Golf is 100% Mental

If you have a single digit handicap and you want to bring that handicap down significantly, then this is the mantra that you have to live by.  If you have a handicap in the single digits, you have a basic and functional  method on how to swing a golf club.  What is keeping you from getting down to the ultimate goal of scratch is your mental process on the golf course and looking in the wrong places to improve your game.  I made a commitment, to Golf is 100% mental, around May of 2018, and did my handicap go down. It did not.  So what happened.

I feel there was two reasons my handicap remained basically unchanged during the 2018 season.  One was a minor reason.  We had a horrible year of weather.   The golf courses were saturated and muddy almost the whole year, especially from August until the end of the year.  This led to a lot of unpredictability all how the ball would react off the clubface from the rough and even the fairway.  This made the courses play a lot  longer than usual.  There was no question this was a factor, so keeping my handicap the same, may have been a victory, instead of it going up.   The main reason I did not see a drop in my index, was that even though I was “committed” to 100% mental process, I am like everybody else, and brain washed by the “normal” way to improve, by changing something, or finding something wrong with your swing.  In other words the physical side of the game.  Let’s face it, this is way it was been for well over 150 years.  Even when I started this year I was going with a new swing.  ARE YOU KIDDING ME.  I quickly forgot about it on round 2 of 2019.    Even though this sounds so simple,  100% mental, it is difficult to do.  I hadn’t planned to do this blog this soon, and even though right now it is snowing and yesterday it was -3 degrees, there is a good possibility that I will be playing golf by Tuesday or Wednesday of next week.   I wanted to write about the 100% mental concept before I played my next round of golf.   Every bad shot and I mean every bad shot is caused by some kind of dysfunction of the mind.  This dysfunction then manifests itself in some kind of bad execution of the swing.  Depending on the type of shot the possibilities can be endless.   This of course results in a bad shot.  Then the chatter starts.  I swung to hard, too fast, bad aim, did not stay down, dipped, came out of it,(my favorite)and the list could go on and on.  All of this is caused by mind dysfunction.   As I wrote in my last blog, I will be writing after ever round or two of golf I play this year to see how I progress or digress, applying this concept.  The other big factor in trying to lower your index is putting, a whole different animal  all unto itself.  That will be for a later blog.  One of keys to success in playing this game is the art of visualization.  How should you visualize and what should you visualize, which will be another blog.  One clue, you should visualize things you can not see.  Tricky, huh.

So, next week may be the next blog, if I make it to the golf course.   I will incorporate some of the above subject matter into the next blog depending on how the round goes.  Its snowing right now but by Monday its going to be in the mid 50’s and Tuesday and Wednesday in the upper 40’s.  Welcome to Pittsburgh.