If you asked one hundred regular amateur golfers to honestly rate the quality of their mental game on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being highly competent at managing their mental/emotional state on the golf course and one being totally incompetent on the golf course what do you think the majority of golfers would say?

I bet they would say that they rank too low on the scale, probably about a 2 or a 3.

If you then ask them what they need to do to raise their score most would have very little idea about what they need to do.

Some will say that they have read popular authors like Bob Rotella and other popular golf psychologists who write about the mental game and golf.

The truth is that very few golfers ever spend any time developing their mental skills and there’s no doubt that it is holding you back from hitting better and more consistent golf shots and shooting lower golf scores.

How much easier would it be if you knew what your unique personality style was for learning and performing on the golf course?

If you knew that your particular style meant that you needed to take instruction a certain way as well as the way you play on the golf course?

If you were oblivious to your performance style could it mean that every time you play you are no better off than the last time you played?

That in fact you would never get better at golf because you don’t know what you need to do.

Golf is a game of gross generalisations.

Golf books, golf magazines and other forms of media try to persuade you to go with a popular style that may not be even close to being the best way for you.

This has been a challenge for me for many years up until recently when I came across a golf personality profile that actually got it right.

Someone finally developed a golf personality profile for every golfer that helps you to understand why YOU play golf the way YOU do and how YOU can get better at it by following some simple guidelines.

The profile was developed by Bobby Foster, a management consultant headquartered in Columbia, SC. Bobby is a former teaching professional and golf coach at the University of South Carolina where he coached several All-Americans including four players who played on The PGA Tour.

He is a Certified Behavioral Analyst specializing in the D.I.S.C Behavioral Style Model. He explains the purpose behind the development of the mental golf profile -

“Our company has had great success using DISC profiles in work language to help people improve performance in all types of working environments.

 

Over the years, I’ve often thought about how much better I would have been as a player, instructor and coach if I’d known about the DISC System during that stage of my life.

We built this profile in golf language so that players, instructors and coaches could enjoy the same benefits I’ve seen countless experience with DISC profiles in the workplace.”

The system generates personalized information for working on your mental game just as video and launch monitors produce personalized information for working on your swing and customizing your equipment. The profile works great for self-coaching as well as for collaborating with your instructor or coach.

It’s Quick…It’s Accurate…It’s Comprehensive… “The beauty of this system is that our players get an accurate and comprehensive report without having to spend hours completing a laborious questionnaire. You sure get a lot for the time and money you invest in this process.”
– Dr. Greg Rose, Co-Founder, Titleist Performance Institute

Following is the 5 step outline of the Mental Golf Workshop™ profile process -

1. Log in to www.mentalgolfworkshop.com with my access code procollege (all one word).
2. Pay US $65.00 (worth every penny too!)
3. Spend about ten minutes answering the multiple-choice questionnaire.
4. Your answers go through the proprietary scoring system to produce a 20 plus page report.
5. Review the detailed descriptions of your mental golf tendencies and customized strategies for these areas of your game – Golf Temperament
   1. Pre-Round Preparation
   2. Mental Tendencies When Playing Shots
   3. Course Management
   4. Working With Your Instructors
   5. Mental Tendencies Toward Golf Fitness

Your report is produced in a “workshop” format, with space provided to make notes as you work through your report. This format makes it easy to self-coach yourself or to review with your instructor or coach.

I know that this great tool will be the tool you need to make the New Year your best year ever to play golf the way you have always wanted to.

Lawrie Montague – Golf Confidence Pro

Top Professional golfers who play golf on tour are unique individuals who passionately pursue their dream of achieving success on the PGA and LPGA tour’s with drive, energy and determination. They allow us to see what lies within; the potential to be a lot better than we currently are.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To improve your golf you need a strong passion to constantly fuel your motivation. Passion comes from your desire to be excellent at what you do, and golf is one game where you have to work very hard over a long period of time to gain a high measure of control over your golf shots and ultimately your golf scores.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By removing the “quick fix” mentality from your thinking and working hard on your weakest, most important skills you can make progress with your golf. Your passion to improve will keep you focused on the task, and in the weeks and months from now you will reap the rewards of your dedication with better golf shots and lower golf scores.

 

This week Golf Confidence Academy (GCA) launches our new Online Video Golf Lesson Program. Every week thousands of keen golfers visit GCA and Lawrie Montague owner of Golf Confidence Academy gets many requests for advice from golfers around the world to help them solve their golf swing technique problems.

From this month visitors to Golf Confidence Academy will be able to send videos of their golf techniques and have Lawrie analyse them.

Lawrie is a very successful golf coach who has more than twenty five thousand hours of experience coaching golfers from beginners to tournament winners and through the power of the internet he’s able to help golfers to improve their golf so they can play confidently and competently.

Lawrie co-owns Pro Tour Golf College at Joondalup Resort in Perth Western Australia where he trains and prepares aspiring tour professionals and tour professionals. He also owns Gold Coast Golf School on Queenslands Gold Coast where his instructors help amateur golfers to sharpen their golf skillsd to gain more enjoment from their game.

Here’s one of Lawrie’s Online Video Golf Lesson students (who was part of his test program) commenting about the program…

“I stumbled upon Lawrie through his Youtube golf videos.  As an avid player,  I have seen hours of Youtube footage on golf instruction.  I rarely however, watch more than one video within an instructor’s channel.  When I found these videos, I was blown away by Lawrie’s ability to analyze the swing. 

He explains technical aspects of the swing in a way that is easy to digest, and you can just sense his enthusiasm for the game.  I soon after sought Lawrie’s opinion of my golf swing. 

I was more than impressed when I received my swing analysis back.  Lawrie clearly diagnosed and explained the critical areas where my swing could be more efficient.  He also illustrated the positions I should be in, by drawing overlays onto the video.

He then explained certain drills I could work on to achieve these positions.  Overall the video lessons I receive from Lawrie are thorough, clearly explained, and without any fluff.  I have never heard the physics of the golf swing explained better by anybody anywhere. 

Its hard to believe that somebody on the other side of the world could improve my game without ever seeing me in person.  My swing continues to evolve and change under Lawrie’s keen eye.  I am playing golf with more confidence and awareness then ever before.  He can definitely do the same for you!”

Sincerely,

Paul – Lantana Florida

So if you would like to have Lawrie help you to improve your golf technique you can visit this page www.golfconfidence.org/online-golf-lessons and go through the simple process to have Lawrie help you to play better and more confident golf.

There’s something really interesting that happens to dedicated, serious golfers as they go about developing and improving their game. At some point of time many reach a stage of progress sometimes described as “arrested development” where they essentially reach an impasse with their golf performances and stop improving.

This level has been described many ways by sports coaches such as; plateauing out, levelling out, or becoming stale etc.

Every time you come off the golf course after completing a round, your golf scores reflect your aptitude and attitude for creating your golf score. For many golfers it becomes more of a physical and psychological battle than a round of golf with their golf game taking control of them leaving them defeated, frustrated and unhappy.

I think it’s one of the most fascinating aspects of golf performance psychology because it doesn’t seem to matter what improvement strategy the golfer takes, they discover yet another way to produce less than desirable scores. In-fact over the years I have met golfers who have been in this frustrating and unsettling place for literally years.

Golfer’s that reach this arrested development level will quite often change their equipment, change their golf instructor or even change their sport in an effort to change this condition. Quite often a change in equipment or instructor might do the trick but I have found that the problem has a lot more to do with how you go about improving your game rather than simply changing a brand of golf club.

The way many advanced golfers practice tends to be based mostly on improving the golf swing performance to improve their golf scores which ends up being the limiting factor in improving their performances on the golf course.

It’s like saying that the tyres on a racing car is the only factor that determines whether the driver will win the race or not, without considering all the other performance factors in the race car, like fuel for instance. Tyres are very important on a racing car but they won’t do you much good if you run out of fuel before the end of the race.

So determining exactly what you need to work on to improve your golf scores should be you starting point. If you were going to practice your golf skills on the practice range for five hours what skills would get the most attention? In other words, how much time would you allocate to each skill set and why?

• Full Swing – Technique Training
• Full Swing – Target Training
• Putting Skills – Long and Short
• Chipping, Pitching and Lob Skills
• Sand Skills – Short and Long
• Full Swing – Trouble Shots
• Short-Game – Trouble Shots

Study the skill sets above and rate each skill set in order of its importance to you right now in improving your golf scores on the golf course. Consider the makeup of your round and determine which skills have the greatest effect on your golf scores.

When you go about improving your golf skills you need to know whether the skills that you’re focusing on will actually make a difference to your bottom line golf score. It’s not uncommon for advanced golfers to be working on the wrong golf skills, particularly when they’re in the arrested development phase.

You need to find a simple way to measure your golf skill routine to determine which of the golf skills need more of your focus. It’s not unusual to hear a golfer describe themselves as a bad putter, but is the golfer a bad putter because they are missing putts that are outside of the makeable range? What is the makeable range? Well, you will discover when you test your putting skills that you will make a high percentage of the putts you attempt from 3 feet (85-95%) of the hole and almost half as many from six feet (45-55%) of the hole and almost half as many again from ten feet (15-25%) of the hole and so on.

So the question you might need to ask yourself is this; “am I a bad putter because I’m trying to hole my putts for par from outside ten feet of the hole because I don’t realise that from this distance I would actually only make 15 to 25 percent (1 to 2 out of 10) of them?”

Should the question really be re-framed to something like this; “what percentage of my chip and pitch shots around the green finish within six feet of the hole?”

I bet you that if you get a high percentage of your chip and pitch shots within six feet of the hole that you will make more putts and your putting average will improve. This illustration is the same for other skills as well.

If you consider yourself a bad driver of the ball and you hit say 40 percent or less of the fairways that you attempt to hit when you use a driver, is it possible that by testing your driver skill on the driving range to a set of targets that are placed twenty yards apart at 200 yards that you achieve a forty percent success rate (4 out of 10 shots) with a driver and a sixty five percent success rate when you use a three wood, however when you set the targets on the range at twenty five yards apart you now can achieve sixty percent success rate with your driver.

So whenever you play a hole that has a fairway twenty yards wide at your driving distance you will take a three wood from the tee instead of your driver. If the fairway is twenty five yards wide you can confidently take your driver and swing away confidently.

By measuring your different skill sets in this manner you can accurately determine which skills need more of your attention and which need less. Every golfer uses a formula for producing their golf scores and by measuring the elements that make up your golf score you can change the formula so that you break free from your arrested development and go on to produce better and more consistent rounds of golf.

Until next time,

 

Lawrie Montague – Golf Confidence Coach

“How would you like to practice your golf skills so that there was a very high chance that you would significantly improve? It has been my experience that the majority of golfers practicing at their game do not know how to practice effectively.”

In this article I’m going to explain how to practice your golf skills for improvement. I’ll explain the key factors that influence behavioural change and the common mistakes that golfers make when practicing their golf. I’ll also describe golf ‘best practice’ techniques that you can adopt and implement into your game to improve any aspect of your performance.

So what is golf practice? Golf practice is the procedure you use for learning, developing and acquiring golf experience. We engage golf practice routines to develop, improve and master our golf skills and we do this by repeating a highly specific behaviour many times until we have a very high degree of competency and trust in it.

We do this to be able to perform a particular golf skill when it matters to us; for example hitting a high, soft pitch shot from a tight lie over a bunker to a tightly tucked pin position would require a very specific golf stroke technique that travels on a very shallow and slightly outside to inside swing path to slice the ball from its lie.

Golf practice therefore is simply the reinforcement of particular actions that help to create a specific type of result or set of results that we desire and by improving the nature of the way that you go about practicing your skills, you can in turn generate the results you seek sooner.

Regrettably when we practice golf skills incorrectly we are setting ourselves up for failure. In other words when we really need to produce a result, this will be the time that the particular shot you’re attempting to play will more than likely not come off as planned.

An example of practicing incorrectly would be to practice golf skills that you are already very competent at. Many golfers will go to the practice range with the same golf clubs and practice with them rather than practicing with clubs that they find more difficult to use and also golf shots they find difficult to play.

Best Practice
Golf ‘best practice’ can be defined as the most efficient practice method that you can use that requires the least amount of effort and is the most effective way to achieve exceptional results when performing the skill-set, based on repeatable well defined procedures that have proven themselves over time by large numbers of golfers.

Proven Practice Performance Platform
So before you begin your practice session start by deciding on the best approach for improving your golf skills. The best way to go about this is to initiate a testing and measuring protocol to accurately assess the relative performance of your golf skills currently.

Track and Measure

If you were lost somewhere you would logically look for some point of reference to help you to determine where you are relative to where you want to be. Tracking and measuring your golf skills helps you to gain the necessary clarity you need to help you to know where your skills are at the present moment so you can determine where you wish to go with them.

There is a relatively easy way to do this. Track a minimum of six rounds of golf and measure results in at least the following six categories.

1)      What is your score average against par

2)      How many tee-shots you hit into the fairway

3)      How many greens you hit with your approach shot in regulation (e.g. Hit a par 4 in two shots or a par 3 in one shot)

4)      How many putts you had for 18 holes

5)      How many bunker shots you hit onto the green and made one putt

6)      How many chip and pitch shots you hit onto the green and made one putt

Now of course you can measure many more categories with much greater detail if you like, and this will be dependent primarily on your golf skill ability. Low handicapped amateurs and professionals will measure many more categories with much greater detail to extract the information they need to develop a suitable plan for improvement.

If you are a high handicapped amateur then the abovementioned categories are a good beginning.

Forecast and Estimate

Forecasting the amount of improvement you desire is essential for developing a planned approach to your golf improvement as well as fuelling your focus and desire to improve.

Every successful golfer is motivated by performance goals and forecasting your future performances just helps you to stay on track with your improvement as well and also helps you to determine how you should get there.

Once you’ve tracked and measured the different skills that make-up a round of golf you need to estimate the amount of improvement you desire sometime in the future. If after six rounds you discovered that you hit thirty eight percent of fairways and that seventy percent of those tee-shots missed to the right, and you forecast that within six months you will hit at least forty eight percent of fairways or ten percent improvement in your tee-shot accuracy, your next step would be to decide what you need to do next.

Isolate and Prescribe

Ok here’s where the rubber meets the road. Now you need to isolate the critical element in your technique that would help you to achieve better results. Of the categories you tested and measured, and using the driving accuracy example from earlier, what specifically will you do to improve your driving accuracy?

Remember you’re looking for ten percent improvement over six months which equates to around one and half percent improvement per month.

So you need to find a method for making the golf ball travel more down the target line so you can hit more fairways.

You’ve isolated the problem that your tee-shots are travelling too often to the right of the fairway and now you need to prescribe a specific drill or training technique that will alter that situation and move you towards your ten percent improvement goal.

This is where a series of lessons with a competent and experienced golf teaching professional would make good sense as you can isolate the problem in your golf swing technique faster so you can get on with the job of improving your tee-shot accuracy.

Manage and Monitor

The final step in the process is to determine how much work (effort) you will put into your golf practice to improve your performance by around 1.5 percent each month. You will need to manage your effort and also monitor your progress continually to ensure that you remain on track with your improvement.

Managing your effort means to develop practice routines that incorporate the specific skills that you need to learn, modify or improve. When you practice your skills you will have to involve the following four practice dynamics in each practice session to influence how much improvement you will make each month.

Volume:

This is the exact amount of golf balls you will hit during each golf training session. Ideally you will break your practice volume into manageable sets of golf balls and hitting sets of ten or twenty golf shots per set makes it easy for you to stay focused, and it’s also easy to measure and manage.

Frequency:

This is the rate of recurrence of practicing a particular skill. How often do you need to practice certain skills, and when is the best time to perform the skill? Should you practice putting after hitting three sets of driver shots – probably not? Managing the frequency of your practice helps you to manage energy expenditure and focus and is critical when developing an effective practice plan.

Duration:

This is the period of time you actually invest in hitting your golf shots. The time it takes to hit sets of golf shots will vary depending on whether you’re practicing using a pre-shot routine or not. Technique practice doesn’t usually require that you use a pre-shot routine where practicing targeting skills does.

So practice duration helps you to manage the different skills you will practice and fit them into your total plan. If you know that it takes you four minutes and thirty seconds to hit ten pitch shots to a target then you can easily work out how long it will take to hit ten sets of ten pitch shots to a target which will help you to plan your practice program more carefully and effectively.

Intensity:

This is the level of focus or concentration you involve in your practice in practicing each skill. When you break your practice volume down into sets of ten golf shots and you practice the right skills at the best time, and you have worked out how many sets of shots you need to hit you will find it easier to focus on your skills and get the most out of yourself.

Focus varies depending on the importance of the practice routine however by practicing correctly you give yourself the best opportunity to practice efficiently and effectively. When you practice a skill set the key is to control what you’re paying attention to. Your responsibility is to control your eye gaze and maintain it for each and every shot.

Practicing your golf skills correctly means building a platform of strategies that support and enhance your effort to improve. It’s easy to just go out to the range and hit golf balls and hope that you will do something that makes you improve. It’s much more challenging to perform practice skills correctly by planning your strategy carefully and implementing it into your program so that the effort you put in actually leads to outcomes that you expect.

Remember to always begin with the end in mind. Decide what you want to achieve from your golf game and notice where you are with it right now. Then go to work building a bridge from where you are to where you wish to go. Take your time, really think it through and in the days, weeks and months you’ll discover the other side of improvement.

 

Until next time,

Lawrie Montague – Golf Confidence Pro