It’s good practice to mentally play a round in your mind where you control the ball and place it where you want it to go avoiding all the problems such as water, out of bounds, sand, etc. Try it sometime and let your imagination run wild.

Here is a mental exercise to see if you allow bad thoughts to enter your mind even in your pretend round. Bad habits die hard and the first place to attack them is in your conscious mind.

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In order to eliminate bad habits that you have formed in your game try this 3 step process:

1. First confront your fears in your game and admit them by writing them down on a piece of paper.
2. Replace it-it’s time to trade in bad habits and negative behavior for good ones.
3. Stick with it-by being persistent, diligent and remaining disciplined. Your game plan will soon have you forming a new habit.

We can’t change our circumstances about how the ball bounces so to speak, but we can alter our response to them. It’s all about choice so choose wisely. Having a brighter outlook about playing and excepting occasional bad breaks that are inevitable will help you start getting over being “Teed off” about yourself and your golf game

However, sometimes losing your cool can be good because it can help you let off some steam and help you refocus on the task at hand. Often, as all golfers know we keep it bottled up which can impair our performances for the rest of the round.

The key is to allow yourself to completely vent, then refocus again immediately. By venting I don’t mean throwing or breaking clubs, or cursing. The skill of refocusing lies in knowing what the most important element to master is. How does a person learn to regain composure after losing it?

Just remember that losing your cool is nothing more than focusing on what went wrong, and allowing yourself to get frustrated, angry, ticked off, etc. Think about how you respond when you’re angry - you breathe faster, your body tightens up, your heart rate increases and so on.

These stress messages you’re sending to your brain only make your body tighten up more sabotaging your abilities to perform properly. This unfortunate cycle will continue until you learn to break this broken record set on self-destruct.

In a tense situation the best way to regain your composure is to work in the opposite direction, to get your body to calm down, this in turn will allow your mind to calm down by taking several deep breathes, and by pushing away any negative thoughts.

There’s a good method called “Treeing” which seems appropriate since you’re on the golf course with plenty of trees. What you do is take your emotions in this case negative thoughts and put them onto something else.

Some older cultures throughout the world have used this technique for centuries. They learned to pass their bad feelings or negative emotions to a tree, hence the name. So next time when you’re on the golf course and you’re losing your cool find a tree and push or touch it physically releasing your pressure that you’re feeling into the object and leave it there.

After you have dealt with the past it’s time to move on to the future which in this case is a new hole, or shot at hand. Remember you can’t change the past, but you can profoundly affect your future with the proper mind set. There’s no longer a reason to carry all this emotional baggage to the next hole so let it go. So next time you see a player in the woods a lot during a round maybe they’re just getting rid of some issues that are bothering them.

This is all easier said than done, but like all things with a little practice and some discipline you’ll be recovering from poor shots quicker and salvaging your round instead of going from bad to worse. The best players in the world all have their own particular methods for staying cool, so watch how they handle poor shots while they are in town.

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Filed under:Golf, Golf Lessons, The Mental Gamebyadmin