Golf, Life, And The Challenge Of Controlling Your Mental Game

The Challenge of Controlling Your Mental Game

Changing your feelings about the way you feel regarding a particular shot, can actually allow you to succeed. That may sound a little confusing, but for instance, say you’ve been playing a poor game up to the 9th hole. You realize that your attitude has become very negative, and you recognize that if you don’t change your attitude, you won’t get any better.

You begin to pretend that you are doing well, and believe that you will continue to do well until the end of the game. Confidence in your ability goes a long way in the game of pretend, and is imperative for its success.

While we can make the distinction between anxiety and anger, our nervous system can’t tell the difference. While both are powerful emotional reactions and trigger physiological arousal which trigger our negative responses (such as “fight or flight”), they are two very different emotions. Both of these are identified by very different thought processes and produce significantly different behaviors.

Anxiety may cause a person to become quiet, withdrawn or even to leave, at its worst it can cause a person to freeze up (stage fright is a sign of anxiety) and be unable to continue with what they are doing.

Anger produces more evident reactions and behaviors, both mentally and physically. Some people react to anger in the same way as they react to anxiety, holding their anger in often getting headaches and other problems in their physical health.

Remember that you must control obsessive and perfectionist behaviors when you play golf. You are not perfect and must remember this in order to play good golf. A perfectionist may struggle with the many bad shots (which are to be expected) while the obsessive golfer may not be able to put the one bad shot out of his mind, dwelling on it to the detriment of his entire game.