Click here to take the brand new redesigned Mental Game Assessment!
I’m a Golf Mental Coach and the host of a golf mental game podcast. Yet my mental game has gotten worse.
How do I know that? And what am I going to do about it? And what you can do to improve your mental game. All of that in this short episode.
In 2016 I was a 3-ish handicap, floundering as an amateur golfer, no clue what I was doing. In 2017, I won the Triad Amateur (a county level event), the Carolinas Open (a regional PGA of America event with amateurs and pros), and I made it to the finals of the U.S. Mid-Amateur. That finish exempt me into the next three U.S. Mid-Ams and in the 2021 U.S. Mid-Amateur I made match play and got to the round of 32.
5 years later, I’m kinda back to where I was in 2016: nowhere near the player I was in 2017. Physically or mentally. And I have hard data to prove it. (more on that in a minute)
The single most important thing that made me so good back then was my mental game. Yes, I was working on my physical game, practicing harder and better than I ever had. But it was my mental game. I was more committed, trusting, accepting, and freed up.
And that’s why I got into mental coaching and doing this podcast. When I stopped pursuing pro golf, I asked my coach Robert what he thought I should do for work. He said the way that I got good was from a radical shift in my mental game. So he thought I could help others do that too.
Well come to find out, just like any part of your golf game, your mental game is a continuing work in progress. You have to practice it in order to keep it good. It doesn’t just get good and stay good forever.
Those mental game skills of commitment, trust, acceptance, and freedom come a lot harder than they used to. And this is from several factors, but primarily because I just don’t give it the attention that I once did. Yes, I give other’s mental games a TON of attention. But my own? I know the right way to think, but as my players (and you) know all too well, there’s a massive chasm between knowing the right way to think and actually thinking the right way.
You know that old saying “the cobbler’s kids have no shoes”? I as a mental coach am the cobbler, the shoes are my mental game, and the kids are me as a golfer. Ok weird analogy. Aka, I do this for a living, but I struggle with it myself mightily.
So why am I saying all this about my own mental game? Well because I recently took a Mental Game Assessment. And in fact it was my own Mental Game Assessment. But this assessment is like 7 years old from way back when my coach Robert and I built it from scratch. Well we just launched a brand new Mental Game Assessment, built fully from the ground up, integrated directly into our new app Mental Golf Club. So in testing it I took it for myself.
We have two cool new features that the old assessment didn’t have. We have mental strokes gained for each of the 8 mental traits. And we have an overall Mental Game Index. The Mental Game Index is essentially just like your Official Handicap Index, but for your mental game. It’s one score that sums up your entire mental game. And it’s not just some simple average. The MGI is based on a formula that I kid you not looks like a completely different language to me. It shows how your overall mental game compares to thousands of other golfers.
The MGI is awesome, and I scored pretty well there. I’m at a -0.4 Mental Game Index. Meaning I’m better than scratch overall mentally. But where it gets interesting for me is the individual traits strokes gained. The breakdown of each trait shows that I do pretty well on most of the traits.
But something that stood out to me is I’m losing strokes on the mental trait Pressure Regulation. The different statements that correspond to this are
These are very interesting to me, because they’re all how well I handle pressure. Clearly I don’t have a very good relationship with mistakes and pressure. Which is something I used to pride myself on. My relationship with mistakes and how I felt about my tournament performance were things that I believe set me apart from my peers. But now clearly I’m much less accepting of mistakes and how tournaments could go.
This tracks. Because I’ve played in a dozen or so qualifiers over the last few years and haven’t made it out in any of them. So on the one hand, I’ve built up some pretty negative baggage. And on the other hand, I’m letting that negative baggage affect my relationship with results.
I did not know that I had drifted like this. But the assessment showed me that it’s clearly an area that I need to work on. And if left untouched it will get worse over time.
So this brought up a bigger conundrum for myself. I wondered if maybe this just meant that I’m more aware and honest with my own answers than I used to be. Or maybe I just grade myself tougher now because I do this for a living. Or maybe I’ve become more critical and negative about my mental game over the years as my physical scores have gotten higher.
Or, and this is the one that I didn’t really want to admit is a possibility, I’m scoring worse now than I used to, and maybe that’s not just because of my golf swing or putting stroke. Maybe I’ve just plain gotten worse mentally. Not that I’m badmentally, and my game and practice habits are for sure not where they used to be, but clearly I’m not as good mentally as I once was. And I think it shows in my scoring and tournament results over the recent years.
So this assessment has given me some hard data on my mental game (albeit self-reported, which should always be taken with somewhat of a grain of salt). But I can see clearly what I need to work on based on this data. Which gives me a sense of control and tangibility with something that can often seem very vague.
This means I’m going to need to directly address the things from these results. When I give myself a 4 out of 5 on being more nervous in a tournament than most of my peers, and having a lot of fear of making a mistake in a tournament, and getting extremely anxious on the day of a tournament, I know that those are all on a deeper level to do with acceptance of results. I know for me, I pretty desperately want to qualify for something again. So when I’m about to play in a tournament, the prospect of hitting bad shots and missing easy putts and shooting bad scores is pretty anxiety-inducing. So in order to offset this, I need to have a deeper look at why these results matter so much to me. Why do I need to perform well? Sure it would be cool, but why is it such a strong desire to the point of being anxiety-inducing? And then equipped with this knowledge about myself, I can show up with an extra awareness of my tendencies, and not allow myself to be so attached to shot by shot results. I can be on a closer watch for my pre-shot tension and post-shot reactions. If those are starting to show signs of result-attachment, I can regulate myself back to center. Instead of letting that result-attachment cause me to spiral, I can proceed mindfully, which will give me better access to my skill.
I’m playing in a qualifier for our state amateur this week in fact. So I’m definitely going to use this data to help me.
So I think you should check out the new assessment. Even if you’ve taken it before, you’re going to want to take this again because it gives you an awesome new layout of your mental game traits. And it’s even faster to take now. We worked with a pro data guy to whittle it down to just 38 questions.
To check it out go to app.joshnicholsgolf.com/assessment. And if you want to get that deeper level of analysis like I’ve talked about with mental strokes gained and Mental Game Index, you can access those when you upgrade to MGC+. You can also see your individual responses to the statements so you can analyze what exactly is holding you back, just like I did. And you’ll be able to retake the assessment so you can track your mental game improvement over time. And we’ve got more features coming to MGC+ members in the future that you’re gonna love.
Again, to take the new assessment click the link at the top of the shownotes or go to app.joshnicholsgolf.com/assessment.
I’m pumped to use this for my own game, and to see how you guys can use it to improve yours too.