HOW MEMORIES AFFECT Y OUR G O L F GA ME
en Hogan often said that when B he played his best golf, he would address the ball and as if the shot had
already happened. Jack Nicklaus was absolutely convinced that he had never missed a putt from inside three feet on the back nine of a major championship. Tiger Woods in his own book said, “The secret to the mental game is the ability to instantly recall past success and then let go of failure.” And the common thread running through these comments from three of the game’s all-time greatest champions? The power of memory to cement thoughts and feelings associated with ultimate performance. My guess is that if you think back to the last round of discount burner 2 Irons you played, you will very quickly relate to the power your mind has over your performance. When you stand over a putt and you just know that you are going to make it, or (and rather more frequently) when you look at a certain shot and all you can see is the out of bounds running down the right side of the fairway... and guess where you hit it? Welcome then, to the wonderful world of your MEMORY and the way it influences your performance. We underestimate the power and the effect our memories have on our golf at our peril. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the way that you utilize
your memory will be one of the critical keys to your future as a golfer. In my own experience, with some of the players I have worked with over the last few years it has become very clear to me that the way golfers use their memory is very different. The greats like Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods have worked it out. Recently, the field of neuroscience has begun to question how memory works and one of the most exciting developments has been the suggestion that we can actually take an active role in programming the way our memory functions in terms of our golfing experiences. Just how important a discovery could that be? What the scientists are telling us is that if we re-visit a certain memory of a past event, while we obviously cannot change the past event what we can do is change our interpretation of it. So if you lost a golf tournament, you will always have lost the tournament, but what you can change is your interpretation of the meaning of that defeat. And that is significant. If the meaning of that defeat is stored as the worst thing that has ever happened, then chances are that your unconscious mind will go to work and protect you from that experience ever happening again. So, the selfsabotage kicks in and finds ways of getting you to AVOID that situation. Poor performance is a great way of avoiding winning!
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