5 Steps to a Better Short Game in Golf
Find your confidence on the golf course and claim your victory over every hole with these simple short game tips. Every golfer knows a powerful and accurate drive can only get you so far. It is the often overlooked short game that sets the champions apart from the rest. Apply these tips to your strategy and watch your score go down as your confidence grows.
Gathering Your Perfect Shot Ingredients
When you crave fresh homemade bread, you don’t expect to instantly have it appear before you. Instead, you start accomplishing your goal of enjoying a delicious slice by setting out the ingredients and beginning the mixing portion of the recipe. Such ingredients need to be carefully selected for their nutritional value as well as flavor. With this winning combination of food items, you don’t expect the bread will taste bad. It may not rise properly or be as light and airy as you would like. But, you already know based on the ingredients you have chosen that this will be a tasty batch before you begin the cooking process.
The same process is important for your short game on the golf course. You need to gather high-quality ingredients to make that perfect shot like choosing the right club, gaining a solid understanding of distances and angles, and, arguably most importantly, clearly establishing a visual image of your ball going into the hole. In fact, even without the right club, your ball can still go in the hole as long as you have the right mindset. It’s like kneading your bread by hand instead of using a mixer. Would a mixer make the process a little easier? Of course. However, it isn’t necessary when you know what to do to craft a masterpiece.
Shift Your Focus at Club Selection
Speaking of making your game easier by selecting the best club for the location of your ball and the distance you have left to go to before your ball can reach the hole, there is another key ingredient you will need to make that next stroke a success – concentration. Hopefully, you are already visualizing your ball’s path into the hole from its current location. This image helps you determine the power, speed, and direction you need for this stroke to be your last for that hole. That said, without concentrating on each aspect of that visualization and replaying it in your mind until it is second nature before you approach the ball, you are essentially performing the same action as making bread from memory without first memorizing the recipe. Avoid this mistake by memorizing your recipe through intense focus on your visualization.
Change the Negative into a Positive
What if you have a negative thought process in play from your last shot that left your ball out of bounds or in a difficult position? It’s easy to say, “Shrug it off.” Then again, with a little mindset practice, it can be just as easy to turn that less than desirable position into a positive outcome. There are countless golfing stories about how the most difficult chipping, pitching or putting shot turned into the most rewarding shot of the day. Hence, when this happens and it happens to all of us, tell yourself a little off the beaten path or a bit too far past the hole just means you’ll have an exciting story to tell when you sink it in the next shot!
End Each Round with a Constructive Lesson
If golf was easy, no one would feel compelled to master it. Therefore, you cannot be hard on yourself for not playing a “perfect” round of golf. What you can do is try to find the lessons for your next round while celebrating perfecting your recipe for victory over your biggest challenges on the course.
Just as you would still eat a loaf of freshly baked bread that did not rise perfectly or does not have the texture you were after, you should hang onto the memory of the good shots you made with each challenging round of golf. Then, go back over the shots you missed in your mind with a positive and constructive mindset just as you would try to figure out what was missing in your bread recipe if you did not get the desired result. What ingredients were missing from each shot? Is there a pattern?
Look Forward to Putting New Knowledge to the Test
After the hole or round of golf Is over is where a lot of golfers lose their confidence and allow that negative energy to take its full effect on the golfer’s health, well-being, focus, and relationships. Such a mindset can take away from the joy of playing and turn a future game of golf into more of a chore instead of a fun outing. Remember, just as in golf, there are always improvements you can make to your bread recipe. But, you can still enjoy the fruits of your efforts in making your bread and discovering the changes you would like to make to the recipe in order to achieve a higher level of satisfaction from the next batch. Apply this same constructive mindset to your next golf game and watch your score go down and your confidence soar!
For more fast and effective tips and strategies that will produce the results you want both on and off the golf course, check out my upcoming affordable instructional offerings. My groundbreaking mindset techniques and tools will have an immediate impact on how you think and feel when you play the game. Best of all, each course is designed to give you more value than you’ll find in any other golf instruction program. Register today!
