This is the second article in a series of posts titled: "The Real Lessons", in which I hope to highlight ways we can glean much about life, from golf, and vice-versa. Hopefully we can learn more about ourselves and what we can do to be better people and better golfers.
Mastering the mental game in golf is similar to mastering the mental game of life. This involves letting go of regrets, and staying in the present.
Letting go of regrets:
Just let it go, man. One of the most stressful things in many of our lives is the fact that we can't let go of past mistakes and we live with regret; constantly replaying scenarios and considering how we might have approached them differently. The enormous amounts of stress this regret causes has negative effects on our day to day life and makes it difficult to focus on the task at hand.
The same thing happens during a round of golf. We hit a ball into the woods, hit a tree trying to get out, finally get it on the fairway, hit it into the water, get it on the green and three putt. On the first hole! Then we have to put this catastrophe behind us on the second hole and attempt to move forward with absolute trust in our swing. Not an easy task. The tendency is for the golfer to get extremely heated and obsess about the bad shots, which causes the bad shots to continue (because the ball knows what you're thinking).
It is imperitive in life, and in golf, to forgive yourself and move on without beating yourself up. The only thing we have control over is the next shot (or moment), so buck up and do your best.
Staying in the present:
Allowing the mind to run off all willy nilly during a round of golf will cause the golfer to lose all focus on the shot at hand. One hundred percent of a golfer's attention should be pinpointed directly towards 'what is happening right now'. So many times we start adding up our anticipated score on the third hole after a couple of early birdies, thinking, "oh gee, if I keep this up I'll finish ten under par!" We constantly look at our scorecard and add up imaginary numbers. Big, big mental error. This practice takes all the focus off the shot at hand and puts the golfer in a 'results not process' frame of mind, which is detrimental to good golf.
As in life, rewarding ourselves for successes before a job is completed; or beating ourselves up for failures that can still be reversed, will not do us any good. We can set goals, and should, but there is no shortcut for getting the work done step-by-step, with our minds intent on the process of the task and not the future result.
