Inside the Golfer's Mind

By Dr. Bob Rotella, Golf Digest Professional Advisor
Photo By J.D. Cuban December 2004

Golf is a game of confidence and competence. I am not about to tell anyone that a player who lacks physical skills can transform overnight into a winner by changing his thinking. If you trust a bad swing, it's still going to produce bad shots. (Though it will produce fewer of them than if you don't trust it.) You have to attain a level of physical competence to play well.

Having said that, I believe it's impossible to overestimate the importance of the mind in golf. There is no such thing as "muscle memory." Your muscles have no capacity to remember anything. Memory resides in your head. Therefore, no matter how long you practice a golf swing, no matter how skilled you become, your muscles alone can't remember it and execute it when the need arises on the golf course. Your muscles and the rest of your body are controlled by your mind. Unless your mind is functioning well when you play golf, your muscles are going to flounder. If your head is filled with bad thoughts, your scorecard is going to be full of bad strokes.

Having control of your mind and using it properly can separate you from the competition, whether it's at your club or on the PGA Tour. I believe every golfer has the potential to be much better than he or she is, and that using the mind is one essential way to improve. You will never know if you have the ability to be the best player in the world, or the best player in your club, unless you commit yourself to developing both your physical and mental skills.

1. Play to play great. Don't play not to play poorly.
There's a fine line between playing to play great and playing recklessly. Reckless players hit driver off virtually every tee. They fire at sucker pins they have no business aiming at, because they're convinced that's what playing to play great is all about. It isn't. Golfers who are playing to play great love a great drive more than they fear the rough. They like making putts more than they care about three-putting. They love chipping it in more than they loathe not getting up and down. But they may have a conservative strategy for certain holes. The conservative strategy is what permits them to always make a confident, even cocky swing. When the moment is right, when they've got a scoring club in their hands, they take dead aim at the hole. But only when the moment is right.

Players who play to play great understand that good can be the enemy of great. They know that if they get too concerned about not being bad, they might not free themselves up enough to be great. They don't care very much about making cuts or top-20 finishes. They play to win.

‘Every golfer has the potential to be much better than he or she is, and using the mind is one essential way to improve.’

If they do this, they control their destiny as a golfer. I want clients to understand this. They have free will. The choices they make with that free will determine the quality of their golf game and the quality of their lives. If you consistently make the right choices, you're destined for greatness. I'm not suggesting that this means you're going to win all the Grand Slam tournaments or all your club events or even all your Saturday-morning nassaus. I'm saying that if you make the right choices, you will someday look back on your life, or that part of your life that was devoted to golf, and say, "Wow! That was great."

2. Love the challenge of the day, whatever it may be.
Golf is a game of mistakes and unpredictable fortune. If it were not, no one would ever miss a fairway, a green or a putt. On top of that, there would be no sudden gusts of wind, no unfortunate bounces, no imperfections in the turf. Every ball would go exactly where you wanted it to go, and the winning score in a golf tournament would be something like 50 strokes per round.

If you truly love golf, you must love the fact that no one shoots 50, that golf is an inherently imperfect game. If you spend your time fighting the fact that golf is a game of mistakes and trying to make it a game of perfect shots, you're really saying that you don't like golf. You want it to be some other game--billiards, maybe. No one has ever perfected golf--not Ben Hogan, not Jack Nicklaus, not Annika Sorenstam. I don't believe anyone ever will.

Golfers who understand and love the game accept it rather than fight it. They realize the essence of golf is reacting well to inevitable mistakes and misfortunes. They know they can separate themselves from their competition not by perfecting their games but by constantly striving to improve. I tell players that if there's one thing they should always be proud of in their games, it's how well they react to mistakes. I tell them that they will never have complete control of the golf ball. But they can control their attitudes.

3. Get out of results and get into process.
There's a goal that I speak of often. It's called a "process goal." Success comes from patiently and persistently doing the right things over and over. Process goals are the "to-do lists" of players striving for excellence. The process is what gives you a chance to find out how good you can be.

Here, for instance, is a set of process goals for a round of golf. If you follow them, you'll give yourself your best chance to find out how well you can play in that particular round: