Improve Your Golf by Changing Your Inner Dialogue

The Inner Game of Golf is the mental game of golf. The Outer Game is the physical game which includes the mechanics of the golf swing.

The mental game includes learning the skills to decrease the mental obstacles that keep you from playing at your peak performance levels. These skills are relaxation and concentration. In order to relax and focus on playing the game, you must overcome self-doubt, fears such as failure & embarrassment, worry, anxiety, a limiting self-image, and negative attitudes and beliefs.

The mental hazards created in your mind on the golf course are many of the same pitfalls that you encounter in your daily life. Unless these weaknesses are changed into strengths, you will be overcome, frustrated, and you will sabotage your game.

Here are five ways to change your inner dialogue:

1. Start listening to the dialogue inside your head. Make a decision to replace negative self-talk with positive self-talk.. Change negative thoughts into “I can”, “I will”, “I can recover”, “thank you”. Avoid the failure statements of “I can’t”, “if only”, “I could have”, “I hope”, “It’s a hard shot”, “It’s a tough hole”. Repeat positive messages until they are hard-wired into your brain, body and spirit and have become a conditioned response.
2. Talk to yourself as if you are a winner.  World class golfers rarely put themselves down. Pro caddies constantly pump up their pros with self-affirming observations.
3. Don’t agree mentally when someone makes a negative comment. Breathe to relax your mind. Ignore the comment or turn it around and give yourself the opposite positive message inside your head.
4. Program your self-talk for what you want instead of what you don’t want. If you tell yourself not to miss another shot, your subconscious mind will reinforce the missed shot. What you resist persists. This is called negative hypnotic programming. Focus your dominant thought on what you do want.
5. Remind yourself what it is that you love about the game of golf.

“The trouble with all of us, who grumble over the game and thus spoil an otherwise pleasant afternoon with congenial friends, is that we do not understand the game, nor ourselves. In this we can take a number of lessons from the poorer player who without fail has fun. For no matter how good we may be, if we should fancy that we have mastered golf to the extent that we can go out day after day and play as we please, then we are greater fools than ought to be left at large”.
~ Bobby Jones

For additional information on improving your inner dialogue, read the PositiveMentalImagery May 2007 newsletter “Positive Thinking for Positive Results” at www.pmi4.com Archived Newsletters.

“Play In the Zone” With Joan

Log on to the PMI website and Blog for additional mental golf tips.

If you want to learn more about how you can improve your mental game, call Joan for a complimentary 15-minute consultation. She can be reached by phone 828-696-2547, or through the Positive Mental Imagery website or blog.

Self-empowering self-hypnosis mental golf CDs are available at http://www,pmi4.com/cart