The Mental Trap Every Golfer Falls Into, Explained l Mind Games l Golf Digest

One of the reasons we love golf is because the game is a blank canvas. We are given choices at every turn. And yet the abundance of options come with a downside that experts call “the paradox of choice.”

In our first episode of Mind Games, a new Golf Digest series devoted to the mental side of golf, host Sam Weinman explains how too many choices can overwhelm golfers of all levels in simple and surprising ways – from how we think about our swings, to the shots we choose to hit, and even how we segment our time.

Along with citing clear examples of where choices present challenges, Weinman also speaks to experts about ways golfers can make simpler, smarter choices and not look back.

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Writer & Host: Sam Weinman
Producer & Video Editor: Ben Walton
Executive Producer: Christian Iooss

(golf mental game, golf psychology, golf decision making, golf course strategy, golf mindset, mental side of golf, how to think on the golf course, golf confidence, paradox of choice golf, overthinking golf shots, golf regret and decision making, golf practice priorities, how to practice golf smarter, golf course management tips, how to simplify golf, why too many choices hurt your golf game, how to make better decisions on the golf course, mental tips for better golf performance, golf practice routines that actually work, golf strategy and shot selection advice, how to stop second-guessing shots in golf, best mindset for playing your best golf, simplifying your golf strategy for lower scores, how to manage your mind under pressure in golf, golf improvement, golf tips, golf practice, golf course management)

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:18 The ‘Paradox of Choice’
3:20 The More You Know, The More Baggage You Carry
5:19 Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should
6:51 Whatever Shot You’ve Chosen, That’s The Right Shot
8:09 In Defense of the ‘Stock Shot’
9:55 You Can’t Boil The Ocean
12:27 Verdict

This clip of Jordan Spe and his caddy Michael Growler is peak golf entertainment. This is so bad right now. This is a spot we’ve all been in. We’re assessing a shot, struggling to make a decision. There’s an option A and an option B. Each with pros and cons. This has to be hit so hard to go 115. Let’s just hit it right here. I don’t want to hit it. I think eight out of 10 of these are not getting this. They’re not 10 or it’s over here. I just don’t know if it makes that big a scoring difference. This is the essence of golf. Golf gives you choices. It’s part of what makes the game so fun. And it’s also what gets us into trouble. There is this phrase psychologists use for this. It’s called the paradox of choice. And it factors into a golf more than you realize. And the swing thoughts we rely on, in the shots we choose to hit, even in how we practice. It’s a paradox because it doesn’t appear to be a problem. In theory, we want more choices, right? For instance, would you rather have a ball on the fairway 20 yards off the green with multiple ways to play it or one stuck behind a tree? Of course, you want the ball on the fairway, and that shot should produce the better result. But here’s the weird part about our brains. More choices also brings more challenges. So, this video is about the paradox of choice. How often we confront it as golfers, why it trips us up, and how we can overcome it by learning to make a complicated game simpler. First, some background. The paradox of choice was coined by a psychologist named Barry Schwarz. It wasn’t about golf or even about sports. It was mostly about consumer choices. There was a famous study done about jams. Yes, jams. At a food market one day, psychologists set up a table offering 24 different flavors of jams. Then another day, they set up a table with only six different flavors. Because of the abundance of options, the 24 jam table attracted more interest. But it was the six jam table that drove way more sales. Why? Simply put, people become overwhelmed by too many choices. We think we prefer to have them, but in reality, they create more confusion and doubt. Here’s Schwarz in a TED talk. All of this choice has two effects, two negative effects on people. One effect paradoxically, is that it produces paralysis rather than liberation. With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all. The second effect is that even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from. The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose. So, how does this tie to golf? a bunch of different ways actually, but let’s start with how every golf shot begins with an element of choice and that we have time to make it. Unlike in baseball or tennis when a ball is hurtling toward you and you only have a split second to make a decision, in golf the ball is just sitting there. And if you’re like me, you usually take a moment to consider all the things you want to do. We call those swing thoughts. And according to Dr. Will Woo, a professor of motor control and learning at California State University, Long Beach, not all are created equal. Some are more effective and too many can be crippling. This is the first lesson of the paradox of choice. The more you know, the more baggage you carry. The wrong combination of swing thoughts becomes like a menu of too many options. And the internet isn’t doing us any favors. If I spend 20 minutes on my phone looking for a fix for my steep down swing, I can find 20 different swing thoughts that seem like they should help. I can think about loading my right hip and bowing my left wrist. Or I can think about keeping my chest down and over the ball through impact. The more I scroll, the more options I’m given. But which one is most important? Is there anything I’m leaving out? Like that table with 24 different jam flavors to choose from. Too many individual swing thoughts leads to a type of paralysis. Woo has actually studied how we move most efficiently. And he says our brains don’t want the most information, but rather the right information condensed effectively. The classic example is the swingfield of skipping a rock, which is really four or five moves consolidated into one. It’s quality over quantity. And when Woo measures how golfers move with that sort of focus, he’s found our bodies respond better. The skipping a rock, it’s a way, it’s a cheat code into making the information more efficient. So what happens is in the 3D kinematics, what we see is better coordination, better limb coordination, better segment coordination. So from a motion standpoint, we see sequencing that we want and we see with that timing is associated. And from a muscle activity standpoint, this is super cool is that you see you see more efficient muscle activity. That means everything is not maxed out. It’s the right amount at the right time in the right sequence. So from a physiological standpoint, all the research dependent variables, it’s like it’s overwhelming. So when it comes to what we focus on, less is more. You want a swing thought that focuses on a simple single outcome. Anything beyond that is probably doing more harm than good. But that’s just one pitfall from too many choices. Let’s go to another common challenge. There was a point where there was arguably no more talented a golfer than Phil Mickelson. And yes, that might even include Tiger Woods. He won the US Amateur and a PGA Tour event before he turned pro. And then once he was on tour, he was able to win because he could hit pretty much every shot in the book. The strange part is that when it came to major championships, this was also part of Mickelson’s problem. He could hit every shot in the book. And yet, in certain big moments in his career, Mikkelson confused the shot he could hit with the shot he should hit. The best example was likely this one in 2006. He had a one-shot lead in the US Open at Wingfoot, 210 yards from the 18th hole, but blocked out by trees. For most golfers, the choice here was simple. Just punch back to the fairway. But if anyone could thread a ball between the trees and onto the green, it was Phil Mickelson. He was the rare golfer who had a choice in this situation. But here, he made the wrong one. In going for the green, he hit a tree square and the ball carried backwards. He ended up losing the US Open by one. What this moment taught us, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Golfers like mess this up all the time. Even if the stakes are much lower, we consider a range of options for a shot. Some that shouldn’t be options at all. Maybe we pulled it off one time or we saw a video about it on YouTube. This is part of golf’s allure. There is no specific playbook. And even for chops like me, there are times when a shot works out exactly the way we want it to. But this is also our downfall because not only do we butt off more than we can chew, we also invite doubt. If you’ve learned a few different ways to play a shot, that also means you have the luxury of considering the downside of each one. So, when you are weighing a flop shot against a bump and run, you’re not only thinking about why each might work, but also why each won’t. The reason the brain hates doubt is because it can’t send your muscles the right signals. Brett McCabe is a clinical and sports psychologist who works with a number of top tour players, and he says this problem continues even at the highest level. When a golfer runs down a list of pros and cons over every shot, there’s a risk we never fully believe in our selection even after we’ve made it. But as Mabe says, the successful players work to eliminate doubt by learning to commit to the shot and blocking out everything else. You lack the conviction of the clearest decision to be made in the biggest moment, which is execution. There’s too many choices. There’s too many thoughts. You’re bouncing off and trying to prevent doubts from happening. And what happens is when you step into the shot, you lack the conviction and your mind needs a clear convicted pathway to be connected to the shot. If you don’t do that, you almost have no chance of success. So that’s why choice, doubts, noise, clutter ruin great golfers. Ultimately, what he’s saying is at some point, pick your shot and own it. Whatever shot you’ve chosen, that’s the right shot. The course strategy expert, Scott Faucet, built his decade system to help make those decisions easier. He looks at everything through percentages and wants his golfers to do the same. One of Faucet’s fundamental principles is around shot shape. He says every golfer has a stock shot, either right to left or left to right. And that’s what they should be playing, even if the shape of the hole suggests the opposite. I’ll let him explain. Let’s pretend you like drawing it. And we’ve got a backright pen. I get it that hitting a fade might look better, but your distance control for sure becomes worse, but you still on average you’re not going to hit it any closer because of worse distance control. And so by having this paradox of choice of the nine box drill, being able to hit low, medium, high, and all three shapes, fade, straight, and draw, um you’re just out there on any given shot, and you could hit anything. Faucet says we all have one type of shot that we hit better than others, and that’s what we should be focusing on. His critics will say he’s taking some of the romance out of the game by prescribing the same shot shape on every hole. The golf architecture community will say golf holes are designed to entice you into hitting different shaped shots. And for years, leading instructors have said a great golfer is the kind who can quote work it both ways. They’re all on the side of giving you choices, but Faucet says those choices come at a cost. I I think one of the most interesting things is when people say like, “I just like to be creative. I like to be an artist out here.” Can’t we do that with just still picking a target, hitting a stock shot? I mean, artistry and creativity, it’s really difficult to practice all of those shots and be really good at it. There’s just there’s just way too many shots. And I talk all the time about the Tiger 5. Um, and one of those was no-bone easy saves. It wasn’t let’s hit these amazing flop shots. It’s like, man, when I’ve got a stock chip shot, let’s not screw it up. All of this leads to our last point. This is Tiger Woods. You’ve probably heard of him, and you might have even heard of his nine box drill that is Peak Tiger Genius. When he practiced, Woods sought to master nine different shot shapes, both high and low, left and right, and everything in between. This is a Golf Digest video, by the way. And one way of looking at it is we were offering a glimpse into the inner workings of the game’s greatest player. That’s the nice way, at least. The harsher way is we were doing millions of golfers a huge disservice. Why? Well, because there’s only one Tiger Woods. And as Scott Faucet said, the rest of us are better served committing to one shot and not trying to master them all. And this is not just because Tiger Woods is more talented than you. It’s also because you probably don’t have nearly as much time to practice golf as he did. This is another paradox and it has to do with time. Play enough golf and you are faced with an endless assortment of different shots. Uphill lies, downhill eyes, chips out of heavy rough and chips off the fairway. When I go to practice, a small part of me wants to account for every possible variability I might confront in a round. That would seem to be helpful. Those choices come with an opportunity cost. If I attempt to practice all the shots I might hit, I am taking away from the time practicing the shots I probably will hit. In the tech world, they have a phrase for developing a product that doesn’t try to do too much. And this applies to golf. You can’t boil the ocean. Unlike Tiger, you can’t do it all. So, better to pick the most important skills for you and devote your energy there. This is why I always say um Tiger was one to marvel at. Maybe not one to copy, right? one to really marvel at because he’s an outlier and you don’t really you shouldn’t really copy outliers. And so that nine window drill probably good for him, but I think ruined a lot of golf careers. Let’s put it in the framework of a practice session. Say we have 90 balls, right? So what are people most likely to do with their 90 balls if they’re practicing nine windows? They would do 10 shots each. So you have 10 from each shot. Then we’ll go to the course and we’ll go, okay, how many times are you going to hit some of those shots, some of them virtually none. So, what you did was handicap yourself in terms of your practice dist distribution or the number of reps you gave yourself in practice because you’re doing the nine window drill and you only got 10 shots at your your stock shot automatically right there. Just from if we’re looking at it from a raw practice design standpoint, it’s poor practice design. So hopefully you follow the trend. Choices are our friend right up until they’re not. We know that too many swing thoughts to choose from becomes overwhelming. We know being able to play a broad range of shots might feel like an asset, but too many leads to a lack of commitment over the ball and brings in more variability than a stock shot we rely on often. And we know that as much as we might think we need to practice for all kinds of different situations, our time is better spent prioritizing what really matters. Golf is already such a complicated game. The key to surviving it maybe it’s opting for simpler whenever we can.