Golf_ The Mind Game - Marlin M. Mackenzie [62]
Establishing Outcomes
Since you can’t play perfectly, what is it that you want to achieve in golf? Part of the metaskills approach is to use a systematic way of deciding what’s worth achieving—your outcomes—and how you can get them with various techniques. This is accomplished by following some basic principles.
Principle of Positivity
Whenever golfers come to me for help, my first question is “What do you want to accomplish?” Invariably, they begin by telling me what’s the matter with their game and what they don’t want. Since this approach is usually, but not always, self-defeating, I play a mind game with them. Let’s try an experiment right now to illustrate a very important point that could make your golf game so much better with very little work.
In about ten seconds I’m going to tell you to do something. At that time pay attention to what you experience inside—what you see and hear in your mind and what you feel in your muscles and other parts of your body. Get ready to follow my instructions.… Here goes: Don’t be aware of your breathing right now.
What happened inside? If you’re a normal human being, you automatically paid attention to your breathing—perhaps you felt the rise and fall of your chest and the movement of your abdomen as you inhaled and exhaled. Perhaps you heard the sound of air in your nostrils. If not, check again to see if you’re still alive. If so, how come you became aware of your breathing when I told you not to?
To understand my direction not to pay attention to your breathing, you had to turn your mind to the act of breathing. The reason you couldn’t not become aware of your breathing is the fact that language, the nervous system, and muscles are “wired” together, but words like not and don’t are totally ignored. In other words the nervous system knows no negation.
If you say to yourself, “Don’t slice the ball into the woods,” you will access, consciously or unconsciously, a memory of having hit a slice in the past. The neural pathways between your brain and the muscles that control slicing will be automatically activated also, probably without your being aware of it. Consequently, you’ll more than likely slice the ball into the trees bordering the fairway.
Of course, you can block this by consciously rehearsing a straight shot down the middle of the fairway in your mind while taking a proper practice swing. There are many people who consistently process information, consciously or unconsciously, by bringing counterexamples—opposites—to mind. Some of those people first think about what they don’t want—a slice—and then they shift automatically to thinking about what they do want—a straight shot. Others first think about how they want to hit the ball, yet unconsciously shift to thinking about what they don’t want to hit. This form of unconscious thinking can be devastating to your golf game if you’re not aware of it.
As you think about your golf game right now, consider what you want to be able to do. If you find yourself saying something like “I don’t want to take so many shots getting out of bunkers,” just turn it around and say, “I want to get out of sand traps easily with one stroke.” Do you feel differently inside when you say this?
Principle of Specificity
The more you know precisely what you want to accomplish, the easier it will be to get. You could say, “I want to be able to draw and fade my shots consistently.” That statement can be further specified to include a more precise definition of “consistently,” such as hitting them eight out of ten times from the tee.
The statement can be refined still further by identifying, in sensory-specific terms, what you would see, hear, and feel as you execute those shots. For example, you might want to change your stance; you might want to modify the swing path of the club in the impact area; you might want to adjust your grip and lengthen or shorten your backswing; you might want to hear a certain kind of click when the club