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Quantum Leap

Dear Golfer,

Last month I explained that golf is particularly mentally challenging because you have so little contact with the ball.

In tennis, basketball, and volleyball, you have much more contact with the ball. Even in hockey, where players only handle the puck for approximately 14 seconds per game, there is more 'point of contact' than in golf.

When you don't interact with the ball much, it's difficult to concentrate. For most players, this leads to inconsistent performance and frustration.

You, however, can be different. By developing superior concentration, you can turn the mental challenge of golf into an advantage.

This is what Francies Ouiment did to pull off perhaps the greatest upset in golf history. Ouimet, a 20-year-old former caddy and amateur golfer, beat two of golf's greatest professional players, Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, for the 1913 U.S. Open Championship in 1913.

Ouimet was a decent player. In 1913 he won the Massachusetts Amateur and had given a good performance in the U.S. Amateur, but there was nothing to suggest his future success.

He did not plan to enter the Open that year. He had to be talked into entering by Preston Watson, president of the U.S. Golf Association.

What was remarkable about Ouimet's play was his mental concentration. Writing 15 years later, Bernard Darwin, the first great golf writer, says:

'The clear picture that remains to me is of the youthful hero playing all those last critical shots, just as if he had been playing an ordinary game.

He did not hurry; he did not linger; there was a briskness and decisiveness about every movement, and whatever he may have felt he did not betray it by as much as the movement of an eye lash.

Yet he did not play as one in a dream, as people sometimes do at supreme crises; he was entirely calm and entirely natural.'*

Mental Toughness Exercise: Turn On Your Concentration

To make a quantum leap in your game, you must learn how to build your concentration before each shot and turn it off between shots.

To improve your concentration, I suggest you play by yourself. Go early in the morning, when the course is usually empty, and do not use a scorecard.

Being alone will reduce your distractions. Without your score card, you will learn to divorce your shots from your results.

Do not try to concentrate the entire time you are golfing. Instead, wait until a few minutes before your shot to sharpen your focus.

When you prepare to hit the ball, bring your focus into the NOW. Use your pre-shot routine and practice 'turning on' your concentration before hitting. Over time, concentration will become second nature to you.

If you'd like to learn some of my best-kept secrets and techniques for being mentally tough on the golf course, then I'd recommend that you download a copy of my online book, Breakthrough Golf! Lower Your Score Now Using the Mental Secrets of Professional Athletes.

It's taken me years to learn, refine, test, and perfect all of the techniques that you'll learn in just two hours of reading.

Inside I'll teach you all the things professional athletes do to perform their best under pressure... and how to use them to lower your golf score instantly.

Just go to:

www.golfgamesecrets.com/sales/

And, if you're looking to improve your fundamentals, here is a special link to one of the best golf instructional programs on the market today. It's from one of the few pros whose coaching you can actually implement easily:

www.golfgamesecrets.com/page/how_to_break_90

I'll talk to you again soon.

Your friend,
Lisa B.

*Golf Digest, June, 1988.