You can save at least three strokes per side without even hitting the ball. Here is how I lost four in eleven holes yesterday.

I’m still playing abbreviated rounds while I recover from my two back surgeries of a year ago. My gas tank isn’t very big yet. So yesterday I went out with two friends, and played 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 17, and 18. The course we played is laid out so it is easy to take breaks at these points.

On the first hole, I had an easy chip for my par and left it way short. I just got too careful instead of hitting the chip like I do in practice a 100 times each week. 1.

On the second hole, I got shy again, and left a made-to-order 90-yard chip 15 yards short and in a bunker. 2.

On the eighth hole I hooked my drive into a bad lie. Instead of hitting out with an 8-iron to take my bogey, I tried for the whole show with my 4-hybrid. One bad stroke led to another. 3.

On the tenth hole, I mis-aligned my drive and hit it way right. I misaligned my pitch into the green and hit it way left. I scored the Trifecta by getting shy (again!) with a garden-variety chip. 4.

Four shots lost that had nothing to do with ball-striking and everything to do with not using my head. I was six over for those eleven holes and could have been only two over without breaking a sweat.

Believe me, I will make the most of these object lessons.

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Until you have learned to control your mind in a positive way, your golf will be characterized by untapped potential.

A few weeks ago, I put up a guest post about building consistency into your game. That post addressed your technical skills.

What I want to say today is, your mental game needs to be just as consistent, and you need to practice it just as much, and in the same way. Please read that earlier post before you continue this one, if you haven’t already.

I would guess that if you wrote down the shots that didn’t turn out well in the last round you played, that the cause was most often a mental lapse of some sort. Your mind was distracted, you were worried about something, over-analyzing the situation, forgetting to consider some variables, and so on.

The point is that you haven’t yet built up positive mental habits. A habit is something that you do reflexively, without thinking; you just do it.

All the time you spend at the range is meant to build up positive technical habits, so when you play a stroke, proper technique comes out automatically.

There are, unfortunately, no “mind ranges” where you can practice the mental skill of consistently staying focused so you observe everything, make good decisions, and execute the shot with confidence.

My new book, The Golfing Self, shows you how to build up a focused mind and how to make that focus habitual.

I wrote this book because I want you to play better. Buy it, read it, apply it, and you will.

It will change everything about the way you play.

“The world we live in is characterized by change. Every day we wake up a bit different than we were yesterday. Each passing moment gives us a new world to live in. We do not live in the same world we lived in yesterday, one minute ago, or even one second ago. The nature of the world is change. To be one with that world, your mind needs to be in tune with the present moment, not with the moment before this one, nor the moment to come. The concept of the present moment is necessarily dynamic.

“As soon as this moment arrives, it departs and a new one takes its place. The present moment is continually being renewed. It cannot be held on to, for as soon as you try, you are operating in the past. That moment is now part of the world as it was, not as it is now. To live wholly in the world, the mind must be moving along with the movement of the world. In other words, live with what can be called a ‘moving mind.’

“Most of the time, changes are so slight that they are imperceptible. You might say, “I can stand beside my golf ball for as long as you want me to, and it’s still going to be 174 yards from the green, on a downhill lie, with a pin on the left next to a bunker. None of that is going to change.” I would agree with you, but that is only one way to interpret what you’re seeing.

“You are not projecting a golf shot into a still image, like a painting or a photograph. You are hitting the ball into an environment that is changing in subtle ways which are noticeable if your perception changes with it. The course ahead of you will accept many different shots. By allowing your perception of the course to change moment by moment, you’ll find the shot you need to hit.

“As each moment comes, the golf course tells you its story, creating an impression with you. As another moment comes, a new story is told, creating a new impression, continuing on until the right choice presents itself clearly. I found the hybrid shot in a crosswind when I stopped trying to figure it out logically, and let the course reach into my thinking and put the shot together for me.

“When your mind is moving, impressions get created in your mind that permeate themselves into your body. The physical execution of the shot will be in accord with, and a physical expression of, your mental feeling of the shot. The physical feeling you are experiencing is the mental feeling made material. Wherever you are, there is a positive shot you can hit. Looking with a moving mind is the way to find it.”

— from my new book, The Golfing Self, now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.

Joyce Wethered, an English golfer whose heyday was in the 1920s, and is regarded as one of the best female golfers of all time, was on the green and putting in the 1920 English Open when a train came roaring by. (Golf courses in those days were built next to rail lines to make it easy to get to the course, since few people had cars.) The story goes, as an example of her superior power of concentration, that she was so wrapped up in her putt that she never noticed the train.

But let’s think about this for a moment. Trains make lots of noise. When one goes by and it’s less than 100 feet away, it’s loud, and you hear it. If, however, you’re truly concentrating with a moving mind, the noise won’t bother you. You won’t pay attention to it because it’s irrelevant to what you’re trying to accomplish. That’s what happened to her.

When you are truly concentrating, your power of perception increases. You notice more things. Along with that, though, comes filtering out information that is not relevant to your task at hand. Your moving mind attends to whatever is important and the rest gets discarded.

We all think we know what it means to concentrate. We “bear down,” “zero in.” We force our mind to pay attention to one thing and fight to exclude distractions. We are taught from an early age that trying hard and concentrating are the same thing. We continue to concentrate in this way not because it works, but because it is what we were taught.

We have learned that since the body must do hard work to achieve results, so must the mind. We are also aware that we seldom concentrate in this way, because, quite frankly, most of us avoid hard work if we can.

This is all a misunderstanding of what it means to concentrate. There are many other misunderstandings. Concentration is the easiest thing in the world to do. It’s nothing more than being able to maintain your mental focus without pause.

— from The Golfing Self

Find out more about what concentration means, and to learn how to concentrate correctly, in this revolutionary golf instruction book, now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com.

It will change everything about the way you play.

People say they want their golf to be consistent, but I think they really mean predictable. When you swing identically every time, you will have attained that goal. Though we can never do that, we can get close by learning what it means to swing identically.

Begin with a simple greenside chip, that has maybe a three-foot backswing. Learn to strike the ball identically every time with that simple stroke. Be very strict when it comes to judging your strike. Identical means similar in every detail, exactly alike. Really close doesn’t count.

Is the feeling in your hands that contact makes identical? Is the sound of contact identical? Do you hit just a bit thin or a bit heavy?

You know what identical means. The more rigorously you apply the concept to this exercise, the more demanding you are of perfection, you more will get out of it.

Big hint: this whole thing is a mental challenge, not a physical one.

Generally, the first two or three chips you hit will be identical, because your conscious mind has not gotten engaged yet. But when the thinking mind takes over, trying to hit identical shots, it all falls to pieces.

At first, you weren’t trying. You just swing and identicality (now there’s a word!) just happened. The practice is to keep hitting using the unthinking mind that you used at the start, to not let that change. The goal of this exercise is not to make your stroke predictable, but to make your mind predictable.

If your mind gets used in the right way, every time, the ball-striking it leads to will be predictable. The reason it’s not isn’t because you haven’t hit 10,000 golf balls. It’s because you haven’t trained your mind not to change with every swing.

That’s hard to do, but infinitely rewarding when you learn to do it.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

A few weeks ago, I took a lesson on how to chip from several yards off the green. This is not where the ball is just off the edge of the green and you could poke it on with a 6-iron. The shot I need help on has to be hit with a lofted club, and that introduces spin. I wanted to learn how to hit it and get predictable spin so the shot wouldn’t check up one time and run out the next.

So, the pro taught me step-by-step, and in a half hour I had it figured out. I practiced it for a while after the lesson was over, then sat in the car before I drove home to write down the points the pro gave me on how to hit it. There were six. Six things I had to do to get it right.

I practiced every day after that, working on those six things, one at a time, until one or two points became one. Now only four things to work on, gradually merging the points until it became two points, then one. When it gets down to none, I’ll have it cracked.

What I have been doing is not training the body, but training the mind. None of the points are difficult at all. Anyone can execute them. The hard part is to coordinate them, to do them in the proper order and not leave out any. That’s an accomplishment which occurs in the mind.

When we play golf, we should just be playing. Mechanics get worked out on the range. They get worked out by training the mind to perform, not the body. Swinging the club, hitting balls without a plan, is so much exercise. If you know what you are trying to accomplish, in the sense that if you get certain points right you’ll get the shot you want, you’re working on embedding the mental instructions into your memory so they become automatic and don’t think about them.

When you play, you ideally just perform so what you have trained yourself to do will come out. If you’re still worried about mechanics when you play, you haven’t completed your training yet. You haven’t spent enough time giving your mind a chance to learn what to do.

I read once, in regard to learning a new language, that language learning is overlearning. Through constant repetition, habits are acquired so the speaker can to be concerned only with what to say rather than how to say it. It’s the same with golf. Through mentally structured practice, the mind learns how to hit a shot automatically so the golfer can be concerned with what the shot is supposed to accomplish rather than how to hit it.

Let me be clear on what a new shot is. It’s not a shot you haven’t hit before. It’s any shot which you can’t hit without thinking about what to do. I began by describing a shot which I have hit many times on the course. Because I didn’t really know how to hit it, it was still a new shot to me. If you would adopt that attitude to your game, it will lead you to thinking the right way about developing your game and becoming a shot-maker.

Happy Independence Day, everyone.

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Every good golfer will tell you that once you have selected your shot, you have to commit to it for it to come off successfully. You can’t still be deciding or wondering if you’re doing the right thing. People who say that are exactly right, but when we try to put that thought into practice it isn’t that easy. Why not? Perhaps it’s because we don’t understand what commitment really is.

When we go through a conscious process of judging the course and matching what we see with the shots we know we can hit, or want to hit, the result is never something that we can truly believe in. There is always lingering doubt as to whether we can pull the shot off, or whether we have evaluated the situation correctly in the first place. Sometimes that bit of doubt is too small to see, other times it it is so large we can hardly move the club.

There is no way that we can commit to a shot if there is a possibility, no matter how slight, that it is the wrong shot or that we aren’t good enough to hit it. We have to make a change somewhere.

Commitment is not an agreement you make, or a promise or a pledge to do the right thing. Nor does it imply an obligation to do something in a moral or a legal sense, as the word is commonly used. The commitment I am talking about is a feeling which exists in your mind and infuses itself into your body that what you are about to do is correct. You have a deep subconscious knowing that transcends success and failure. The knowing in your mind and the knowing in your body are the same. The only thing left is to perform. See shot, hit shot.

I know you have had that feeling on the course before, and if you would just take a few moments to reflect, you would be able to remember an occasion or two when you felt that way about a shot. I would be willing to say that the shot came off quite nicely, too. The question is, then, how do you get to that state at will? How do you make it more than something you enjoy once or twice a year?

As you stand over the ball, turn off the part of your mind that tries to evaluate the course in front of you based on everything you know from the past. That knowledge is in there and it doesn’t need to be cued. Just calm your mind look. Don’t go looking for something. Let the course come to you. In a few seconds you will clearly “see” that you should “hit this shot over there.”

That’s about as clear as words can describe it, and if you have to be specific yourself about what that meant, you probably couldn’t, but that’s all right. You don’t have to be able to express something in words to know it. In fact, that knowing is probably superior in most cases to what you can articulate.

A year ago I was about 80 yards from the green on a par 5, on the right side of the fairway just about ten feet above the green. The pin was on the back tier. Pitching the ball to that tier would have been risky, because over the green is a severe downhill slope. A pitch to the front of the green would not allow the ball to run to the hole because of the elevation difference.

So I just kept looking. The ground to the left of the green sloped away, too, so I looked right. I kept looking right and because I didn’t see a shot, I kept looking more right. More right and more right, and suddenly it all made sense. I could punch an 8-iron over to the mounds on the right and let the ball roll down them onto the back tier so the ball would approach the pin from dead right. I know how hard to hit the ball and just where to aim the shot. In less time than it takes to say so, I pulled out the 8-iron, lined myself up to what I “saw,” and hit the ball. It rolled exactly as I knew it would, off the mounds to ten feet from the hole.

I would like to end the story be saying that I sank the putt, but I didn’t. Seeing clearly doesn’t guarantee perfection. But the 8-iron I hit I was committed to as I described above. It’s a good way to play golf by using a mental skill I practice with every ball I hit in play and on the range. It’s as much a part of your setup as anything else you do to get ready.

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In all of my posts about the mental game, I try to leave you with the idea that the skills you have developed to this point express themselves fully only when your mind is calm and concentrating on a feeling of ease with what you are about to do, rather than on results or process. The question, of course, is how you get to that state of mind. Here’s my answer.

So much of the worry that disturbs our mind comes from the past. You made mistakes on shots like this before so you are worried that you might do it again.

The way to release yourself from the past, and worries that attend to it, is to give your mind something else to do. Just like with a poorly behaving child, don’t suppress. Distract. When you’re watching the ball go where you hit it, do not judge the shot. Just watch. All you need to know is where the ball ends up so you can find it again.

When the ball stops rolling, switch your mind immediately to the next shot. Good or bad, put your mind on what will happen next. Keep going forward. Get out of the habit of judging your shot, which makes you stay on something that is done and cannot be changed.

If you need some help, try giving yourself credit for having a well-rounded game. So you missed the green and instead of getting your par with two putts, you’ll get it with a chip and a putt. From wherever you are, imagine a positive sequence of shots that get the ball quickly into the hole. You don’t have to hit four good shots to get a par. Three good ones will do. Golf is not that hard.

By the time you reach the ball, your mind will be absorbed in what to do next. It will not have spent one moment on what happened up to that point, because you did not give the chance to. This is exactly what you want to do. Don’t give your mind any time to wander off into a place where it could do you harm.

In a current NY Times article, Phil Mickelson is described as being “the best forgetter out there.” He is always moving forward, looking for shots that will put himself in command of the round. He doesn’t spend any time on what didn’t work out. I would guess that he doesn’t spend any time on what did, either.

The more you make that your habit, too, the more prepared your mind will be to stay out of your way and let your skills be expressed. If this is a change you need to make, it takes time and constant work. The rewards are more enjoyment and lower scores.

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To enjoy playing golf, to play your best golf, and to improve, you must see everything about your golf game in a positive light. Criticizing gets you nowhere. Put only the good shots, the great shots, in your memory. Magnify them, glorify them, let them define how you play golf. Tell yourself, “That’s how I play golf.” Those shots weren’t accidents. They truly are how you play golf.

Yes, you do hit bad shots. Everybody does. Do you ignore them? Of course you do! Put them out of your mind. The only shots to carry with you are the good ones. Never say, “I can’t hit this shot,” or, “I can’t [anything].” Never say that. Work only with true things. It is not true that you can’t hit a particular shot. It is true that you didn’t hit it. So when you flub one, say to yourself, “I didn’t hit that shot, but next time I will.” Always use positive words.

Write down your good shots. Keep a notebook in which you record the results of each round of golf you play. In this book, write down the good shots only. Write down the setting, what club you used, describe the shot, and the result. No symbology! Use words! Write down a narrative that inspires you and re-read it before you play. Remind yourself of how good you are. Got a hole on your home course that’s hard for you? Write down the times you played it well and memorize what you wrote. Review those notes before you go out. Put the good times in your head.

If you had a good run of well-played holes, write down how you felt during that time. Give yourself some advice on how to feel like that at will instead of it just happening. During a good streak on the course, enjoy it and keep it going. If you have one good hole, have two more. There is no such thing as “playing over your head.” You wouldn’t be playing this well if you weren’t capable of it.

Stay positive about your game. Hit only the shots you’re good at with the clubs you’re good at. Sure, you‘re allowed to carry fourteen clubs, but if there are a few you don’t feel comfortable with, leave them home! Find a way to get the ball around the course hitting the shots you like with the clubs you like, and find a way to hit those shots with those clubs as often as you can. Identify your skills and beat the course to death with them.

Stand over every shot believing that it will turn out well. If you’re unsure of yourself, choose a different shot or a different club. Is there a shot you need but don’t hit well? Get a lesson, learn how to hit it so you look forward to hitting it during play.

When the round is over, talk to your friends about the good shots you hit, and that they hit. Review the round in a positive way. Change the subject if someone starts talking about their flubs. Come away from the course happy, believing that you had a chance to display your skills to their full advantage, and that next time out you’ll do it again.

Always be positive about your golf. Allow nothing negative into your golf game. Always be positive.

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