Playing Golf under pressure? Follow these tips that might help you soothe your frazzled nerves and take your performance a notch higher.
Before every competition, be prepared. We’re not referring to your practice regimen, I mean getting prepared with new balls, clean clubs, nutritious snacks, tees, pitch-mark repairers, sunscreen, shoes and clothing. Go through your mental check-list and make sure you have everything ready the evening before a big competition. Feeling unprepared and forgetting something can cause unnecessary stress and tension.
Before a competition, don’t change anything you would normally do before a round. Your routine should not change. A lot of golfer go through a more extensive warm-up and get to the course a couple of hours before to make sure everything is fine-tuned. Eat your same pre-round meal or breakfast and do the same warm-up for putting, short game and long game. Every pre-round warm-up should feel the same no matter whether it’s a friendly game or the club championship.
In golf, the better you can get at suppressing your emotions the better you’ll play. Golf can be an incredibly up and down game if you let your emotions run wild. It’s easy to get carried away when you’re playing well and start catering to your ego and thinking of what might happen if you keep up the good run, only to see your good form disappear. Alternatively, (and just as debilitating) fear of embarrassment or being the worse player in the tournament can appear out of nowhere. Your playing partners can also make you feel inferior by longer driving or better putting. Learn how to ignore these emotions and get back to the job of hitting one shot at a time. An anchor is a good way to do this.
You’ve done the practice and you’ve hit all the shots before. Trying to force good golf results in the opposite. Let it go and stay loose. Never try to correct or consciously think about your swing while swinging – that’s mental game 101. You can make sure you’ve got everything like your club/shot selection, set-up and alignment all figured out before you have to swing. One of the best mental game triggers I like before every shot is “Stay relaxed, balanced and trust it.”
This tip sounds ridiculously obvious, but even you’re having what you think is a terrible round, you’re only one shot away from getting it going again. But few of us think that way. Even bad rounds can be seen through positive eyes. Every shot is an opportunity to excel and take your game forward by adding more great shots to the memory bank no matter how you’re playing. You have to keep believing right through to the end, no matter what happens.