Golf_ The Mind Game - Marlin M. Mackenzie [7]
What Will This Book Do for You?
The metaskills techniques will improve your golf game by changing the way you think and feel. You’ll learn how your mind regulates your golf swing. You’ll learn how to expand and modify your sensory apparatus so your thinking is changed. You’ll learn how your emotions can be controlled so your mind can work smoothly and unconsciously; you’ll learn how to use self-hypnosis to identify your mental resources. In short, you’ll learn to have more choices about how to hit a golf ball so that your golf game improves and your sense of enjoyment is enhanced.
If you’re a 90-shooter, these techniques won’t get you an invitation to the Masters. Still, they’ll get you out of bunkers more quickly, if that’s a goal, or get you to hit higher and longer shots off the fairway. Using them will make you as fine at specific skills as your ability allows, and better able to cope with such miseries as knee-knocker putts.
This book will help you get in the just-right state so your mental golf-shot programs will take over. You’ll learn to get your conscious mind out of the way, stop talking to yourself, stop doing anything, and just let go when you swing.
How to Use This Book
Use this book to supplement the work of your golf pro whose job it is to teach you the actual mechanics of golf. You can read it whenever you have a spare moment and refer to it during your practice sessions.
The time frame for learning any one of the techniques can range from half an hour to a few weeks. It all depends on what you want, and how much energy you give to getting it. Practice for the mind also takes time.
I can’t emphasize often enough that the best way to learn my techniques is to experience them first hand while doing something—lag putting, for instance, or regulating your swing tempo—something very precise that you would like to improve. First find out what happens to the way you play golf; analyze and evaluate the usefulness of a technique in terms of your improvement, not in terms of whether my approach fits existing psychological theory.
The goal is to have your unconscious mind in complete control during competition. Seldom will there be a need for conscious application of any metaskills techniques while playing a match. If you’ve learned them well, they’ll take over automatically, just as your ideal golf swing follows a grooved pattern.
The essence of my approach and the way I want you to use this book was best expressed in Golf in the Kingdom by Michael Murphy:
“But this is the thing,” he raised his hand and shook a finger at me, “ye can only know wha’ it is by livin’ into it yersel’—not through squeezin’ it and shovin’ it the way they do in the universities and laboratories. Ye must go into the heart o’ it, through yer own body and senses and livin’ experience, level after level right to the heart o’ it. Ye see, Michael, merely shootin’ par is second best. Goin’ for results like that leads men and cultures and entire worlds astray. But if ye do it from the inside ye get the results eventually and everythin’ else along with it. So ye will na’ see me givin’ people many tips about the gowf swings lik’ they do in all the ‘how-to’ books. I will na’ do it. Ye must start from the inside, lik’ I showed ye there.”*
Controlling your golf swing, indeed, comes from the inside out, first consciously, then unconsciously. Your beliefs and values, your emotions and your thought processes, regulate the quality of your swing and the extent of your enjoyment. My metaskills techniques are based on tapping your unconscious resources through your senses—going “right to the heart o’ it”—and getting your conscious mind out of your way.
Let’s get started.
* Published by the Viking Press (New York, 1972), pp. 85-86; reprint Delta Books (New York: Dell Publishing, 1973).
This is a must-read chapter; it’s fundamental to everything that follows. Practically all of the techniques in this book deal with “going inside” and retrieving past experiences. These remembered experiences are resources to be used