Does Positive Self-Talk Work?

A great way to set yourself up for failure during a round of golf is to expect it to go great. How often do you do this: you tell yourself "today is going to go great. I'm feeling good about my game, I like the way I'm hitting it, that was a good warmup, I feel like I found something, I might finally play up to my potential today". And then like so many other rounds you've played, reality hits and you play nowhere near your expectations or potential.

So it makes you wonder if positive thinking even works. You've tried telling yourself it'll go well, and that doesn't make it go well. So as it's not going well, you double down and try to make it go well. And usually trying to make anything happen makes things worse, because now you're more focused on making things right than just playing golf.

So I wan to go through a few reasons why positive thinking doesn't work, and why it actually works in the opposite direction and sets you up for failure:

A belief that our thoughts have power

When you start to try to talk yourself into playing well by saying positive thing like affirmations, or kind self-talk, or even something like visualizing things going well, you are buying into the belief that what you think makes things come true. And while we've heard all our lives "you can make it happen if you just believe" this actually works against us, and here's why.

When you buy into the "my thoughts have power" belief, then there's another side to that coin. It means you also believe that negative thoughts have power. So when you have a thought like "don't hit it in the water" or "don't chunk this" or "you're gonna blow your good round" you believe that simply having the thought is going to make you do that thing. So as soon as you have the thought you try to fight it, ignore it, distract yourself from it, numb yourself to it. Golfers do this in all kinds of ways, through countering with more positive talk, through self-deprecation, making jokes to lighten the mood, over-drink to numb out reality, hit two or 3 balls until you get a good one, or even just bail on the round completely.

This may sound a little heavy when we're just talking about golf, but this is what happens when you buy into the belief that thoughts have power. Believing thoughts have power sets you into a confusing spiral of trying to stay positive but also trying not to jinx it. I've been here, and it's a really frustrating and fragile place to be.

Entitlement that you deserve for it to go well

Another reason positive thinking doesn't work is it sets us up to believe that we deserve to play well. Like we're entitled to a good shot or a good round. Yes, when we work hard on our game, we make our game better and in reality the end result should follow. But what we typically do is build up this expectation that we should play well or we deserve to play well. And this creates an environment where things have to be going well and if they don't we're going to start trying to make them go well.

This entitlement is dangerous because when you start to not get what you feel like you're owed, you will spend the round trying to make the universe bend to you to get what you're owed, rather than being flexible with what happens and taking it as it comes. You're playing a game that doesn't care who you are or how much you've practiced or what you just did on the last shot or how many over or under par you are. So I'll just be straight up with you: you aren't owed anything in golf.

So when you spend your round noticing all the ways you're not getting what you deserve, you're doing this instead of playing golf. Which leads us into our third way positive thinking doesn't work.

Distraction from the present

I think the main reason why positive thinking is unhelpful is a distraction from the present. When you tell yourself positive things like "this is gonna go great" or "no negative thoughts today, only good things" or "I'm gonna have so much fun today" you're subtly telling yourself things need to be positive. And you've created a mentality that when things aren't going right then something must be wrong or you're doing something wrong. So now you've got to exert mental effort and attention toward making them right.

Even though trying to make things be more positive seems like a good thing to do, you've got to ask what are you really doing at the golf course? Are you trying to feel good the whole time? Or are you playing golf? Because if you're trying to feel good the whole time, then maybe golf isn't the sport for you, because golf is full of difficulties and obstacles and discomfort. Yes golf is ultimately for fun, but fun is a relative term. You can't have fun unless there's something un-fun to compare it to, and golf is full of un-fun things.

So when you go out expecting things to be great, you set yourself up for disappointment and failure because not everything can be positive. Which is why you should expect things to go bad. Ok, that sounds a little harsh. But seriously it might not go great. You can't guarantee that it will go perfectly. There's no certainty of everything going smoothly and feeling positive the whole time. But there is something you can guarantee: that you'll make mistakes.

Golf is a difficult sport. There's a very small margin for error, and staying within those margins only happens every so often for even the best players. As you know from some great conversations I've had on this podcast with people like Lou Stagner, Jon Sherman, Adam Young, and several others where we touch on course strategy and managing expectations, we know that we can’t be perfect and we have a wide range of shots we can hit.

In a recent twitter thread, Adam Young talked about how small the margin for error actually is. He said that with driver, if you have the face open by just 4 degrees, which is a nearly imperceptible amount, you can hit it offline by about 50 yards.

That's an incredibly small margin for error. And this is why it's so potentially dangerous to expect everything to go well and positively, let alone perfectly.

Check this with your own experience: when you expect a round to go perfectly, do you feel more freed up or less? Do you feel like you handle the inevitable bad things better or worse?

I'm willing to bet that when you expect things to go well you are becoming more constricted and less freed up. Because when you create a sense of needing the round to go well, then you've created a fear of it not going well. The prospect of it going poorly is scary to you. So now you're going to protect against it going poorly. And playing protectively is not the best way to play.

This is why expecting bad things to happen is actually the best mental strategy.

Because it's true.

The best mental strategies are grounded in reality and truth. And the fact that mistakes will happen and not everything is going to go perfectly smooth and positive the whole time is true.

Basing your confidence on things needing to go well is fragile. Grounding your confidence in reality is much more reliable.

Empty positivity is fragile. Acceptance that not everything will be positive and bad things will happen is robust.

What sounds stronger:

• I need everything to go well in order for me to feel good

Or

• Anything can happen during this round and I'll take it as it comes

I would argue the second one, and I don't think I'd lose that argument.

So preach the truth to yourself:

• bad things will happen

• I might not like those bad things

• but I will be ok even if they do

That's real confidence right there.