Golf On Tour Secrets – How to Stop Punishing Yourself on the Golf Course
I know that golf is a difficult game to play consistently well. I also know that most amateur golfers would play much better if they just gave themselves a break from “beating themselves” every time they hit a golf shot that is less than they expected.
I have spent countless hours with amateur golfers and professional golfers and one thing I continually observe is the difference in attitude between professionals and amateurs when it comes to how they deal with ‘less than desirable’ golf shots. For the most part, successful professional golfers are adept at dealing with the continual ups and downs of this great game.
Professionals who play golf on tour realize that “you can’t control the game, but you can control yourself during the game.”
Of all the many factors that influence the results you achieve on the golf course, the factor that will make the biggest difference to you is how you deal with your frustration when things don’t seem to be going your way. The easiest thing you can do is get angry about a golf swing and carry the anger and frustration with you.
One of the mental confidence skills tour golf professionals develop is a high tolerance for frustration. Frustration is a form of stress, and reacting negatively can literally set off a chemical time bomb within you that erodes your confidence and propels you into a seemingly endless negative emotional cycle.
That is, bad shot = frustration = bad shot = frustration = bad shot = frustration, etc.
The bottom line is that you need to control how you experience frustration. It is important to realize that your perception of any golf event dictates your response, and this response is chemical in nature. When your golfer perceives events in a negative way, such as “feeling frustrated,” it releases chemicals into your bloodstream that trigger a multitude of biochemical events, which can cause you to produce a surge of adrenaline and cortisol, which are stress hormones. These chemicals affect the feel and rhythm of your swing and symptoms like an increased heart rate and high blood pressure are also common.
The good news is that stress caused by frustration is okay as long as you recognize it for what it is. Exposure to stress is the starting point for our mental, physical and emotional growth. Small intermittent doses of stress are actually good for you because they allow you to get used to the ever-changing conditions on the golf course. Protecting yourself against exposure to stress will not make you a better golfer, it will make you a worse one.
There is a saying that goes “If you don’t fit your die”, and speaking metaphorically, this is quite correct. If you don’t learn to adapt, you don’t learn to move beyond your existing comfort zone and your golf improvement dies. Getting too comfortable and basically developing a game of golf that never really changes is described as arrested development. This is where you stop improving and start to get too comfortable, or if you like it too automatic.
Professional golfers are always improving little aspects of their golf skills so they never get too comfortable and too automatic. Feeling uncomfortable is vitally important as it challenges you to keep finding ways to improve. “Negative stress lives beyond discomfort,” and the question you may need to ask yourself about frustration is this; “What makes you think that every golf shot you make should go exactly as planned?”
Remember that the problem isn’t the frustration you experience when hitting a golf shot that wasn’t up to your level; It’s when you exceed your frustration tolerance level that problems start to arise. Would golf be more enjoyable for you if you could simply let go of the negative feelings associated with taking bad golf shots that don’t live up to your expectations?
Professional golfers know that almost every golf shot they hit will be less than they expected. In other words, they miss most golf shots compared to their level of expectations.
If your goal is to hit your golf ball in the middle of the fairway, thirty to fifty percent of the time it will go into the rough or bunker of the fairway or sometimes even into the water.
If they are hitting an iron shot on the green, about forty percent of the time they will miss the green.
If you play a sand shot from a greenside bunker, at least fifty percent of the time you will not putt.
If you hit your ball from the front of the green wanting to get it too close to the hole, more often than not it will end up short and to the left or right of where you expected it to end up.
And finally, when they kick six to ten feet out of the hole, they will miss at least fifty percent of them.
So, during all the hours of practice that professional golfers put into their trade, their golf shots miss most of the time. The difference is that they know and continually manage their expectations, and so should you.
It is unreasonable to think that your golf shots will turn out the way you expect them to most of the time because there are so many variables that influence where your golf shot will end up. The best you can hope for is to accept that it will probably be short, long, to the right, or to the left of where you thought it would be.
We cannot master the game of golf, no one has and no one ever will. However, you can master your emotions so that when faced with the choice of how you will respond to a bad shot, you can pick up your golf club and carefully slip it back into your golf bag and walk to your next golf shot without emotion. . buying the less-than-desirable hit you just played. Accept that you did the best you could at that time and live with it.
Punishing yourself for any golf shot suggests that you are probably putting a lot more pressure on yourself than you need to and that you have developed unreasonable expectations about certain golf skills. By continually doing this, you will never learn to realize that you have the ability to think before you react and choose the option of simply accepting the consequences of your actions and continuing your game.
Increase your ability to tolerate more frustration during your round and you will develop your skill and expand the potential of your golf skills into better golf shots when needed, leading to more confidence and much more enjoyable rounds.
How happy and confident you feel on the golf course is an excellent indicator of how well you manage your frustration tolerance levels. The more you accept the difficulty of the game and continually work conscientiously on your weak abilities, the less likely you are to want to punish yourself. Remember “you can’t control the game, but you can control yourself during the game”.