Podcast Transcript
We’ve all heard the quote.
There’s golf, then there’s tournament golf.
Competitive golf is a whole different beast. But why is it so different? It’s just golf right? You’re just hitting a ball with a club on a golf course right? It should feel the same as when you play in a casual round right?
No. Competitive golf is indeed different. There’s pressure in competitive golf that doesn’t exist in casual golf. But why? What causes that pressure? Pressure could be defined as “the felt stress of potential consequences”. When you are playing a competitive round, there’s built in consequences. There’s your name on a leaderboard. There’s other people seeing what you shot. There’s your game compared to others. There’s the potential good consequence of winning and getting an award for your skill. Which causes the pressure to perform so you don’t not get the opposite of that.
These consequences are where the pressure comes from. They’re all based on some level on fear. Fear of the opposite of all those positive consequences. Fear of realizing the negative consequences. You want other people to think you’re a good player, which leads to fear of people thinking you’re not a good player if you play bad. You want to be high on the leaderboard, which leads to a fear of not wanting to be low on the leaderboard. You want your hard work to have not been for nothing, which leads to a fear that maybe your hard work was for nothing.
This is the first law of pressure: The more you want a good thing, the more you’re afraid of the bad thing.
There would be no pressure if you didn’t fear the negative consequences. And there would be no negative consequences if you didn’t really care about getting any awards of any kind, whether it be a physical award or the award of other people thinking highly of you. If none of those things mattered to you, then you would feel no pressure.
But that’s of course not realistic. Why would you sign up for a tournament if not to strive for some kind of positive consequence? The reason you’re signing up is to go for something. The reason you play any round of golf is to go for something. Which brings in the potential of not getting that thing, which creates pressure.
And this is where a lot of players go wrong. It’s where I used to go wrong. I used to think that feeling pressure meant I was mentally weak. That pressure was causing me to play bad. That I needed to figure out a way to push the pressure away, and make it so I didn’t feel it, and then I could play well. Then I could play up to my potential.
But this is a mistake because this sets up a poor relationship with pressure. This ensured that every time I played a competitive round that I would be locked in a battle against myself; against my own feelings. So every time I played, I was fighting two battles: the golf course and myself. I was spending the entire round fighting my own feelings, especially towards the beginning and end of rounds when the pressure felt the highest. I would feel the pressure, dislike the feeling, try to make it go away through something like breathing or positive self-talk, it wouldn’t go away, so I would try even harder to make it go away, which would add even more pressure, until I was totally spiraled down in a battle of overthinking and stress.
This obviously doesn’t work. So what would be a better way to approach it? It would be the opposite of this battle. It would be accepting the presence of the pressure.
You’ve heard the phrase “pressure is a privilege.” This is good psychology because it creates a good relationship with your internal feelings. It allows you to feel pressure, and be ok with that feeling. Even embrace it, seek it out. You sign up for a tournament in the hopes of getting to experience pressure. Why? Because the presence of pressure means you’re in a situation where you could both get and lose what you want.
You can’t have one without the other. To wish away the uncomfortable feelings of pressure is to wish away the potential reward of doing well.
So here’s the second law of pressure: the more you accept pressure, the less you let the pressure affect you.
The best way to play worse under pressure is to hate the feeling of pressure. And the best way to play well under pressure is to love the feeling of pressure.
So every competitive round has the obvious battle against the course and your game stacked against other players. But the internal battle is probably the most important when you play competitive golf.
As Raymond Prior says in his book Golf Beneath the Surface,
Developing physical skills is vitally important; however, you can be as skilled as any golfer in the world, but if you’re not addressing your relationship with your inner experience, physical ability will only take you so far.
The battle is how well can you accept your own internal thoughts, feelings, and emotions. The better you can do that, the more readily you’ll access your skill, which is how you play up to your potential, and give yourself the best chance to do well in the competitive round.
