Bouncing Back
One of my top amateurs recently had an operation and is back into competition again. Aside from some slight swing adjustments he knows are necessary, he wrote me and stated, “Mentally I need to work on my bounce back ability harder. I still let a bad hole affect me too much.”
How we cope with negative events in our lives makes a big difference in our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. For instance, we know from other research that people who use certain types of coping with a tragedy feel better about them selves and experience less depression and are more healthy than those who don’t use that type of coping. In the case of golf, research has found that those golfers who can accept their shots (good or bad) and move onto the next one, have lower handicaps than those who tend to focus on their previous shot. Think about it this way, a golfer who realizes that they can’t do anything about their last shot and simply accepts the outcome now has more time to focus on the current shot. Accepting a shot is like taking out the trash. The more we continue to think about shots we took, the more the baggage piles up and the heavier your load becomes.
The issue on the course is that accepting bad shots can be more difficult to do than one might think. The following exercise will help to develop the skill of acceptance for poor golf shots, leading to less blood pressure, better feel, more focus, and ultimately better results.
Acceptance exercise:
- For starters, you need to be able to hear your inner voice judge and criticize a person, place, or thing. If you have trouble with knowing your “self-talk”, it might help you to think about a situation where you wanted to say something but you “bit your tongue” and held the words back from coming out. We talk to our selves all day long and are so used to it that often we don’t even know we have an inner dialog.
- Make an effort to right down two criticisms that you hear your inner voice speak.
- Criticism 1. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
- Criticism 2. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
- Make an effort to accept the criticized situations as they are….
- On a scale from 1-10 (1 being the low end of the scale) rank your ability to accept each criticized situation.
Criticized Situation 1.
My score of accepting the situation as it is, without judgment:________
Criticized Situation 2.
My score of accepting the situation as it is, without judgment:________
- Work this mental muscle over and over again.
- This sort of exercise is not common and it’s likely that you’ve never done it before. Hence, it might be difficult to understand and see how doing such an exercise can help one to become better at acceptance and how that can lead to improved results on the golf course. Regardless, studies have shown the benefits of acceptance and its impact on focus and concentration. As you continue to pay attention to your thoughts about people, places, and things, and choose to accept situations without judgment, your golf game will improve.
- Acceptance is a skill as much as knowing how to hit a flop shot. It takes repetition, awareness, and needs to become a habitual way of thinking for consistent results. Repetition is the mother of skill. Work the mental muscle.