The feeling of love comes from your heart. The feeling of hitting a perfect golf shot resonates in your heart. Discounting that feeling by judging the result keeps you in your thinking mind.
One of the mental keys for successful golf is to let go of self-judgment. When you think about how you are doing, or how to do it, you are judging yourself and your performance under the guise of helping your game. When you judge yourself you are likely to feel anxious, guilty, embarrassed or angry. These feelings will ultimately sabotage your golf game, lower your self esteem and keep you from being successful.
Let go of self-judgment
Judgment is the comparison between how something seems and how we think it should be. We would like to believe that we could hit every golf shot perfectly. And when we don’t do that, we feel frustrated, embarrassed and humiliated, and we reject ourselves because we feel inadequate. And so we pretend to be what we think we should be (perfect golfer) by demeaning ourselves with words or physical actions of disgust. In other words, we pretend to be what we are not (perfect), because we are afraid someone else will notice that we are not what we pretend to be.
The way we judge ourselves is the strongest Judge there is. When we miss a shot in front of other people, we try to deny the mistake and take the attention off of us by covering it up with excuses and rationalizing why it happened. To be a champion golfer, you need to seek your own approval, not the approval of others.
Use your thoughts and words and pictures to create the golf game that you desire. Let go of judgments that demean your game. Give yourself permission to enjoy the game of golf with its ups and downs, with its perfect and imperfect shots, with its humiliating situations and its joyous moments! Remember that golf is a game where an inch can make the difference between total disaster or absolute perfection! See the round in its entirety. Don’t be trapped by a few miss-hits into judging your whole performance by them.
Affirm your worthiness
Peak performing athletes rarely put themselves down. They talk to themselves positively about what they are attempting to create. This is a part of their mental training program. They repeat positive mental affirmations and training routines until they are wired into their brains, body and spirit to become conditioned responses.
You are your most important critic. Nothing is more critical than the opinion you have of yourself. What you say to yourself in your inner mind is the most important conversation you will ever have. You become confident by affirming yourself.
Keep doing your best. If you always do your best, there is no way the Judge within can find you guilty or blame you. When you give it your best effort, you learn to accept yourself.
Be your own best mental coach. Encourage and treat yourself as well as you do the others in your group. Tell yourself to LET GO of self-judgment and self-rejection that comes from never measuring up to being perfect.
Love playing the game of golf more than you love the outcome.
Play “In the Zone” With Joan
Entrain Your Heart & Mind for Peak Performances
To train your brain to play your best golf, listen to the Positive Mental Imagery guided imagery CDs, available at www.pmi4.com/cart
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