Which Comes First - Confidence or Good Golf?

Which comes first, confidence or good golf?

Does confidence breed good golf, or does good golf breed confidence?

From what I’ve experienced and learned over the years, I feel strongly that confidence comes first, and then good golf comes after.

My main reason for that is this: if you need golf to be going well in order to be confident, then your confidence isn’t really confidence. It’s conditional happiness. You are confident one the condition that you’re playing well recently, or you’re hitting it well, or you like the course you’re about to play.

I hear this all the time in sessions with players. “I’m playing well so I feel good about this tournament.”

But do you see how this is fragile? And setting you up for failure? And it’s not because saying you feel good is going to jinx it. A surprising amount of people avoid saying positive things like this because they’re afraid the “golfing gods” or some unknown invisible force is going to punish them for feeling good about how they might play. But there’s no such thing as jinxing. Full stop.

Saying “I’m playing well so I feel good about this tournament” is fragile because what if you start playing poorly during the round? There goes your confidence.

Confidence based on golf going well is extremely fragile, because golf is such a difficult sport with razor thin margins for error.

Needing golf to go well is is up and down, mostly out of our control, and wishy washy depending on an uncertain future.

So confidence has to come first, which means your confidence has to be based on something deeper and more robust than how you play, or how you’ve been playing, or how well you know the course, or how you felt when you woke up this morning. These are all mostly out of your control.

So what are some robust sources of confidence that can then breed good golf?

We need sources of confidence that are constant and controllable and built on reality. And they don’t come and go very easily.

The two strongest sources of confidence that qualify for those criteria in my experience are quality work ethic and permission to fail.

So let’s go through why work ethic and permission to fail are such strong sources of confidence that if you can prioritize these first they will naturally breed good golf.

Good work ethic to me is using your available time as efficiently and productively as possible towards improving your game for the long term. This means that you are being thoughtful with how you practice and you are patiently and diligently sticking to working on the same things over a very long period of time. Just simply showing up and putting in time isn’t good enough. It has to be quality, well-thought out effort.

So yeah, we get it. We have to practice hard. But what does this have to do with confidence?

Quality work ethic has multiple benefits to it. How much time you spend and even more importantly HOW you spend your time is almost fully in your control. And when you work hard on your game you get the benefit of seeing yourself be productive, which has a compounding momentum benefit of getting better from working hard, which shows you that working hard makes you better, so you keep working hard, which makes you better and you see yourself working even harder and getting even better, and so on and so on. You’re in a really healthy spiral. The confidence benefits of actually putting in quality effort are clear.

The other confidence benefit you get from quality effort is knowing that you are a work in progress. So when you’re about to play in a golf tournament, you know that how your game right now is less relevant than how good your game is becoming over time. This tournament you’re about to play is just a data point on your journey of long-term improvement. If you know that you’re going to get back to work on your game because you love the process of quality work ethic, then this tournament can go however it’s going to go and you’ll be ok. It’s a very freeing feeling.

Which leads into our other robust source of confidence: permission to fail.

Why would permission to fail be a good thing. It sounds more like a negative than something that could help you play better. Permission to fail sounds like you’re resigning to playing bad.

But permission to fail is a source of confidence which can help you play better because of the freedom it gives you to just play, instead of worrying about how it might go.

When you’re worried about where this tee shot might go, then you’re going to make a protective swing. When you’re worried about how this tournament might go, then you’re going to get off to a slow, tight start.

But if you can credibly say “Failure would sting, but it would ultimately be ok” then you’re free to just play. Or “hitting this tee shot bad would make it harder to score well, but ultimately I’ll be ok because I believe in my scrambling ability or I know that my tee shots are a work in progress” then you’re free to just swing. What would normally be scary to you is not anymore. It’s just another result now. Nothing detrimental. Nothing life or death.

A bad shot is not a failure anymore, it’s just another shot.

This permission to fail give you freedom to just swing with less fear of consequence, which is an incredible feeling of confidence.

So let’s recap. Confidence based on playing well or feeling good in the moment is fragile because it’s fleeting and out of your control and based on an uncertain future. But confidence based on putting in quality work and giving yourself permission to fail are solid sources of real confidence because they’re within your control and they’re constant and based in reality.

And maybe the best part is these feed off each other. When you put your priority on a long-term process of quality effort, then it becomes very easy to give yourself permission to fail, because it reframes even the definition of failure. What was formerly failure is now just a series of challenges or opportunities or data points. It’s so much easier to make a free swing and get off to a freed up start to a round when you believe this.

So how can you do this? How can you have confidence based on work ethic and permission to fail?

Fortunately, because these are both firmly within your control, it’s as simple as setting an intention for doing them, planning ahead, and executing.

You want to put in quality effort toward improving your game? Get a lesson, figure out how much time you have to spend working on your game, build a plan for your practice, and then go do it. It might now be 30 hours a week, but it doesn’t have to be. Any amount of quality effort is better than none. And if you’re dedicated to long-term improvement rather than quick results, then it doesn’t matter how long it takes.

And if you want to give yourself permission to fail, start with prioritizing long-term improvement, and then reframe what a round of golf means. A round of golf is simply a test of your game, nothing more. This sets you up for freedom and confidence.

You can show up to a tournament with that feeling of confidence because you can believably say:

“I’ve been working hard, and I’m going to continue working hard, and the shots I hit in this tournament are just a drop in the bucket”

And if you have a genuine permission to fail, where failure is actually ok to you, then there’s nothing to be afraid of.

And if there’s nothing to be afraid of, then you have the confidence to free up and let it rip.

Don’t wait til you play good to be confident. That might be few and far between.

Find your confidence in robust, controllable sources. Which will inevitably lead to good golf.