The Most Important Thing to Help You Play Your Best

We’re going to be talking about the number one thing that helps you play your best on a shot by shot and round by round basis. We all know that mental game issues make us play worse, but in this blog you’re going to learn why, and how to turn that around and play up to your potential.

When you play, what’s a mental game issue you usually face? Maybe it’s wanting to impress others. Maybe it’s wanting to live up to your own expectations. Maybe you just want to hit the ball solid.

Some others might be:

• Having a great pre-round warm up and worrying about it translating

• Having a terrible pre-round warmup and hoping it’ll magically get better

• Worried about getting off to a good start

• In your head about shanking it

• Panicking after a good start hoping you don’t ruin it

I could go on and on. The mental game issues in golf are nearly endless, and we all face at least one if not all of those every single time we play.

And they’re all pretty different. Some of them are from a source of worrying what other people think. Some are meeting your own super high standards. Some are from needing to validate your hard work. Some are anxiety about an uncertain future.

The variety of sources that our mental issues could come from are varied. But there’s one thing that I think they all have in common. One reason why each of them are hurtful to our game. They all pull us away from the present.

Each one of these brings your mind into the future, or the past, or projecting onto others, or back to the last golf lesson you had, or the next hole, or the 19th hole, or what will the college coach or mom and dad or my buddies or the media say about how I played? How will I have to answer for the score I just shot?

All of these are places other than the present. Not one of them have to do with where your feet are.

You will perform best when your mind is where your feet are. When you’re in the present. When you’re experiencing your round of golf moment by moment.

And what all of our mental game issues do is bring us out of the present. They make it much more difficult to experience our round moment by moment because now we’re mentally experiencing everything else besides what’s happening in front of us.

This isn’t always as dramatic as this either. In fact it’s almost always so subtle we don’t even catch ourselves doing it until we’ve just bogeyed 3 holes in a row and finally snap out of it. But we don’t have to let it get that far. We can catch our minds when they first want to wander off. Or a thought pops in and wants to take our minds with it to wherever and we can notice that thought and let it go and come back to the present.

This comes from self-awareness. The reason why self-awareness is so important is because it takes you out of habitually, mindlessly doing things. Studies show that by default, we spend about half of our waking lives doing things mindlessly. That means we’re doing something while our mind is elsewhere, which I’m sure you can relate to. We hit a golf shot while thinking about where we don’t want it to go. We’re reading a putt but we’re not really thinking about what we’re seeing. We’re going through the motions of our pre-shot routine. Self-awareness stops that mindless wandering before it can start.

So if self-awareness is the way to stop the mind wandering and be able to be present while you play golf, which is the way you’ll perform your best, how do we do that? Do we just force ourselves to notice every single thought and shove out all the bad thoughts?

What do you think? You guessed it, that’s not quite it. Instead, we need to train a non-judgmental awareness. Why do you need to be non-judgmental of what you’re self-aware about? Because self-awareness by itself can lead to harshly judging every thought you have against what you should be thinking.

Ok before we figure this out with what to do, let’s recap what we’ve got so far:

• we need to be in the present to play our best

• but by default we mind wander at least half the time

• so we need to be self-aware of our thoughts to stop the mind wandering

• but self-awareness by itself leads to harsh judgment of our own thinking, which creates more problems than it solves

So if we need to have non-judgmental self-awareness to be in the present without harshly criticizing our own thinking, how do we train non-judgmental self-awareness? Glad you asked. Two words: mindfulness practice. Ok, one word: meditation.

Meditation is the leading way that I’ve learned and experienced to be able to notice thoughts or mind wandering, see those thoughts without judgment, and return to the present. As you’re doing, let’s say, a simple Breath-Centered Mindfulness Practice, aka focusing on your breath for 8 minutes, thoughts will inevitably pop in and distract you from your breath. Or your mind will inevitably wander away from your breath. So then at that point because you’re paying attention, and not mindlessly going with the thoughts, you’re able to consciously choose to let the thoughts come and go, or come and stay. That’s being non-judgmental about your thoughts. And then you choose to bring your attention back to your breath. So with meditation you’ve trained yourself to pay attention to something in the present, notice thoughts that can distract you, noticing them without judgment, and then return your attention back to the present.

Sounds like a scenario on the golf course right? You’re paying to something in the present, like the shot you’re about to hit. Then thoughts pop in, like “whatever you do don’t hit it in the water”. You can see those thoughts without judgment, which means they don’t mean anything. They’re not good or bad. They’re just thoughts. And then you consciously choose to bring your attention back to the present, which is the shot you’re about to hit. This is how to train yourself to be in the present, which is where you’ll play your best golf.

Instead of playing half your round mindlessly distracted into the past or the future, mindfully and non-judgmentally notice the thoughts that pop in, and then return to the present. And you train this through mindfulness practice.

There’s a slew of meditation apps out there, I haven’t tried all of them, but I’m sure they’re all great. But ideally, what you’re looking for is something simple and not overly guided. You’re ultimately trying to train for what you’ll experience on the course, which means focusing on something simple like the breath or part of your body, noticing thoughts, and returning to the breath. And eventually doing it unguided would be best.

I encourage you to train this way. 5-8 minutes a day. It takes hours and hours of playing and practicing and working out and eating right to improve your game. So taking 5-8 minutes a day to improve your mind shouldn’t be too bad.