Category Archives: mental game

How the Mental Game Really Works

The mental game of golf is all about being in the right frame of mind to hit the ball as well as you can. Oh sure, there’s decision-making, staying in focus and all that.

But the essence of how you use your mind when you play golf is in what happens in the few seconds just before you take your address, set up, pause, then swing back and through the ball.

How do you set up mentally for that? What goes through your mind during that time?

I have found that the key mental approach is to have a firm thought about where I intend the ball to go, and not on how my swing is going to get it there.

I reduce the moment to a simple thought–I want to hit the ball from here to there. Then, retaining that thought, I step up to the ball and hit it there.

The thought is not hoping, or “would liking,” or any of that. It’s, “The ball is going from here to there.” Period. And with a mind that believes that nothing will keep that from happening.

When you think this way, you would be surprised at how the technical stuff falls into place by itself.

Try it.

An Easy Way to Shoot Lower Scores

Following yesterday’s 58 in a LIV Tour event, Bryson DeChambeau had this to say to the press:

“Yeah, so for any junior golfers out there, it’s probably the best thing you can do when trying to learn how to score. You go up to the red tees and try and shoot sub-60 rounds, for a good aspiring junior golfer that’s trying to be a professional golfer.

“You just go to the front tees, try and shoot under 60. If you can do that and you consistently are able to do that every single round you play, get in that comfortable mind of, okay, I’m 10-, 11-, 12-under, let’s keep going, pedal to the metal, that gets you in a great mindset.

“That tremendously helped today, being able to say, okay, I’m 10-under; well, I can’t stop. I’ve got to keep going. I’ve got to birdie 17, birdie 18, let’s go, and having that sort of — I’m not really going to say it in front of the media, like — Yeah, sort of the F-you mentality, like let’s go, let’s get it done. It’s something that led to me shooting 58 today.”

Bryson is exactly right. Are you trying to break 90? 80? 100? Always close, but no cigar? Go the forward tees and get it done. Over and over. Keeping doing it again and again.

You’ll get comfortable shooting those low scores and when you go back to the tees you normally play from, you’ll keep on doing it not because of your skills, but because of your new mindset.

The Number One Enemy of Golfers

You might hear that the number one enemy of golfers is fear. Sorry, that ain’t it.

No one is throwing a baseball past you at 95 mph and if it misses the strike zone it could hit you. No one is trying to tackle you with as hard a hit as he can muster.

In golf you just stand there and swing a club at a ball. And if it goes in the water instead of on the green, how are you harmed? What have you lost except a golf ball and a stroke on your scorecard?

The number one enemy is uncertainty — that you have picked the right shot (knowledge) or that you can hit the shot you picked (confidence).

If you have acquired both of those qualities, golf is a simple game.

Straight Lines in the Golf Swing

We pay a lot of attention to making sure the clubface is square to the target line at impact because of the overwhelming effect that clubface orientation has on the flight of the ball.

Let us not neglect the club’s path, however. You can’t hit the ball north if your swing goes northwest.

I think the simplest way to ensure that the club is traveling along the target line at impact it to imagine that the club swings along the target line the whole time, back and through, kind of like a Ferris wheel.

We know that can’t happen. We can’t swing the club along a straight line like that. We can only swing it around.

But I believe that if you visualize the target line on the ground and “swing along it,” your normal swing will take the club up and around in such a way that prevents you from carrying the club too far to the inside or the outside at the start, and likewise back through the ball.

It works great at least for me.

I’m not suggesting you change your swing in any way, just the way you think about where your swing is going.

Two points. If your method is to hit at the ball instead of swing through it, this might not work. If you try to put in a conscious physical assist, that absolutely won’t work.

Just visualize the line and feel your swing going along it. That simple.

Golf Is a Game of Perfect

There’s this guy named Bob Rotella who is the cat’s meow among golf psychologists. He seems to have helped a lot of touring pros to play better. More power to him.

I finally read one of his books, the famous one, I guess, Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect. I’m sorry to say I came a way quite disappointed.

First of all, the title is all wrong. If you don’t expect to hit the shot you planned on, which is my definition of a perfect shot, then choose another shot that you do expect to come off as you planned it to.

I mean, do you step up to the ball and expect to hit a mediocre shot, or a lousy shot? Really?

And what is “perfect,” anyway? It all depends on what you are capable of.

Touring pros aim for a spot on the green about the size of a throw rug, and they have the skill to hit it.

Me, I just want my ball to hit somewhere on the green and stay on it. That for me is a perfect shot, given my skills.

The trap, and what he is probably addressing, is that while we (should) expect to hit a perfect shot, we get disappointed when we don’t.

The skill every golfer needs to have, from hacker to pro, is to pick a shot you believe in, hit it, see where it ends up, and start thinking about the next shot. Period. No more than that.

No sense of uncertainty as you are about to swing the club away. No emoting because the ball went somewhere else. No wondering if your game is falling apart because you hit one bad shot. And so on. None of that.

That was the whole point of his book, and it’s a good point. It can’t be said often enough.

But where the book fails is though he tells you what to do, he is silent on how to do it.

It’s as if he had written a book of golf swing instruction that says you need to hit the ball with the clubface square to the swing path and the swing path going toward your target, the end.

Good advice. How about telling us how to do that?

Well, the mental game is the same. “What to do” is not “how to do.”

Just as you don’t get a good swing for the asking, and you don’t acquire good mental habits for the asking. You have to know how to get them and then develop yourself long those lines.

[WARNING: Massive product promotion coming up.]

There is only one book on the mental game that I know of, and I have read a lot of them, that goes beyond telling you what to do and also tells you how to develop your mind so you can do it.

It is my own book, The Golfing Self. It contains exercises that if you do them train your mind to maintain your concentration for the entire round, every shot, so you have your best chance of hitting perfect shots.

(You get the book as a free download on this site. Hard copy at Amazon.)

A Cure For Being Ball Bound

The golf ball on the ground can make us do things. Stupid things.

Golf is so easy. All you have to do when you swing at the ball is reproduce your practice swing. Easy!

But the ball gives us other ideas. Bad ideas.

Here’s a good idea.

When you take your practice swing, all see below you is turf. That’s all your mind is perceiving.

So, when you swing at the ball, see the ground on each side of the ball and fill in the ground under the ball with your imagination, and swing at all that, just like you did when the ball wasn’t there.

Now you’re back to what was going through your mind during your perfect practice swing, and you can easily reproduce that practice swing and just let everything else take care of itself.

The ball is still there, you can still see it, but you have given your mind the command to see the ground instead.

(There’s only room in your mind for one thought at a time, and that thought needs to be what to do. What not to do, as in don’t think about the ball or something like that, is entirely irrelevant.)

So instead of focusing on the ball, focus on the ground beneath the ball. Easy!

Visualize the Entire Shot

The next time you go out to play, try this.

Before you make your stroke, look ahead to where you want the ball to end up and visualize the ball going through the air/along the ground in the way you intend AND at the same time visualize the feeling in your body that will make the ball do that.

That second one should almost be a palpable feeling.

The Perfect Golf Swing

If you break 90 regularly, if you go to the course and expect to shoot in the 80s, I would guess you have a near-perfect golf swing–for you.

If you swung that swing a dozen times in a row, with no ball in front of you, I would bet that every swing would be as near to the same as a dozen swings can be.

The clubface would be square all the way through, the clubpath through “impact” would be right at the target, the hands would always be leading the clubhead. Most importantly, you would swing to identical finishes each time.

In other words, perfect.

Now put down a ball and swing at it. Did that same perfect swing come out, or did your “Hit the ball!” swing come out?

This is why golf is hard. We KNOW what to do. It’s just that the ball makes us do things we know are wrong, yet we can’t help it.

At this point I would normally give you the solution. But with this, I there’s nothing I can say.

You’re going to have to figure it out by yourself, which I urge you to do because if you crack this nut, there will be no stopping you.

It’s the most important golfing skill there is.

The Nothing Golf Swing

I’m going to remind you of something that I know has happened to you many times.

You’re in the fairway standing over the ball, your mind seems to be blank, you swing the club, and hit a tremendous shot and think to yourself, “Where did that come from?”

This happens a lot at the range, too. The first ball you hit with just a warming up swing is the best of the bucket.

The reason these things happened is that there was Nothing your mind.

I didn’t say there isn’t anything your mind. That’s different. There is something on your mind, and the name of that something is Nothing.

You’re not thinking of technique, you’re not thinking of results, not anything like that. You have cleared you mind of all that, but have not emptied it. Was you are thinking about now is Nothing.

What I mean by this is the feeling of a moving mind. that, and how to obtain it, are through described in Chapter 2 of my book, The Golfing Self.

The following golf-oriented exercise shows you a way to obtain this feeling.

I want you to take two practice swings, but without stopping between them. Start in your address position, then swing back, through, back again from there, and through a second time. Back through, back, through, two full swings in a continuous motion.

The first swing will probably be a bit clunky, like you’re trying to make a swing, but the second one will be quite relaxed, graceful, and, well, just a swing.

If you just let the second swing happen, you will have the feeling of Nothing in mind. At that point, step up to the ball and start your stroke with that feeling of Nothing still in mind. Go right away. If you delay too long, the feeling will fade away and you will be right back where you started.

Don’t hurry, just don’t dilly-dally. Step up to the ball and go while the feeling is fresh.

Practice this at home without a ball (of course). A lot. What you might have thought to be a random occurrence can become a reliable feature of your game.