Every time you hit a golf ball, there should be a purpose. At the driving range, you can hit balls with no other purpose than building positive habits to serve you when you play. What would be the habits you might wish to develop?
The first one, which should be shared with what follows, is the feeling of mind that the shot is within your capability to hit well, and that it will be hit well. Train yourself to have that feeling every time you step up to the ball. Do not take for granted. Make that feeling explicit, part of your emotional checklist you go through before you take the club away.
When you play, don’t you want to have a confident feeling like that when you’re about to play a shot that counts, as confident over a drive into a narrow fairway as over a six-inch putt? Of course you do. You can have that feeling if you have trained yourself to have it, by making it a natural response to hitting a golf ball, regardless of the situation.
You need technical skills, too. Good golf is played by hitting the ball the right way, the same way, every time. Please take lessons to learn what the right way is. Very few of you are genius enough to figure it out by yourself. Once you know what the principles of good golf are, practice those principles, and only those. Hit each ball with one thought in mind, the same thought.
If you hit the ball poorly, take it to mean that you haven’t learned the principle yet. The mistake is to think it doesn’t work, and then go fishing for something else. That leads to one thought after another, ending up in having learned nothing, and having established a habit of guessing over the ball.
While the emotional confidence you are trying to build up shouldn’t be influenced by your circumstances, when you really don’t know what you are doing, it’s hard to maintain your confidence; because you are believing in, what?
So practice your technical point using practice swings, enough of them so you feel you have it down, and then step up to a ball with the feeling that you know what you are doing and that it will work. The ball cannot be a test to see whether you know, but a confirmation that you truly do.
If the shot works out, repeat the whole process. If it doesn’t work out, chalk it up to needing more work, then go do the work.
In the end, this is true: While you want to have all parts of your game polished as well as you can, a positive mind will serve mediocre technique much better than flawless technique will serve a mind that worries. Because the mind is intangible, we tend to forget its influence. Those who remember are the ones who get the most out of their skills and have the most fun.