It took me seventeen years to get three thousand hits in baseball. I did it in one afternoon on the golf course._-Hank Aaron, baseball

Hopeless Golfer!

One thing about me – I always dress well. I look the part of a golfer!

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“I get to play golf for a living. What more can you ask for – getting paid for doing what you love.”

From early childhood I dreamed of being the world’s best golfer. I worked hard and applied my family’s values to everything I did. Integrity, honesty, discipline, responsibility and fun; I learned these values at home and in school, each one pushing me further toward my dream.

One of the things that my parents have taught me is never listen to other people’s expectations. You should live your own life and live up to your own expectations, and those are the only things I really care about it.

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http://www.golf-mental-game-coach.com

Then I came across my solution…

If you’ve golfed competitively you’ve no doubt felt nerves affect your game. When I say competitively I don’t just mean competing on a professional or mini-tour. If you have a $5 bet with a colleague or friend it’s still competitive! Whether you’re a 27 handicap or scratch you are likely to feel at least some nerves during your round.

The Nervous Golfer cartoon

For many people it doesn’t even have to involve competiton at all. Just stepping to the first tee can cause a serious case of nerves. Maybe it’s when you must make a put to tie a hole or to win on the 18th green. If you’re standing on the 17th hole in a match and you’re 1 down then you have to deliver. Period. If you can’t channel your nerves you had better hope that swing you’ve been grooving for the past 6 months holds up now!

Regardless of skill level and/or on course scenario there will be times when you’ll require some way to calm your nerves so they don’t adversely affect your stroke/swing.

Have you made any conscious attempts to reduce your experience of nerves in your game? What did you try? What have been your results? Did they work and if so was it immediate? Or did you, like most every golfer alive, simply fill your head full of self talk saying things like, “ok, calm down. Just breathe…there’s nothing to be nervous about…hey, maybe he’ll miss his putt….yeah…miss-miss-miss!…”

Does this sound familiar?! Have you noticed that this doesn’t really do all that much to reduce your nervousness? Unless of course your playing partner does miss the putt!

Seriously though, you must have a means of noticing the onset of nerves and a method for not only calming them but using them to your advantage. How does that sound?

While I can’t go into detail on how to transform nerves into actually playing your best golf under pressure I will provide a few excellent methods you can use right away. They will improve your performance.

Breath is a very powerful state enhancer. What I mean is that your breathing provides deep physiological links to your internal states. So when you’re nervous the last thing you want to do is take short, shallow breaths. Quick breaths actually instruct the brain to respond in a “fight or flight” manner. The brain is hardwired to respond to fast breathing by being on the lookout for an emergency. Not the most effective place from which to make a smooth putting stroke on that 10 footer for par now is it?!

Tip #1

1) While waiting for your turn to hit stand aside and follow this breathing pattern:

Inhale – 4 counts

Hold – 5 counts

Exhale – 6 counts

Deep Breathing to calm your nerves!

Long, deep, slow breaths. This process interupts the breath influenced aspect of your state and directly instructs the brain to become still. Another adverse affect of nerves is a noticeable loss of feel in your hands. Sometimes you may even wonder if you’re even holding the club!

Tip #2

2) Simply hold a golf ball in your hands. Now squeeze it gently and hold for a few seconds. Then release. Then squeeze once again but this time do so very firmly and hold for a couple seconds then release. Roll the ball around in your hand and make a note of how the dimples feel.

Repeat this sequence 2 or 3 times and you will immediately increase the feel in your hands. Nervousness and shallow breathing directs extra blood to the brain, diverting it from your extremities. By doing applying this simple technique blood will flow back into your hands and improve your feel.

These 2 exercises work quickly. Self talk alone can’t compete with the psycho-physiological intensity of nervousness.

What if there was a way to transform nervousness into a calm, inner confidence? To actually have the onset of nerves “trigger” an inner calm. How powerful would that be in improving your performance? I can show you how to achieve this.

Wade Pearse is a Peak Performance Coach who spent 7 years applying the most advanced mental game strategies in golf with his clients and in his own game with phenomenal results. Visit his website. It’s 100% focused on developing the inner game of golf.

Wade Pearse

Keeping you on target!

Visit the website now….

Wade Pearse may be contacted at http://www.golf-mental-game-coach.com
Wade Pearse is a Mental Game Golf Coach who teaches the most advanced mental game strategies in golf. Visit his website today. It is 100% focused on developing your inner game.

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Here’s the first one I’ve illustrated for Gail Smirthwaite at http://www.confidencecaddie.com that appeared in Lady Golfer as a series of articles….

This month we are going to take a look at how goals create the ‘motivation’ in your life and how setting a goal BEFORE you go out and play golf will greatly impact on the results you will achieve.
In ‘The 7 Secrets of a Highly Successful Golfer’ every ‘secret’ helps to create awareness on how very important the role ‘good self-esteem’ plays in becoming a consistently confident person on and off the golf course. Motivation is very important to this process …how many times has your little voice said, ‘I always get to the fifteenth hole and feel really tired’, or ‘I just can’t seem to get motivated about anything especially my golf!’ – I am sure you can add to these?
In order for you to create the game of golf you would like to play, or indeed the life you would like to lead, you need to set goals; then fulfill your commitments to these goals and change the habits you have created that are stopping you from achieving what you really want to.
NB: Goals are dreams with a date attached!
I often ask the following question when I do a talk on this subject – ‘How many of you have set yourself the goal of lowering your handicap this year?’ Guess how many people in the audience put their hands up – yes nearly everyone?

Then I ask the next two questions; whether they had a similar goal the year before and how many actually achieved it. Again, many hands go up for the first part of the question but for the second part pretty much EVERY hand stays down.
Making goals is a peculiar emotional process that we humans engage in on a regular basis, however, what we tend to do is make the goal in our heads and then expect them to happen – we do nothing to change the habits that are preventing us from achieving them or create an achievable plan to get us there.
Einstein stated that the definition of insanity is ‘to keep doing what you have always done and expect a different result!’ How many of us are guilty of that one?
More importantly as the months go by and you have not achieved what you thought you would it serves as another nail in your coffin to lower your self-esteem. It allows that negative self-talk to kick in and tell you what a failure you are again!
Before you set your goals and work towards achieving them it is important to understand how your values and beliefs play such an important role in this process. No goal you make will truly give you proper fulfillment if it is not in line with what you value (Secret 2).
We are back to this word ‘desire’; you must really, truly desire the changes that you are looking for when you set yourself a goal. Let’s take the value of ‘success’, for instance, if this value means to you playing consistently well and taking your handicap down by two this season, then by thinking and believing it and by living it in every moment, you are more likely to succeed. REMEMBER you become what you think about most of the time!
NB: Also remember when setting goals they need to be yours, not other peoples or what you think you should be doing because those around you say so.
Often amateur golfers will come to me because they are not enjoying their game of golf anymore and cannot understand why. It sometimes turns out to be because they are putting unnecessary pressure on themselves because they have created a belief (Secret 3) that they should be playing golf to a certain standard. What they have often bought into is someone else’s values; someone else’s beliefs. This is why it is so IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND YOURSELF – to help create a real sense of self worth and inner confidence so that you can ENJOY the hobby the way you want to – not the way someone else believes you should!
So before you set about defining your GOALS make sure that they are in-line with YOUR VALUES otherwise you will set yourself up to fail again. To work further on your values and your goals download the relevant Work Books from the website www.playgreatgolf.co.uk and work through the exercises to establish your eight core values and their order of importance to you before setting your goals.

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