14 Golf Performance Experts Share Their Best Advice in 25 minutes

We’ve pulled out some amazing clips from the Unlocking Performance Summit so you can get some critical advice to help you go play better golf this summer.

So many INCREDIBLE takeaways from the summit. Good news is you can now access all the content as well just click here and you can get a better idea of what it’s all about.

Here’s one quote from an attendee that makes all of this worth it!!

I have been struggling with golf for many years now. Finally I can put the pieces together. Your seminars are starting to work for me. I will be replaying each one of the sessions and taking notes this time as well following all the presenters and you on Twitter.

Thanks. When they say golf is mental no one says ok so what does that mean? How do I deal with that? You have finally provided the answers…

-LEN

LET’S GET INTO THE PERFORMANCE & MENTAL QUOTES

The Human Skills

When we practice or prepare, we can work on our technique, or go to the gym and work on strength and flexibility. We can go and make sure our equipment is fit properly and we can go and train more mental skills or emotional skills. We can do all that in practice.

What we need to realize is that once you put your foot on the first tee, you can no longer change your skill level. If you don’t know how to hit a slice, it’s not going to suddenly appear. If you don’t know how to hit a bunker shot, it’s not going to appear.

You have to play with the skills you have at that time.

Many people do all that work leading up to the golf course and then when they step on the golf course, they actually don’t know what they are supposed to focus on.

Vision54
Lynn Marriott and Pia Nilsson
Vision54.com



Visualization on Steroids

Imagine yourself succeeding and what that feels like in every vivid detail you can possibly imagine.

How your hands feel, the level of tension you might feel while watching the putt roll across the grass. The sound that ball makes as it drops into the cup, what other people might be saying as soon as it happens and the overall lightness of accomplishment.

It has an emotional context… and I want you to embrace that.

joe bosco

 

Joe Bosco
joeboscogolf.com



Self-image

Our self-image impacts how we talk to ourselves, our internal dialogue, all of which impacts our mindset how we see things, and what our vision for the future is.

That vision for our future impacts what we are doing in our process, in our plan, in our development. Our plan, what we create, our structure, and our organizational plan impacts and interacts with the world around us and then finally how we project ourselves.

Dr Bhrett McCabe

 

Dr Bhrett McCabe
themindside.com




Improve your ability to FOCUS

People with poor attention control, in other words that they get distracted by external things,get out there and can’t block out your playing partners, can’t block out the people watching, too attentive to the score and you can’t immerse themselves in what they are doing.

Those same people, when you watch them go practice, they do the exact opposite of what they should do. The person with poor attention control will go to the driving range and they’ll look down the range and find the area in the range where nobody is and they’ll go to the end of the range and be by themselves.

If there’s someone one the putting green, they won’t practice on the putting green. They wait till they leave and then they’ll go and practice putting by themselves.

They put themselves in a situation where there are no intentional demands because they don’t have good attention control. It’s the exact opposite of what I would prescribe they do as a sports psychologist.

dr rick jensen

Dr Rick Jensen
drrickjensen.com




It’s not WHAT you think…

It’s not what you are thinking, because if it was what you were thinking, a swing thought would always work…

So, let’s say someone has a swing thought and they want to make a full turn. They get to the 15th tee, they tell themselves on with their driver, “make a full turn”. They just nail it and it’s the best tee shot of the day. They get to the 16th tee and they tell themselves the same thing, after all it worked on the 15th tee “make a full turn”; the ball goes nowhere.

If it was what you were thinking, a swing thought, would never break down. Why would it break down? But it’s not what you are thinking… It’s not the content of your thought.

It’s not what you are thinking, it’s how you are thinking.
It’s from what level of the mind the thought was generated from.

steven yellin

Steven Yellin
fluidmotiongolf.com



Deal with the first tee NERVES

Let’s start with an example of someone standing on the first tee thinking, “Man, if only I could get up here and not be nervous” or “If only I could get up here and not think about hitting a shank into the pool right of the hole, then maybe I’d be okay.”

Most then spend the next 15 to 30 seconds trying to do whatever you can to think differently. But in the back of your mind, that thought is still sort of still there. You can still feel that tension. Now you are in this deep battle with yourself, not over the thought itself but trying to get rid of it.

The opposite would be to stand on that first tee and feel that thought coming. “Okay, I’m sensing some nerves, I’m aware that I’m nervous, I’m aware that I’m feeling some anxiety, guess what? It’s okay. I’m going to allow that to sort of resonate, sit for a little bit to move forward.” That’s where you return your focus.

Now no longer is the focus on trying to change what you think, trying to stop thinking negatively, now it’s about focusing on the task at hand.

dr greg cartin

Dr Greg Cartin
mindfulmindset.com



4 building blocks of Self-Belief

When we think about belief, there’s really four places where it comes from and this is taken straight out of Bandura’s research.

The first is EXPERIENCE, so often times confidence comes from evidence and so when there’s external evidence or witness yourself being successful, that fuels your self-image or your belief.

There’s the idea of MODELING, if this person can do it, why can’t I? And so when you think if the influx of female professional golfers from South Korea and you think of this, Se-ri Pak that totally shifted the the overall mindset of the culture to say, you know what someone from here did it, so can I.

There’s this element of PERSUASION which would be any sort of external feedback or encouragement from others. When you think of Jason Day had his father and he had Collin Swatton and he had the whole environment of this school around just a lot of conditions there right to push him externally in that direction that he wants to and again fuel his own belief about what he is capable of achieving.

And then fourthly PHYSIOLOGY, and this one is a little more performance specific. Someone is likely to believe in their abilities more if their physical state is such that one that is sort of calm and not under stress as opposed to one who is very anxious and fearful. Often they are centered or focused on ways where we can manage our physiology and get into sort of a performance state that enables us to access our skills and do what we can.

matt wilson golf

Matt Wilson
curiouscoaches.com




Perception vs Reality

Most golfers are what I call “ego golfers”. They reach a point where they tie how well they are playing with how they look in front of other golfers.

There’s this perception that if you are not a very good golfer, then you are not a very good person or it somehow reflects who you are as a person by how well you play on the golf course.

The key is to think about and a lot of players that I have worked with have found this to be quite effective in separating yourself as a person and you as a player.

david mackenzie

David MacKenzie
golfstateofmind.com



How to build confidence

Magic happens when we want to have success bad enough that we are willing to do the things we don’t want to do.

I have a player on tour and we always have stakes. If you see me out on tour, I can guarantee you, I’m doing pushups because I’m always betting push ups.

With this one player on the putting green, we were betting pushups, against tickets to a Philly’s game. I wanted those tickets. So I set up a game where he had to two putt every hole that was on the putting green. He had one chance to do it.

Here’s the thing… There was one putt that was really, really difficult. He stepped up, hasn’t practiced at all, and says, “I’m starting with that one right there, the most difficult putt.”

Start with what’s hard. It gives us confidence that we can get anything done.

dr rob bell

Dr Rob Bell
drrobbell.com




Golf Habits

Most of what we are doing right now, yourself and I and anyone who is listening to this, is just a habit. That starts with how you are breathing, the automated function of your physiological system, how your heart is beating and how you are breathing exchanging oxygen and CO2.

It’s about how you are holding your posture, it’s about how you are thinking, it’s about how you are listening to what I say. These are not conscious actions, they are automatic behaviors. Tonight I said what you do is just having some – whatever our behavior us currently on the golf course, whether it’s helpful bits of what or not helpful, it’s just a habit. So to change it is going to be challenging because building new habits is difficult.

There is a myth out there that says it takes 21 days to build new habits. Nonsense. It can take up to a year to build a new habit. Habits are very complicated; they are integrated, they are connected. We can’t change ourselves for sure but you have to be realistic about to change process.

Jon Finn

Dr Jon Finn
pre-shot.co.uk



Range game to the course

There’s a lot of golfers that will always ask, “Why can’t I take my range game to the course?”

Quite simply, they are not in an effective learning model built for the retention of the knowledge and building lasting skills.

Currently in the golf world, there is a lack of transfer of skills into the competitive environment. A lack of transfer of that range game striking that ball well repeatedly on the golf range, those are going to happen when players go to the golf course.

iain highfield

Iain Highfield
Bishops Gate Golf Academy




Range game to the course

You have to be make practice hard putting yourself in situations where you are working at the edge of your present ability… or else learning doesn’t take place.

You are just really going through the motions and again that’s very sad that people spend hours and hours at the range and they don’t know what to believe. Yet they are so adamant, they think that they are moving in the right direction yet they would be skeptical if you ask them, does it transfer to the course. Then they somehow irrationally feel as though they are idiots; that they have some huge mental impairment and they don’t.

They have never really trained in a way that should result in a considerable change on the golf course or in competition.

iain highfield

Dr Fran Pirozzolo
drfranpirozzolo.com




Positivity on the golf course

A positive mind making clear decisions and freely accessing available skill provides the best opportunity for success. We have always been trying to figure out how to help golfers when they are anxious, uncomfortable, they don’t feel confident, or whether they discover they are not prepared or their lack of skill, negative emotions come rushing in and when they come rushing in, they disrupt the free-flowing signals in the brain causing poor decisions and making errant shot.

I’m a firm believer that when those errant shots show up, you haven’t lost skill, you simply lost the ability to access your skill.

It’s the concept of hitting it great on the driving range and then going to play and you can’t replicate those successes. I really think that has to do with your being uncomfortable, less than confident or not knowing how to prepare for the golf course.

ed teer

Ed Teer
edteergolf.com




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