golf_ The Mind Game - Marlin M. Mackenzie [6]
Another player, however, might respond positively to the same situation; his attitude could be that here is an unprecedented chance to learn what has prevented him from playing up to his potential. The first player is controlled by values pertaining to perfection and winning; the second, in exactly the same context, is influenced by his belief in the value of any experience being an opportunity to learn and change.
The first player is dejected, the second curious and optimistic. The chances of the second player winning the match are certainly higher than for the first player because his emotional state, influenced by his beliefs and values, is more conducive to good play.
In many instances changing beliefs and reordering your values can affect your performance. This book will help you do just that.
Communication and Change
The techniques in this book are forms of communication that are intended to change your behavior. They are designed to influence your mental strategies, emotional states, and your beliefs and values. My instructions are deliberately intended to affect the way you perceive the environment and the way you communicate with yourself—the way you run your brain. Your attention will be limited to how you process relevant sights, sounds, and feelings, not to how you address, swing, and hit the ball. My techniques do not teach you the proper physical mechanics of addressing the ball and of holding and swinging the club; that’s the golf pro’s job. However, while you are learning the mechanics of golf, or after you have learned them, my mental techniques will help you execute them better.
Self-hypnosis
Some of my exercises are based on hypnosis because it is a mental state that permits the golfer to access important information within himself about hitting golf balls and because a hypnotic state is a mental characteristic of fine performance. Although highly sophisticated daydreaming might be as good a way to describe some of what actually happens during a hypnotic state, my work is Walter Mitty stuff, nothing scary. Most athletes, in fact, are in a trance, a profound altered state, when they perform superbly.
Admit it, now. You’ve transformed yourself, perhaps at a traffic light or at the office, to the 18th tee at Augusta National, needing only a routine par for Jack Nicklaus to help you slip into something worthy of a legend. Make that green jacket a 44 regular! In your mind you see the flawless swing that just might get that accomplished, the one that made you most proud on your home course.
Growing up, you watched Sandy Koufax, Arnold Palmer, Billie Jean King, and other wondrous athletes. Later you tried to mimic their seemingly unique motions in your mind—and then scooted outside and worked on duplicating them. What surely never entered your mind at the time is that you were using a kind of self-hypnosis. I have techniques that use that concept, one of which can make your putting stroke seem a whole lot like Ben Crenshaw’s.
I was working one afternoon with George Burns, the touring pro, at his club. He has been playing so long, there are few situations where he can’t recall having hit a fine shot somewhere in similar circumstances. But on one hole George couldn’t remember ever having been faced with a particular shot. So I said, “Have you ever seen anyone else hit one like that?”
Out of thin air he grabbed a golfing god.
“Nicklaus. I saw Nicklaus hit that shot.”
We then began a process I’ll explain in full later, in which George pictured Nicklaus hitting the shot. And then, in his mind, he pictured himself hitting the shot as if he were Nicklaus. Finally, George struck the ball, and it landed a few feet from the pin. That process took no more than five minutes, and George was in an altered state