I know golf is a difficult game to play consistently well. I also know that most amateur golfers would play a lot better if they just took a break from “hitting 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 notice is the difference in attitude between professionals and amateurs when it comes to the way they handle “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 find that “you can’t control the game, but you can control it during the game.”
Of all the factors that influence your results on the golf course, the factor that will make the biggest difference to you is how you handle your frustration when things don’t seem to be going your way. The easiest thing you can do is get angry over a golf shot and carry anger and frustration with you.
One of the mental confidence skills that professionals who play golf on tour develop is a high tolerance for frustration. Frustration is a form of stress, and reacting to it in a negative way can literally set off a chemical time bomb within you that erodes your confidence and pushes you into a negative emotional cycle that seems to have no end.
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 you perceive golf events in a negative light, such as ‘feeling frustrated’, you release chemicals into your bloodstream that trigger a multitude of biochemical events, which can cause you to produce a surge in 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 not uncommon as well.
The good news is that stress brought on by frustration is fine 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 really good for you because they allow you to get used to the changing conditions of the golf course. Protecting yourself against exposure to stress will not make you a better golfer, it will make it worse.
There is a saying that goes “If you don’t fit your die”, and metaphorically speaking, this is quite correct. If you don’t learn to adapt, you don’t learn how to move beyond your existing comfort zone, and your golf improvement dies. Being too comfortable and basically playing a golf game that never really changes is described as arrested development. This is where you stop improving and start feeling too comfortable, or if you like too automatic.
Professional golfers are always improving small aspects of their golf skills so that they never feel too comfortable or too automatic. Feeling uncomfortable is vitally important as it challenges you to keep finding ways to improve. “Negative stress lives beyond awkwardness,” and the question to ask yourself about frustration is this; “What makes you think that every golf shot you make should turn out exactly as you planned?”
Remember that the problem is not the frustration you experience when making a golf shot that was not up to your standards; It is when you exceed your frustration tolerance level that problems begin to arise. Would you enjoy golf more if you could just let go of the negative feelings associated with bad golf shots that don’t live up to your expectations?
Professional golfers know that almost every golf shot they make will be less than they bargained for. In other words, they hit the majority of golf shots poorly compared to their expectation level.
If your goal is to hit your golf ball in the middle of the fairway, thirty to fifty percent of the time it will enter the rough or a fairway bunker, or sometimes even the water.
If they are hitting the green with an iron shot, about forty percent of the time they will miss the green.
If they play a shot in the sand from a bunker on the green, at least fifty percent of the time they will not make the putt.
If you throw your ball from the front of the green wanting to get too close to the hole, most of the time it will end up short and to the left or right of where you expected it to end.
And finally, when they hit six to ten feet from the hole, they will lose at least fifty percent of them.
So during all the hours of practice that professional golfers do their craft, their golf shots are missed most of the time. The difference is that they know it and continually manage your expectations, and you must too.
It is unreasonable to think that your golf shots will turn out everything you expect most of the time because there are many variables that influence where your golf shot will land. The best you can hope for is to accept that it will probably be short-long-right or 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 take your golf club and carefully slide it into your golf bag and walk towards your next golf shot without emotion. buying the less than desirable hit you just played. Accept that you did the best you could at the time and live with it.
Hitting yourself for any golf shot suggests that you are probably pushing yourself a lot more than necessary, and that you have developed unreasonable expectations about certain golf skills. By doing this continually, you will never learn to realize that you have the ability to think before you react and choose the option to simply accept the consequences of your actions and continue your game.
Increase your ability to tolerate more frustrations during your round and you will develop your skill and expand the potential of your golf skills towards better golf shots when needed, giving you more confidence and much more enjoyable rounds.
How happy and confident you feel on the golf course is an excellent indication of how well you manage your frustration tolerance levels. The more you accept the difficulty of the game and continuously work conscientiously on your weak abilities, the less likely you want to beat yourself up. Remember that “you cannot control the game, but you can control yourself during the game.”