Golf – The Mental Game by Andy Barton

It was the legendary golfer Bobby Jones who said: “Golf is a game that is played on a five-inch course - the distance between your ears. ” What Jones appreciated, as far back as the 1920s, was that the thing that separated him from the also-rans had less to do with his technique and far more to do with how he used the mental side of his game.

The truth is, however, that in the quest for a lower handicap the vast majority of players will spend hours and hours on practising the technical side and small fortunes on buying the latest equipment and yet will completely neglect to train the mental side of their game. It is quite extraordinary the number of people I come across who actually get worse the more they practise. The main reason for this is that they lack the mental skills to enable them to improve.

There is actually something quite unique about golf in that players have so much time to allow negative thinking to creep in. They may use the time in between shots to dwell on a poor shot or to imagine the worse for the shot that they are about to play. This will invariably lead to a deterioration in performance.

By spending time practising your mental skills, you can make very real improvements to how you think and feel on the course and, ultimately, will have a significant impact on your scores.

Andy Barton
Sports Psychologist
Tel. 020 8879 7079
andy.barton@thewinningmind.co.uk
www.thewinningmind.co.uk