If you struggle to finish off your best rounds then you need to treat changing your mindset the same way you treat changing your golf swing. When you make a swing change you don't expect it to be perfect immediately. The same is true when making a change to the way you think. To finish off your best rounds you need to be able to stay in the present when the pressure is on. To be on a good score through 14 or 15 holes and focus only on the shot in front of you. Not on what might happen to your handicap if you par the last 3 or what you might shoot if you can 'only drop 1' coming in. This is not an easy thing to do. The reason you work hard on your game is to shoot good scores and lower your handicap. But focusing on these things in pressure moments doesn't help. It adds more pressure and makes you play tight and scared. In these moments you need to be able to control the way you talk to yourself. To be aware of your internal narrative and spot when it gets too far in to the future. Like changing your grip or the position you get in to at the top of your backswing, this takes time. So you need to be patient and work on it gradually. Start by learning to listen to your internal conversation (it's harder than it sounds). Then, learn to spot the things you say to yourself that get you focused on the result over the shot that's in front of you. Over time you'll develop the ability to spot these patterns immediately and challenge them. Averting your attention back to the task at hand. Keeping you in the present and meaning you're able to finish off your best rounds! If you need further help here… pop me a message!

Baggage is a useful metaphor for the thoughts, assumptions, and dramas we all carry around, rightly or wrongly. In life, most of it goes unnoticed. In golf, it shows up immediately. On the course, the only baggage you need is the bag holding your fourteen clubs. Everything else is surplus to requirements. We often hear that successful sportsmen, and businesspeople, have remarkably selective memories. If that weren’t true, how else could we explain their ability to absorb failure, leave it behind, and move forward without hesitation? This isn’t about pretending the past didn’t happen. It’s more likely the result of a perspective they’ve cultivated… a lens that keeps past, present, and future in proportion. Golf, perhaps more than any other game, demands this ability. A round of golf is not a static experience. It is fluid, unpredictable, and constantly changing. To move through it successfully, you must be equally flexible, refusing to let any single moment knock you off balance. I’ve written before about the journey within a round of golf, and how the people you become along the way mirror the rhythm of the round itself. In that sense, golf is a series of small reinventions. To “reincarnate” after every shot is to accept a simple truth: you will almost never hit the same shot twice. If every shot is different, how can you possibly approach each one as the same person? Consider this. On the final green, you need to coax a twenty-foot putt downhill, with several feet of break. Two minutes later, you’re standing on the next tee, asked to unleash a full-blooded drive down a narrow fairway. The mindset, the energy, the personality required for each shot couldn’t be more different. Trying to be the same golfer for both is a mistake. Here’s another example. You arrive at the hardest tee shot on your home course. Driver in hand, you make a committed swing and launch it 280 yards down the fairway. You walk after it with a spring in your step, riding the surge of confidence.

Your job is to decide what happens next! Ever notice how your mind goes straight to the water, the bunker, or out of bounds before you hit the shot? That’s not a lack of confidence… It’s preparation. Under pressure, your brain is wired to scan for danger before it sees opportunity. That instinct can save you from careless mistakes. In a life sense, that’s watching for cars before crossing the road, in a golf sense that’s seeing the hazards, trees, out of bounds etc, But when it controls every shot, it can stop you committing to the one you actually want to play. Great golf isn’t about pretending the hazards aren’t there, it’s about choosing where your attention goes next. Focus on the target, commit to the shot, and let your swing follow. Because where attention goes, performance follows. And that choice changes the golfer you become!

What do you think is the most important part of the mental game? It's a question I've asked several other performance and mental game coaches. The answer is always the same… It's confidence. When you're confident you can relax, trust your stuff, and perform at your best. Confidence is the bottom line. So, where does confidence come from? Great athletes say that confidence is knowing they are prepared physically and mentally. Experience tells them what to do and confidence allows them to do it. Confidence is the emotional knowing that you are prepared, mind, body, and spirit, for anything. Confidence is the result of preparation, and preparation begins with forming a mental game plan. The great athletes visualise not only best-case scenarios but also worst-case scenarios. They don't imagine failing, but they do mentally plan how they will respond in unpleasant and difficult situations. In sports, the ball takes funny, or not so funny, bounces. Oftentimes games or contests don't go as we had hoped. The prepared athlete has not only a Plan A but also a Plan B and a Plan C. Confidence comes from the emotional knowing that you are prepared mentally as well as physically. Over-prepare so you don't under-perform!

I have posted on this before, but I wanted to add another as I think it’s so important to the game and helping you play better! In his book Golf My Way, Nicklaus talks about the single minded imagery he uses before hitting a shot. "It's like a color movie," . "First, I 'see' the ball where I want it to finish, nice and white and sitting up high on the bright-green grass. Then the scene quickly changes and I 'see' the ball going there; its path, trajectory, and shape, even its behaviour on landing. Then there is sort of a fadeout, and the next scene shows me making the kind of swing that will turn the previous images into reality... I love the way Nicklaus described that, and could be something you try, or at least your own version of next time you play. And to finish this post, a lovely quote I read recently that backs up the idea of using visualisation to your advantage! “It is said the eyes are the mirror to the soul. They also are the mirror to the mind. With great athletes, their eyes aren't searchlights. They aren't even spotlights. They are laser beams.”