Ultimate Golf Blog

I was giving a playing lesson with Gary, one of the pros I work with and we had an interesting session that I wanted to share with you to give you an idea of what instruction is like at a professional level and why.

With Gary, we always start by going over his swing first to identify what he needs to work on, then we go play to look for mental patterns on the golf course that need to be fixed to prevent losing those corrections. This particular session was special because Gary made a huge breakthrough that I have been trying to get him to make for years. I have Tiger to thank for the breakthrough, so Tiger… Thanks.

When ever I work with a pro, the physical part of the lesson takes only a few minutes. After that, we work on injecting the adjustments into the golfers mental routines so they become habit while also giving them indicators in case they start to lose any part of their swing again. I believe that the mental game is 100% of the true game of golf.

At one point we talked about the famous Mac O’Grady, who has been known for years to be somewhat of a mental guru, but I always thought he took things into the Ozone Layer by getting overly existential about his teaching. We talked about how he and Seve Ballesteros went out into the desert to bury Seve’s troublesome game… and how it left Seve with nothing mentally. I’m sure Mac had great intentions, but I believe he took advantage of a desparate man. You don’t take away what a man has. You should take what is good and build upon it. At any rate, it shows how ridiculous this whole mental game issue can be and how it can be mishandled.

I noticed from our conversation that Gary was interested in talking about the mental game, paying better attention, and he was getting it. I wasn’t sure why until later when he mentioned an article he read in Golf Digest. Here’s the link: http://www.golfdigest.com/magazine/2008/01/tigersecrets it is one of the best articles on Tiger I have read.

What was it in the article that caused Gary to listen a little closer for the mental secrets of golf? Let me insert the paragraph that got his attention. It also explain why Tiger has stayed with Hank for so long.

“I’ll tell you 100 percent what happened,” says Williams. “Tiger came back from Carnoustie, and instead of spending hours on the practice field, he just tried to picture how he wanted to swing the club. He used what Hank was telling him to do — which he had been having quite a bit of difficulty putting into practice — and went about getting swing thoughts organized and the right mental picture. He came to Firestone having done little actual practice, but from that point on, he had a mental image of himself that he was able to relate to the movement of his body.

“And each week he played, he got a little bit better right up to the Tour Championship. His rhythm and balance with every club were exceptional, and never changed. In the 10 years I’ve been with him, it was the best stretch I’ve ever seen Tiger play.” That process was how Woods came closer than he has ever been to “owning” his swing, to borrow the phrase that has been his goal since he began working with Haney in early 2004.

“Hank has been invaluable to Tiger, no question,” Williams says. “In the last three years he’s picked Hank’s brain and totally trusted him with his golf swing. But in the maturity process that a golfer goes through, he doesn’t want to get too reliant on a coach, because it can cause a loss of feel, and golf is a game of feel. Hank remained his guide, but ultimately it was important for Tiger to find his own way.”

It’s instructive that after Carnoustie, Woods never visited the range for a post-round practice session the rest of the year. In those final five tournaments, he won four and was second in the other. For his part, Woods said he began to find a groove after discovering that playing in the Scottish wind had led him into an old bad habit: leaning back and squatting too much at address. When he started standing taller and more on the balls of his feet, he stopped fighting his release, and his swing began to flow, helping him lose the high-right-shoulder follow-through that sent the ball wide right. Arron Oberholser labeled the onslaught — which reached its climax when Woods shot 28 on East Lake’s front nine during the second round of the Tour Championship — “horrifying precision.”

Asked for an accounting, Woods described a suddenly unencumbered access to an intuitive genius.

“Just understanding how to play the game,” he says. “It’s not so much the physical part. It’s about playing the golf ball. I was lucky that my dad always stressed to me that golf is not about how far you hit it, but where you want the ball to go. How are you going to get it there? If you don’t get it there, what went wrong, so you can apply it to the next one? That’s how I play the game of golf. I pick apart a golf course from the green back, factoring pin location, trouble, iron play, then ultimately the drive, and chart my way back from the green.

“It’s weird that it happens so quickly now. If we went through the whole process on one hole, it would sound really complicated. But now, I just understand how to deal with it.”

Further into the piece is another very telling paragraph that shows that the pros do try to adjust on the golf course…

“It wasn’t until November that Woods posted on his website a definitive statement that the partnership remained solid. But the underlying point was that Woods had achieved a self-sufficiency that is the ultimate goal of both student and teacher. “You always have to be able to figure it out,” says Woods. “That’s something that all my instructors I’ve ever worked with believed. They can teach you whatever you want, but ultimately you have to pull the trigger. No one can tell you inside the ropes what you’re doing wrong; you have to figure it out. And then figure it out on the fly and adjust, and make the change and trust the change, that’s the ultimate.”

What has Tiger discovered? He has discovered the importance of the link between the mind and the body in golf, and it has increased his precision to a level above downright scary. Actually, he realized the link, because he was using it before, but not consciously.

Now he not only sees what he wants to do, he feels it too, long before he ever swings the club. That, my friend, is what Golf Swing Control is all about and the best golfer in the world has proven how important it really is.

But what I found and what I try to teach is that this mental approach works off of the golf course as well. Personally, I’ve always had an expertise at problem solving.

As a technician, my gift was diagnosis. I would ask the owner of the particular item that was broken (ranging from bicycles, cars, electronics, or heavy hydraulic equipment) a series of questions to get an idea of where the problem might be located. But what I did that was different than most is that I consciously created pictures in my head to match what was being described, be it pictures, sounds, even smells. As I asked questions, my mind would expand and dissect the picture to find the logical root cause. Usually by the time I was done with the conversation in most cases, my diagnosis of the problem was correct.

I didn’t completely realize how important the process was until I started coaching golfers over the internet eight years ago. I only realized it when people asked my how I could coach golfers by email without ever seeing their golf swing. Many were amazed by the results golfers were getting. They called it uncanny. That’s when I decided to explore the process I was using in my mind.

When I wrote Golf Swing Control, I used the same visualization process and heard from many golfers who told me they “saw” the same things I did.

I noticed that I used the process more and more until I found that I rarely if ever thought anything without seeing clear vivid pictures while I was thinking, speaking driving… doing anything. This is that “intuitive genius” that Tiger refers to when he plans a hole. Rather than thinking about the process, he simply sees it in an instant. He can go through the process 100 times faster because it happens visually rather than through conscious linear thought.

(By the way, most people don’t know it but Kory is an expert in the field of mind performance technology and is working with me on a step-by-step system for getting your mental game to the level of Tigers. I’ll keep you posted on its progress, but it will blow you away. Something like this has never been presented to golfers. Stay tuned)

Thinking visually, I also noticed my stress level was non existent. I may get bothered by something, but never stressed by it. I realized that my stress wasn’t linked to events, but rather the thought process that I used to process the information I took in.

What I’m saying is that the thought process I teach golfers has made my own life infinitely better by using it for everything I do. If you read between the lines, Tiger is starting to do the same thing.

OK, I think I’m going off on a tangent here, but it’s hard to describe to people that what I’ve discovered and what I’m teaching goes way beyond golf. Once you start to think visually, you’ll do it more and more. Your life will change for the better and your stress will go down.

I often say the Golf is just a game that was created to teach us about life. I believe that there may be another reason why the origin of golf is a so mysterious… But that might be getting into Mac O’Grady territory…

On another note, many of my members know I have sworn off the magazines because of their overly edited instruction pieces, but in three instances over the last week I had occasion to read interviews of different golfers, and I may just go back to reading the magazines again because I think those interviews are telling us more than we may realize… More on this in the future.

I’m curious to hear of any of your experiences with the mental game and how it has helped elsewhere…

Hit’m well,

Tracy

To learn the Tiger secrets that you can use in your game right away, CLICK HERE

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