The preseason pep talk all goal-chasing golfers need to hear
Golf Digest senior writer Alex Myers is on a one-year mission to see how good he can get at golf through daily training, practice and playing. Read more from his “Late Scratch?” series here.
Seeing grass in my backyard earlier this week for the first time in nearly two months was an exciting reminder that we’ve almost made it through a particularly brutal winter in the Northeast. But I was also surprised to feel a sudden wave of anxiety as a daunting question popped into my head:
Have I done enough to prepare for the golf season?
Well, for this season, that is. If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been committed to working harder on my golf game than ever before since the fall by sticking to a daily schedule of training and practice with the ultimate goal of reaching scratch golfer status. And I’ve really stuck to it, spending at least one hour every day (and sometimes a lot more) on activities that will hopefully help my golf game other than a one-day trip to Disneyland with the kids. And as any parent knows, that’s tougher training—both physically and mentally—than anything you’re going to face on the golf course.
Anyway, I decided to talk to golf psychology coach Josh Nichols to assess my mental state heading into the golf season. And his encouraging words are something every golfer chasing a goal should hear.
Why chasing goals can be tricky
This “Late Scratch?" experiment has been mostly fun, it’s gotten me in better shape and it’s kept me busy during these bleak winter months. But there have been unpleasant moments along the way, including a recent Stack session where I wasn’t coming close to hitting my expected numbers and I actually started screaming at myself in my house.
My fitness and speed consultant Mike Carroll has told me there are going to be days when you just don’t have your best stuff even if you feel great. And I had talked with Nichols in the fall about how this process wasn’t going to be a perfectly linear progression. So, why couldn’t I keep my disappointment from bubbling over?
”Frustration is a normal human emotion and it might even serve you to push you to do more,” Nichols said. “And not improving instantly is normal. But emotion is also a signpost that points to something deeper in you and probably means you’re getting too far away from the process.”
As Nichols explained, goals can be great for motivation, but they can also add pressure. And in my case, I’m feeling anxious over whether all the work I’ve put in will be worth it. To lessen that feeling, however, the focus should be on what you’re doing to reach those goals, rather than the results, because that’s what you have the most control over.
Fuse
“If you know you’re doing the right stuff, then the result is secondary,” Nichols says. “The most difficult thing for you is separating this very finite, tangible goal from what it takes to reach that goal. And in order for you to reach the goal, you have to divorce the result from it. You have to focus purely on the things that your team is putting on your plate for you.”
That message put me more at ease because I have been following the plan. And that in itself has been a reward. As I mentioned, it’s given me something to do during a time of being stuck indoors. Heck, it’s made this offseason seemingly fly by.
“There’s different ways to enjoy different things,” Nichols says. “Do you enjoy hitting balls? Do you enjoy working on your swing? Do you enjoy putting for 15 minutes? Do you enjoy just following a process? That's an awesome thing if you enjoy that, but if not, and you really just want results, then you know you might be miserable at times. But that's a trade off for the thing that you want ultimately.”
Finding the right formula is key
As I’ve learned over the past few months, there are traps you can fall into when practicing—especially during the offseason. For one, there’s a belief that the more you do, the better you’ll get. Obviously, that’s not true if you’re working on the wrong things. But even if you are, that doesn’t guarantee results.
“I think too much of the wrong practice sends a signal to your brain that quantity equals better,” Nichols says. “Let's say it does help you get better. I think that the improvement, the gains that you see are offset by the illusion that you’ve been doing the right stuff. So you kind of build up this false, fragile sense of confidence.”
For me, I’ve been pulled toward working on speed training more than anything else. Part of this is due to not being able to get outside and actually play, but another part is that when gains came quickly early on, I just assumed I would keep progressing at the same rate. But they haven’t, which, as mentioned before has caused frustration at times. And my swing coach, Quaker Ridge head pro Mario Guerra, even suspects my speed work has possibly caused a bad habit of crossing the line at the top of my backswing. So why am I still so focused on this one aspect?
“Swing speed is like achieving wealth, there's never enough,” says Nichols, who despite being a great college player and making the finals of the 2017 U.S. Mid-Amateur has never done speed training. “You’ve got to remember that this is part of my plan. It's not gonna dominate my plan, but it's part of my plan and I also have all these other things that I wanna get better at, so I'm going to. Accurately focus on all of these things.”
My swing speed doesn't go up every week, but if I take a step back and assess where I am from the fall, I’ve clearly accomplished getting faster. And my overall goal for this project is to shoot lower scores, not just register a higher number on a radar. I’ll give myself a bit of a pass for focusing on this because for these past few frigid months, the latter has been really the only thing I’ve been able to measure. But instead of worrying about whether I’ve practiced the right things or worked hard enough in the gym, Nichols suggests something else.
“Maybe you could be nicer to yourself?” Nichols tells me.
Sounds like a plan. That being said . . .
Don’t make the mistake I made
If I grant myself some grace as Nichols advises, I'm proud of the work I’ve put into chasing my goal. And when put through the lens of a podcast on this topic by the popular Stanford University neuroscientist Andrew Huberman that Sam Weinman wrote about a couple years ago, I’ve actually done a lot of good things. To follow through, Huberman suggests picking one ambitious goal (check), keeping yourself motivated throughout the process (check) and focusing on your plan and not the results (mostly check).
However, there’s one thing I haven’t done that Huberman says is key to successfully chasing a goal: Keep it to yourself.
“The positive feedback that we get from others when we announce that we're going after a goal activates certain reward systems and motivation systems within our brains that then quickly dissipate, and then diminish the probability that we will engage in the type of behaviors that actually lead us to achieve that goal,” Huberman says.
Whoops. Now, to be fair to me, I kind of had to tell everyone about my goal. It’s part of my job as a content guy. But Huberman’s words are worth noting—and heeding—if you’re not in a similar position.
To be clear, this is different from writing down goals. That exercise, used famously by 16-time PGA Tour winner Justin Thomas among others, has been proven to work. But like JT, who only shares his yearly list and how he fared at the end of the season, you should keep it to yourself while trying to achieve those goals.
So good luck to everyone out there who is also chasing a golf goal. And when you start having doubts about whether you’ll achieve it and whether you’ve done enough to get there, Nichols suggests taking a beat and having a let’s-see approach—even if the season gets off to a slow start.
“Let’s say I played bad. Would I take all that practice away? Would I have not done it? No. I would do the same thing again,” Nichols says. “So you're kind of responding to your own emotions—I might even call the irrationalities—with neutral objectivity, right? And at the end of the day, you say, OK, this, it's my process. Whether I expect myself to do well, or whether I do well or not, this is my process. And it just has to be a constant reminder of that.”
We can do this, folks. Let’s have a great season.