How to Enjoy a Round of Golf

Podcast Transcript

It’s 2014 and it’s the final round of the Forsyth County Invitational Championship at Maple Chase Golf and Country Club. It’s the biggest event in the area, exclusive to Forsyth County residents, and a tournament that everyone around here wants to win, especially me. I had felt that I was one of the best around for years now, but had never really shown up when it mattered in the event.

But this time, I was in it. I was in the final group on the final day and in contention to win. I’m playing nervously, but steadily.

I go into the back 9 in the lead. The first several holes go well. And when I get to hole 16, a fairly sharp dogleg left with a demanding tee shot, I still have the lead. They’ve since cleared a lot of trees and brush on the left hand side, but back in 2014 the left side was thick woods.

I was always a drawer of the ball, and occasionally the big left miss would come into play. But I had no thought of that particular miss at this point, but I was feeling the full on anxiety of trying to close out a very important tournament. The “don’t blow this opportunity” feeling was going through me very strongly. So I line up down the right side of the fairway to hit my draw around the dogleg, take the club back, then a jolt of anxiety hit me and I flipped the hands at it and snap hook into the left trees. My biggest fear was coming true: my big miss was going to cause me to blow this opportunity.

We find the ball and I have a shot at the green, but I’m still shaken by letting the pressure get to me and hitting a snap hook at the worst possible moment. I hit a decent shot but it goes over the green, a pretty bad place to be on this hole. I weave my way through the dozens of golf carts of spectators watching us, and there are some people standing back around an area of thick ground vines. Someone points my ball out to me and I get over it and it’s buried deep in there. An unplayable was not a great option, so I decide to try and hack it out. It barely makes it out. I chip that shortsided shot onto the green, but pretty far from the hole. I two putt. Double.

I went from in the lead to now trailing. Ultimately, the events of the 16th hole prove too shattering to mentally recover and I lose the 2015 Forsyth Invitational Championship.

You know the best way to NOT enjoy a round of golf? To play scared.

Ever since that snap hook on the 16th hole 10 years ago, I STILL fear the big left miss on occasion. The remnants of that fear still linger faintly.

I think playing scared is the opposite of enjoyment. You might say apathy, or anger, or playing bad golf would more likely be better ways to not enjoy a round of golf. And they certainly can be.

But in my experience, and based on what I’ve learned, fear is like a fire extinguisher to having a good time.

Why do I say that? Well let’s start by getting neurological. Because, as the The Mental Golf Show logo implies, our brains are the source of everything we do, especially playing golf. So when there is something scary out there in the environment, our brain recruits as many resources as it can to help us survive whatever seems threatening. Remember, one of our brain’s top priorities is to help us stay alive. So if there’s something that threatens that survival, our brains are going to do whatever they can to either gear us up to fight that threat, or help us get away from the threat. Fight, or flight.

The way this affects our enjoyment is almost all of our attention is on the threatening thing, not the golf shot. When we’re playing golf, which is a game that in my mind is ultimately meant for fun, is mixed with various threats that are taking our attention away from the game itself, then fun becomes secondary at best.

Now if you’re thinking like me, at this point you might be saying “what about when you’re nervous? You’ve got that first tee excitement, or that final hole adrenaline? Those are fun sometimes right?” Let’s run those through our fear and attention filter. When you’re nervous, are you afraid? Is your attention elsewhere besides what’s happening in the present? When you’re on the final hole, and you have that adrenaline going, are you absent-minded? Would you say that you’re afraid? I would argue that if you said you were mentally somewhere other than the present, or you’re afraid of some threat, then you weren’t nervous, or excited, or pumped full of adrenaline, you were ANXIOUS. And anxiety can be defined as fear of an uncertain future. There’s that fear. Anxiety is your brain using past info to gear you up to handle a potential threat in the future.

So nerves and adrenaline are not fear-based, therefore they can be moments of intense fun, because you’re almost fully present in those moments. But when you view something in your environment as a threat, it will take your attention away from the present.

So how do we enjoy a round of golf? If playing scared is the opposite of enjoyment, what can we do to enjoy it? Well, we have to address the fear. As long as you’re afraid of something, enjoyment becomes almost impossible. So the thing you’re afraid of has to be gone.

Let’s say you’re scared of hitting a ball out of bounds. You’re on a tee box, and the OB is directly where you’ve been missing your tee shots all day. You’ve got the big miss that could end up right there. Are you going to enjoy this tee shot? As long you’re scared of the OB, probably not. We need to get rid of this fear to have fun, so how can we do that? You could make some special local rule that makes OB less penalizing, but that’s really just a bandaid and does nothing to address the deeper fear going on. And truly we can’t make the out of bounds go away. The OB is there, and it poses a threat to you.

Another bandaid we strive after is perfect swings. I’ve tried this solution. We try to fully eliminate the big miss. We try to make our swings bulletproof so we will have total certainty of where the ball is going to go and never have anything to worry about. But we know that perfection and absolute certainty of never making a mistake is a futile pursuit in golf. And will ultimately create more fear, because now your confidence is built on absolute certainty of never making a mistake, which is impossible, and therefore your confidence is based on something impossible, making your confidence extremely fragile. So you play with fear of the thing that will take your certainty away. The first big miss you hit (and you might even hit more when you’re trying to be perfect) will shatter your confidence and leave you searching for the rest of the round. How enjoyable does this sound?

So if we can’t make the OB go away, or make our swings perfect so as to never hit an errant shot, we have to make the FEAR go away. In order to freely pursue this tee shot without fear (which is a much more fun way to hit the shot), we have to address the fear. The best way to do that is to drill down into it. Asking yourself questions. Here’s what a progression through some self-directed questions: “what am I afraid of right now? I’m afraid of hitting it OB. Why am I afraid of hitting it OB? Because it’ll hurt my score. Why am I afraid of hurting my score? Because I don’t want to shoot a bad score. Why am I afraid of shooting a bad score? Because I’ve been putting in all of this time and effort into my game and I want to have the scores to show for it. And a bad score will show me that I’m not good enough.” At this point we’re starting to get at the heart of the issue, the true source of the fear. There’s a general rule that applies to almost all of us: we don’t want our pride to get hurt. When good scores pump up our view of ourselves and show us that our hard work has been worth it, then the thought of a bad score poses a threat to our view of ourselves, to our pride, to our ego.

So there’s that word: threat. Remember, when your brain perceives a threat out there, it’s going to recruit resources like mental attention and bodily functions like heart rate and breathing and muscle tension to ready you for the fight or flight to survive the potential threat. So when you’re on that tee shot, with out of bounds looming, posing not just a risk to this tee shot, but to your sense of pride in yourself and your ability, you’re going to be in full threat prevention and protection mode. This is decidedly NOT a fun way to play golf.

So we’re back to fear getting in the way of enjoyment. And we know we can’t make the OB or bad shots go away, but we can make the FEAR of the OB go away, by addressing the deeper reasons WHY it’s scary, why it’s a threat to us.

And this is where it becomes more personal. More individualized to you. You have to answer for yourself why a bad score means you’re not good enough. Or why this result would define you. Ultimately, why are you scared in this moment?

I’ve done this for myself. I’ve gone back to the 16th hole at the 2014 Forsyth Invitational Championship in my mind and walked through the events in detail. I’ve processed it in my mind, defined it as just a singular event that has no real effect on my present, and is ultimately not worth fearing, despite what my mind tells me.

Once you’ve dug into the deeper fear, and you turn it into something that doesn’t scare you anymore, only at that point is it possible for you to play this tee shot without fear, and play it while mentally present and freely pursuing what you want. Which is the way to enjoy this shot more, and ultimately the way to enjoy your round of golf as much as possible.

And as it turns out, I won the Forsyth Invitational the very next year, AND the year after that. It’s not that I never felt any fear though. I played through the fear at the time, which caused some very stressful, uncomfortable, and unenjoyable rounds of golf. I played well, but didn’t truly enjoy my time. Only since then, after processing that fear over years of recognition, naming it, and letting it pass, have I been able to play shots that would’ve scared me in the past, but now pursue and thrive in those situations. But I still have lots of room for improvement to move towards maximum enjoyment during my rounds by playing without fear.

So to recap, I believe enjoyment of the game of golf is the highest goal. You may disagree that it’s the highest, but it’s hard to imagine anyone would say enjoyment isn’t at least pretty high up there.

Then, the opposite of enjoyment is fear. Enjoyment of golf becomes nearly impossible when you’re playing scared.

This playing scared happens in situations where your brain perceives a threat. And you communicate this perception of a threat through your deeper beliefs. For example, this tee shot scares me because I don’t want to shoot a higher score because a higher score means x y or z about me.

As long as that deeper belief is there, the fear will be there. So in order to make the fear go away, you have to change the deeper belief.

You change the deeper belief through naming the belief, questioning it, digging down into it, and getting to the bottom and discrediting it. For example, a higher score does not in fact mean x y or z about me, because I’m who I am no matter what I shoot. A common source of this is priorities outside of golf, or things that you believe are bigger than golf. Such as, “my kids don’t care what I shoot, they’ll love me regardless.” That pretty quickly discredits the fear. Or gratefulness. Like Karl Morris explained so well in The Mental Golf Show episode last week titled “The Power of Gratitude in Golf w/ Karl Morris (part 2)” having that bigger picture perspective where you hold golf in its proper place in your mind can have a significant effect on how little you will fear mistakes and bad rounds, and therefore play with more enjoyment. You will probably have the “it’s silly to be scared of this” type of feeling.

And then you’re freed up to pursue this shot how you want to. You hold results more loosely. You can hit it, find it, and go hit it again.

Which is ultimately the way to maximize enjoyment.

With fear, enjoyment is impossible. Freedom from fear means freedom to enjoy golf.