I am sure as well as the joy of playing well you have experienced the frustration and misery of playing poorly. Anxiety creeps into your swing as you look to control it more; you doubt your own ability to execute the shots. You lose your connection to the target as your mind gets more and more confused. You become angry and frustrated with yourself. Your swing feels tight and contrived, your chip shots are nervy and your putts are jerky and often too long or too short and never threaten the hole. You disregard any good shots as your mind jumps from one swing fix to another without really being aware of what the problem is. You feel stressed.

As a golf mental coach / golf psych, I must ask, how can the same person experience such vast differences in performance?

What stops us from playing to our potential more of the time? If you compare the two scenarios above, you would have to agree that it is a strange phenomenon.

Does our ability diminish in between these two rounds? Logic would suggest no, yet often we seem to stop ourselves from accessing our ability to perform to our potential. This is not something we intentionally set out to do. Wouldn’t we all like to play well more often? So what gets in the way?

Psychology of Golf

Well in short, WE DO. WE GET IN OUR OWN WAY.

Golf Psychologists often write and tell us to get out of our own way. But how? Unfortunately, very often, these Golf Mental Coaches perpetuate the common myths that surround golf and golfers

Myths like this.

The idea that you need to find something that you lost in your swing if you hit the ball poorly that day.

What did you lose? Where did you lose it?

Did you ever putt poorly in one round and then in the next round putt well, without any real practice in between? What changed between rounds? Was it your stroke or you? The existing culture of golf will tell you that you made a different stroke or altered something in your stance, which made the difference. I put it to you that it was you that made the difference. There was a subtle difference in you. Whether you believed in a tip you had been given or you were curious about a part of your stroke, the difference was that you were able to be more relaxed and focused which allowed you to putt well.

Have you ever gone out the day after hitting the ball poorly and hit the ball well without any practice in between? If this has ever happened, even once, and my guess is that it has, then how do you explain it? Perhaps playing poorly lowered your expectations for the next round, which enabled you to relax more. Perhaps it was precisely because you did not look for something that you were able to play well. Maybe the only thing that is lost is you.

Where are you when you swing? Worrying or trying to remember things?

So perhaps nothing is lost in your swing. Perhaps it is merely obscured by your own doubt and anxiety, like a cloud which covers the top of the mountain from time to time – this does not mean the top of the mountain is lost.

What you lack when you are searching for something is TRUST. It is really difficult to play without Trust and it is something that you can and should develop.

So my job as a Golf Psychologist / Golf Mental Coach is to have you develop trust in your swing and yourself.

To help you develop the confidence that allows for the odd poor swing and can then swing with complete Freedom.

To draw from you your innate ability to be able to relax and concentrate well when you play golf.

So perhaps less is more, when it comes to golf?

Less worrying means More Freedom. Less searching means More Trust.

If I was going to coach golfers in the field of Golf Psychology, then I had to have practical experience of my own. I wanted to explore different ways of understanding my mind and how it reacts to the game and not just accept the same old positive thinking blurb I had read a thousand times. The one book that made a lasting impression on me was Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Golf. I had been introduced to his methods by some innovative Tennis Coaches and then by Sir John Whitmore who was an original collaborator with Tim Gallwey. His ideas often flew in the face of popular golf psychology. So I decided to find out for myself, but with few Inner Game Golf Coaches in existence, my only way to uncover these principles, and as I later found out, the best way, was to take some time and to learn for myself from my own experience. I won the Bournemouth open in 2009 by using the techniques I had learnt about.

So I played golf and explored my mind as I played. I wanted to be able to coach golfers with the knowledge that what I was showing them was true and accurate and practical, not just something that I had read in a golf psychology book and regurgitated. So it was really important for me to find out for myself what happens when I play golf? What happens when I am under pressure? What happens to me when I win and when I lose? Only then would I be able to look the golfers I coach in the eye and say, with my hand on my heart, “this is my truth from my own experience”

I have found that it doesn’t matter that the Pro’s I Coach are on another level ability wise, as when it comes down to matters of the mind, we all suffer from similar worries and neurosis. We all share the same mind if you like. Even though my experiences are unique to me, I have discovered that there are universal principles that apply to us all. So this is how my journey with the Inner Game of golf began in 2001. As my discoveries in golf threw up more and more questions, my thirst for answers led me to study many different Philosophies and Mental Practices. I moved away from most of the popular golf psychology, to try to understand the paradoxes that the game threw at me. My journey is ongoing, I will always be a student of the game of golf, but I feel ready to share my discoveries with you as I have been doing with my fellow golf students for some years.