Tip #47 - Reinforce On The Course

No matter what your goal -- to lower your handicap, strengthen a particular part of your game, win more weekend Nassaus, whatever -- you should give yourself some room with easily achievable stepping-stone goals and devise a plan of consistent practice and play that takes you toward those goals.

Talking to your caddie on the course will keep you focused and psychologically reinforced.

"Consistent" is the key word. If you want to hit your goals, you have to stick to your plan and work at it. It's no different than adhering to a business plan with the goal of making a certain profit, or to a diet with the goal of a slimmer figure.

Fortunately, in golf at least, there are a few tricks you can use to keep moving forward. "Positive reinforcement" is what the psychologists like to call them.

For me, this reinforcement occurs on the course, while I'm playing. I talk to myself ... all the time. Sometimes silently, sometimes loud enough for me and my caddie, Tony Navarro, to hear, and sometimes loud enough for the whole gallery to listen in on.

The tougher the challenge, the more I talk. When I have a long approach shot to a tough pin position, for instance, as I step up to the ball I'll say something like, "You know the shot you want to hit. You've hit it a thousand times before. So go ahead and do it."

That's a necessary pep talk from the guy who knows me best, and believe me, it works. When you're standing on the edge of a tough shot, it's good to hear words of encouragement, even if they're only coming from inside.

I also talk to myself after shots. When, in the final round of the 1986 British Open, I hit a 4-iron that struck the flag and finished a couple of feet away, I said, loud enough for Tony to hear, "Damn, Greg, I'm pretty impressed by that one." Reinforcement once again.

You can use verbalization whether you're on the practice range, on the first tee of a big match, or anywhere on the course. It's one of the best ways to psych yourself up for the shot ahead and then congratulate yourself on your success in pulling it off. If you do it out loud, just try to do it in a gracious way that won't upset your playing companions.

You can draw confidence by visualizing past successes.

Verbalizing something is similar to writing it down -- it helps you to remember. You don't want to dwell on your shots -- good or bad. But you do want to file the good ones away for future reference. That way you'll be able to bring them back as part of another reinforcement technique -- visualization.

If you want to play aggressive golf, you also have to be ready to struggle constantly against a specific challenge. For each shotmaking situation you must consider both the safe route as well as the more audacious path.

For each of those alternatives, you should be able to dig back into your memory and call forth a fine shot -- complete with trajectory, flight path, bounce and roll. You should then be able to look at it in cold comparison to the demands facing you and decide whether you want to try it again. Having reviewed these mini-movies, you must select the best one to replay. And do so in the few seconds you have to play your shot.

This is all done through visualization. You envision the ideal shot, "seeing" the takeoff, flight, and landing of the ball in vivid detail. Then you recall successful similar shots from your past and draw confidence from those earlier successes. I can think of favorite shots for virtually every situation I face, and I call them forth each time I play. I'm not sure where in my brain I store those memories, but if I start to lose my mind, I hope that part goes last!

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