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