Would you talk to someone else the way you talk to yourself on the golf course? Chances are, the answer to this question is no. Unfortunately, most people talk to themselves on a golf course in a horrendous manner.
The key to improving your self-talk is improving the questions you are asking yourself.
Currently, you may be asking, what's wrong with me? What's wrong with my swing? Why can't I be more consistent? If you ask these types of questions, you will get some terrible answers.
If you want to improve your golf, improve the quality of your questions.
If you would like more information on how to do this, check out my video series;
The questions you ask on the golf course suck! Ask these instead.
Click the video below to watch Question 7.
We're up to number seven. Now, we've made our way. Well, let me go through the list again. So first of all this, "Where don't I want to go? Where do I want to go? Right? What's going to happen after I hit this shot? What's my plan? What target area do I want the ball to finish in? Where am I going to aim? What club do I want to use? What technique do I want to use? How do I need to change my ball position? What size swing do I want to make? These are some of the questions we've asked beforehand.
Once you start getting into this process, this will all start coming pretty quick and then quite instinctually a lot of it will come to you without even having to consciously think about it. But now what we're doing is, we're getting into the doing part. Now, this is where you actually stand up and go and hit the ball. This is what most people recognise as a pre-shot routine. I mean, everything we're doing beforehand should be a routine. Everything is a routine in golf. The better you can get those the more consistent you'll get. But this one, the doing part is, okay, you've now picked your club. You picked your target. You've done all that. You now know the shot. Now, what would a good shot look like? What would it feel like? Possibly doing some practise swings, trying to create some images, drawing from your memories of having hit shots like that in the past. And the other one is now, what do I need to do over the ball? And it's only very quick. And it might be, Alright, I've got to align my club first up at the target. Get my ball position right there. Just check where I'm aiming. Stay where I am and turn. So, what I've done there is maybe a two or three-step checklist of just getting the setup and I want it really fast. And then one swing thought. That's it. That's got to be so automatic. Very, very regimented. The quicker you can do that, the faster you can do that, the more consistent you can do that, you're giving yourself a much better chance of hitting a good quality shot where you want it to go far more often.
You know this. You watch golf pros do this all the time. They've learned it the hard way. But the better they can get at that, the better chance they have of making a good swing. Jack Nicklaus used to say that he thought the game 100% of the game he'd go;
Alright, 50% was mental or emotional control.
The other part 40% was set up,
10% was swing.
So that means, he put a far greater emphasis on getting his set up right than what he did on the actual swing. He knew if he got that right, things would work out pretty well. I've got to say I completely agree with that. In my time if I get the set-up right, swing tends to look after itself. I know there'll be a lot of golf pros out there who would agree with that.
So that's the next step, the doing part. Standing up hitting the ball. This is the stuff you do at the range very quickly. Bang! Hit shot. Create the memory. Fantastic. We're going to get into the next question that you do straight after you get the shot in the next video. Check it out.
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