Essential Mental Disciplines.

Learning to hit good shots is one thing, getting the ball round the course is another! Other skills need to be developed. Here is a list of a few of those skills.

1. Keep the emotions quiet.

2. Visualize positive outcomes.

3. Avoid reactive response to poor shots

4. Stay in the moment.

The list could go on but we will keep it to a minimum for now and look at the last thing in our list first. I would imagine that a lot of you have heard the phrase "Stay in the Moment" but quite a few of you perhaps have difficulty really doing it or maybe know what it means.

A 4 hour round of golf if you shoot 80 entails approximately 2 minutes of actually swinging the club based on about 1.5 seconds per shot.

The "Moment" though that I am relating too is the 20 or 30 seconds that make up your pre - shot routine. In this short space of time you must mentally put behind you what has just happened, be it good or bad.

Because all Fear is of the Future, you need to visualize clearly what you desire of swing and shot to counter the fear of what is ahead. Selective memory can be a great asset when it comes to visualizing, this means running your better swings and results through your mind as a reference prior to playing the next shot. It helps to put feelings of confidence into your system. All the top players do it.

So taking the 4 hour round and shooting an 80 with 20 to 30 seconds of pre – shot routine each time means we have accounted for about 45 minutes of the round. The remaining 3 hours 15 minutes is the time between shots and there are a multitude of distractions that can affect your ability to not only get into "The Moment" but also the quality of your application when you are in it. Some of the commonest distractions are chattering partners, slow players in front and queries on the rules. Whatever it happens to be, withdraw into your own world when you get within 50 yards of your ball. If you do not mind what your partners think, do as Ben Hogan use to do and stay in your own world for the entire duration of the round.

It is said that the space between the notes creates the music. The same could be said of golf. If you really value good golf, put more value on the time between shots.