The Mental Game
By Chris Dorris, Master Counselor

Today, both amateur and professional golfers are recognizing the importance in practicing the mental side of golf. Given that golf is a slow paced, individual sport, there is a large amount of time for thinking. Unfortunately, many golfers use their abilities to control their thoughts in ways that hurt their game. Most people, golfers included, are actually unaware that they control their thoughts. So what happens all too often on the golf course, is that thinking gets in the way of the golfer’s potential to get better and as a result, to have fun.

Mental conditioning is no different than physical conditioning. Your mind needs consistent training to become disciplined enough to handle the requirements of elite performance. This is why it is important to keep an ongoing sport psychology-training program in place throughout the year. This series of articles on The Psychology of Golf will teach you some mental toughness exercises that you can include in your practice, and will teach you some mental skills that will help you play better in competition.

When someone comes to me to improve their mental game, two of the first things we work on are breathing and visualizing effectively. Later on, we incorporate them both into a solid, repeatable pre-shot routine. Let’s talk first about breathing.

Breathing is a very simple and effective way to control tension. It relaxes you, slow down the pace and energizes muscles. Relaxation breathing has 4 main components:

1. Breathe into the abdomen.

2. Inhale and exhale slowly and smoothly.

3. Concentrate on letting go of tension during exhalation.

4. As you breathe out the tension, replace it in your mind with the image of your Ideal Golfer by saying your “cue word” to yourself.
   
   Practicing abdominal breathing regularly is a good habit to get into. It’s a part of many touring pro’s pre-shot routines, and great athletes from all sports use this breathing technique to help them maximize performance. Remember that, as is true for practicing anything, the more you practice breathing and saying your cue word, the more effective it will become.
   
   Now let’ stalk about visualization. Your mind is a very powerful tool! It can either be filled with positive images or images of doom. And who decides this? YOU do. You can control the thoughts and images that are in your mind. Did you know that practicing in your mind is just as important as actually hitting balls on the range? In fact, imagining yourself hitting perfect shots over and over again is much more effective at making you a better golfer than is a bad practice day of pounding balls.
   
   You’ve heard of muscle memory. Well, visualization strengthens muscle memory. Great players program their muscles by visualizing their shots exactly as they want the shots to happen. Greg Normal says, “I visualize the precise shot I want to play. I see the ball leaving my club face, arching into the sky and coming down next to the target.” Raymond Floyd said recently, “I have found that visualization is the key to golf.” (Visualizing, by the way, is nothing new to you. You already visualize all the time. Every time you daydream, you are doing it.)
   
   Great athletic performance is a result of diligent quality practice (both physical and mental) and afterward, thrusting the body to do what it has been trained to do. In other words, playing great comes from good practice and good reacting. In sports like tennis, soccer or basketball, the pace of play is quick. There’s not a whole lot of time to think. So the athlete must depend on his/her ability to react. In golf, the pace of play is much slower, which allows more time to think and less time to react. So we need to come up with a way that we can let ourselves react more and think less. That’s what visualization is all about – filling out minds with confident, positive images and then letting our bodies react to them.

The more clearly you visualize your shots, the more likely they’ll come out the way you see them in your mind’s eye. It takes practice to train your mind to visualize in great detail. So don’t be discouraged if at first you have a hard time “seeing” the shot. Practice daily for a few minutes. If you’re in a really boring class in school, and you’re not paying attention anyway, play a practice round in your head, or at least a few holes (but don’t tell your teacher we told you to.) When you rehearse mentally, do it in as much detail as possible. Remember to include everything you might see, hear, fell (both emotionally, like confidence, and physically, like the heat of the sun or wind), smell and even taste.

Visualize Perfection! It’s not only important to visualize clearly. It’s equally important to imagine perfection. When visualizing, experience yourself playing flawlessly. Remember, you control your thoughts, so control your imagery as well. Practicing perfection in your mind’s eye greatly increases your chances of making perfect shots on the golf course.

What’s a Cue Word?

When people try to remember things, sometimes a great way of doing that is to have a “reminder,” or a CUE word that triggers in their mind that thing they are trying to recall. Whenever I meet a new person and want to remember their name, I come up with a funny cue word that helps me. For instance, the word “wiggler” helps remind me of the name of a man I met, Johnathon Wurgler. Since I met him, I’ve never forgotten his name.

By selecting a cue word and using it before every shot you take, you will remember to: relax, get focused, and feel confident and ready to start your pre-shot routine. Choose a word that reminds you of excellence, of being relaxed, or being confident – whatever feeling you want to have just before you start your swing. Make it simple and easy to remember. Examples of cue words chosen by some golfers with whom I have worked with include: calm, peace, quality, Obi-Wan, one, smooth, pure, crunch, cool. After you have chosen your cue word, start using it before every shot. Say it as you exhale a big, deep abdominal breath and from there, start your pre-shot routine

Copyright © 2003, Chris Dorris