Positive Golf Tip - Try the "Starter Kit" Idea to Track Your Thoughts

One of the key ideas to being successful at building your mental golf mindset is to know where you are, basically, before you can move forward in your improvement. In other words, if you say something vague like, "I want to improve my attitude," you are going to get vague results. But if you have something more specific, like "I want to improve my focus," "I want to reduce my self-doubt and increase my self-confidence," "I want to improve my trust in my abilities," or "I want to improve my expectations for good shots," then you can pinpoint your efforts and get more specific results that will really help you. In order to develop these more specific goals, however, you need to do a check or assessment to track your thoughts and get a handle on what's going on "inside," in your mind. The tool to do this is called self-assessment. A self-assessment isn't hard to do, but it does require some focus and attention on your thoughts. To get started, you can try the "starter kit" quick assessment idea that I am including in my new book, GOODBYE HIT, HELLO SWING, PART II - Discovering a Repeatable Golf Swing, due out later this month. (CLICK HERE to learn more about the first book, GOODBYE HIT, HELLO SWING, PART I - Six Steps to An Effortless Golf Swing Motion.) Once you get the hang of this self-assessment tool, you can do other assessments for specific mental skills and specific physical game problems, and this will help you to really pinpoint your efforts for some really outstanding results.

"Starter Kit" idea for assessing thought tendencies: Take a couple of minutes and think about various aspects of your game. As you think, pay close attention to any thoughts which have negative connotations. The first time I performed this exercise, although I focused hard on the positive, a lot of negative stuff snuck in (how I lost a tournament, certain bad shots, a hole where I always screw up, and so on. These were small "blips" on the screen, yet each contained a pulse of negative energy (which all adds up). I sensed that the overall ratio of positive to negative thoughts regarding my golf game leaned slightly toward the positive. The revelation, however, came when I compared these results to my actual play at the time. The correlation was strong. I was hitting good, or reasonably good golf shots a little over 50% of the time. I wanted to improve on that, and this tool gave me a clue on where to start with the general quantity of my positive/negative thoughts. Over the past two years, I've done this same quick exercise on numerous occasions, and never once has it failed to correlate with my play. While not highly "scientific," it definitely works and benefits my game. I'm able to get a snapshot of my current "positivity profile," note how I've progressed (or regressed), and determine what I need to work on on the inside, which will ultimately benefit my physical game. Give it a try. It can be a couple of quick minutes that really make a difference!

Here's to great golf!

Rick Semple
Positive Golfer
Co-Founder, TheHeartofGolf.com
http://www.TheHeartofGolf.com

New Video to Improve Golf Swing Mindset and Motion

The new golf swing video that I mentioned in my previous post is now available for viewing on YouTube. Just CLICK HERE to access it. In it, I cover some quick mental golf and physical game tips related to changing from a "hitting" to a "swinging" mindset and developing a smooth, effortless swing that is repeatable and accurate. My new e-book, GOODBYE HIT, HELLO SWING, offers some additional real-life tips and guidance on curing "hit-itis" and achieving a great effortless swing motion.

Here's to great golf!

Rick Semple
Positive Golfer
Co-Founder, TheHeartofGolf.com
http://www.TheHeartofGolf.com

You CAN Achieve Golf Swing Excellence

I love to read and hear stories about the pros working on improving their golf swings. Even when their swings are great, they are still striving to make them better. Here are some thoughts from hall-of-famer Nick Price that put that "lifelong refinement" into perspective. These appear in the excellent book, Fearless Golf, by Dr. Gio Valiante.

Part of the reason I have been able to compete for so long is because every year I have refined my golf swing...I have worked diligently to improve my swing that little fraction more because the fact is, it is imperfectible. To me the swing is like a square block of wood, and your goal is to shape that block into the most perfect circle you can. You can get it to a circle pretty quickly, but after you get the general shape right, then you have to refine constantly and perpetually, and go from a hammer and a chisel, to a 50 grit sandpaper, to 100 grit sandpaper, to 1000 grit sandpaper, to steel wool, to polish. And every year you refine, regardless of how good your previous year was, you try to get better. And that is what I have tried to do. Better and better every year regardless of where I am. Excellence, it's like a process, you know? No matter where you are, you just keep trying to refine.

I like that comment, "No matter where you are, you just keep trying to refine." That applies to recreational players as well as the pros. This is the kind of thinking that inspires me to pick a Positive Golf Improvement Project each year (see previous post). I have been playing golf for more than 40 years , and I am still practicing that "golf swing refinement," both with inner mental golf ideas and physical game techniques. In fact, I just released a new e-book that addresses one of the ideas that has helped me enormously in my golf swing improvement, and that is the "swing versus hit" idea. In my GOODBYE HIT, HELLO SWING e-book, I cover six steps to an effortless golf swing motion, including ideas and techniques to switch from being a "hitter" (someone who hits AT the ball) to a "swinger." This "hitter" tendency is so common that Michael McTeigue said this in his book THE KEYS TO THE EFFORTLESS GOLF SWING: "My teaching experience indicates that the hit impulse - the automatic tendency to strike at the ball - is the foremost reason why so few golfers break 80 in their lifetimes." I know this tendency was a hindrance to my golf swing improvement, and now I am passing along pointers that helped me to successfully change my ideas and techniques and develop the effortless golf swing motion that I was striving for in my "lifelong refinement." Watch for my video golf swing tip coming soon to YouTube to illustrate these ideas in action!

Here's to great golf ideas and great golf swing "refinement" in 2008!

Rick Semple
Positive Golfer
Co-Founder, TheHeartofGolf.com
http://www.TheHeartofGolf.com