The Psychology Of Golf
November 16, 2010Hey. I’m going to be your guest blogger for today (I guess). What is “special” about me, is that I’m not even a golf player. I have pretty much 0 interest in golf (which might come from my never trying it). However.. what I do have an interest in, is learning. In order to be able to become good at as many things as possible – which would increase the chance of becoming good at the few things I REALLY want to get good at – it would certainly help to know the absolute core things you need to improve/do in order to learn. Right? And that’s the angle of this article. I will talk about one single, simple, thing to focus on, when practicing, that is fundamental… and will get you results.
I would like to go into a problem, that people have, when trying to learn something; and it applies to learning anything. It’s that, they are too focused on being perfect. This makes people stiffen up, and performance anxious. Because they’re stiff, they’re really not that aware of what they’re doing. In this state of mind, practicing (golf/other things) becomes more of a fight, against not failing to live up to your self image, than about being able to see what they are doing wrong and correcting it. Get it? Can relate? In this angry “fight state”, you MIGHT be taking action – meaning you’re doing something – but… what are you really doing? You’re probably in a bad spiral, where you’re trying harder and harder – without actually changing your approach. If you don’t change, you can’t go from failure to success.
The more you change, and the more you are aware of the changes occurring, the more you learn.
In school, we learn that a person learns through repeating. It’s ingrained in us, from a very early age, that we learn through doing something over and over again. But how is that possible? On a golf course, if the ball is in a set position, and you hit it the same way ten times? …Have you learned anything? What have you learned, specifically? Your mind SHOULD be drawing a blank, when trying to come up with the answer. …And why is that? It’s because you have been doing the same thing ten times.
Let’s say you manage to hit the ball “the perfect way to hit a golf ball”, ten times over. Will the results be PERFECT ten times in a row? That depends on if, in every one of those occasions the distance to the hole was the EXACT same. At the moment you move the ball, what would have put it directly in the hole, from the previous position, will put it somewhere else. Because the circumstances have changed. And if you don’t adapt to the circumstances, you will fail. In other words: adaptation is where it’s at, rather than something predetermined like “perfection”. Complete adaptation equals perfection, on the golf-course.
Conclusion, so far = when you try to be perfect, you stop learning; because you become stuck in living up to something, and become cut off from what is actually going on; consequentially, you cannot see what you’re doing wrong, and you can’t adapt to improve anything. Also: if you have learned something, repeating it is worthless. Obviously, right. The point is to put yourself in a position where you’re both “being hit” with all these changes, while at the same time being able to pick them up.
You will naturally develop your muscle memory when you relax. To maximize that, you have to do as much different stuff as possible (read: least repetition equals most learning).
What would prepare you best for the different circumstances of the golf course… having done many different things – which have built a bank of many reference points, in your mind, to “how a golf club can hit a golf club”; based on an infinite number of combinations of club-angle/arm-angle/club-speed/more – or having done all in your power to hit the ball the SAME way every time (even if that way is the supposed “best”)? The thing is, what is the perfect hit is all defined by the circumstances.
And how do you get this knowledge? By developing your relationship to a golf club (rather than trying to live up to some self image or hit the ball the “perfect” way; because perfection depends on circumstance). You can’t measure amount of practice in time spent on the golf course. You measure it by ACTIONS TAKEN. If you do the same thing over and over, you’re just doing the same thing over and over. That’s not practicing – it’s stupid. When you’re becoming bored in your practice, you have literally stopped practicing – because your mind has stopped picking things up (and that’s why you never learn anything in subjects that you dislike; while you have no problems in subjects where you have fun/feel stimulated in some way).
The fact that what is perfect, in one situation, puts you right in the bunker, in another, takes the necessity of repetition (read: boredom) out of practice – and makes RELAXATION necessary, instead. This is awesome, because when you relax you become that much more able at picking up what is going on in your body (read: more able at accumulating muscle memory reference points; golf-skill).
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