This presentation given to the Gateway PGA Section discusses approaches that can be taught to the club golfer to help improve their on-course performances. Techniques can be applied to life skills as well!
Thanks Andy all right we’re going to give it a couple more minutes for a few more to jump in here and we’ll get started so thanks everyone for joining us hopefully we can get through this and you guys have some lessons this afternoon our points and golf with a bonus
Day here in the Midwest yeah Logan it’s actually warmer in the midwest than it is in Los Angeles today that’s so unheard of yeah well it might snow like next week I think it was less than seven days ago we had like four or five inches on snow on the
Ground so yeah I saw some pictures of it look like perfect sledding environment yep I actually slipped and fell with my dog so alrighty we’ll go ahead and get started so I want to thank Allison for being here uh as you guys probably read on that her bio and the signups Allison
Is a dual PJ master and lpj master professional um she next year is on the 100th year of the Southern California Section she’s going to be the first female president which is a big accomplishment for her um so you know as far as her PGA status she’s well
Accomplished I would still say as a young professional and uh we’re thank her for being here but today Allison’s gonna more talk in the uh golf psychology uh she has her doctorate uh in sports psychology is that right Alison uh yes yes so she she has her doctor so she’s going to be
Presenting more um how golf psychology and strategies for Club golfers who we see every day um so she works with some Elite golfers as well but this is gonna probably more help us with who we see every day so Allison you can take it from here thank you awesome thanks so
Much Logan it is truly an honor to promote um and present to the Gateway section because I am born and raised in St Louis Missouri and um I’ll share a little bit of my my PGA background my very first golf lesson when I was seven years of age was with
Paul Montano and then as my family moved to Whitmore Country Club had lessons from Neil Hy and Russ ludloff and then my primary PGA coach from middle school up through college and Beyond um was and still is with Brian Maine who’s very close and near and dear to my family so
Um I see many familiar names on the attendee list so it’s exciting to share some information about golf Psych ology uh for the club golfer because I feel that most everyone on the call has a really great toolbox to fix slices and fix hooks but a lot of our students need
To have some more in-depth tools on how to perform and the education that I find out there for golf professionals is a little underserved when it comes to golf psychology so I love talking about this topic and just basically helping people play their best golf so let let’s get started um some of
The topics we’re going to include today are what we call in sports psychology the big five and the big five can apply to all different types of sports and so I’ve adapted a lot of the concepts for golf and golf performance one of my areas of specialty is anxiety and
Athletic traumas and so I’m going to weave that into the sport psychology because often times our students come to us with a lot of baggage and a lot of history of things that have happened on the the course and in performance that make them feel unsettled make them feel
Nervous make them feel fearful and I’ll share a little bit of how I use my psychology background to help them overcome that and also I’m going to weave within the presentation some practical tools that you can add to your toolbox so hopefully you have your notepad ready to write down some of
These strategies that you can share as a non psychotherapist with your students to help them play a bit better so I want to give you a little bit the context of how I’ve gotten to this place of golf and psychology as I mentioned born and raised in St Louis I
Go back often love seeing the PGA professionals that had an influence in my world and as I started to emerge from playing at Florida State University as a full scholarship athlete I was trying to find where do I fit into this golf world I did my fair share of what I call
Fluffing and folding in the golf shop I feel like I’ve run maybe over hundreds of golf tournaments and where I felt the most comfortable and felt like I really influenced people that I worked with was through teaching um as I mentioned the pros that worked with me Russ LOF and
Brian mne they made teaching fun they made lessons fun they made it interesting and the learning process interesting and so I wanted to bring that to my students but I wanted to go a step deeper and understand what really drove the student what things in their history day-to-day life might influence
Um their learning process and what happens on the golf course so that led me to go back to school and earn my masters and then eventually my doctorate in Clinical Psychology and I focused on Clinical Psychology because frankly we all know golfers are crazy right but I really wanted to understand some influences
Like depression and anxiety and Trauma and how that influences those students um within the state of California I became a licensed psychotherapist so what my day essentially looks like is teaching by day and then when I come home at night I run a private practice I have a variety of different athletes
That I work with I’m actually a licensed therapist for an Olympic team that practices here in Los Angeles synchronized swimming now known is Artistic swimming um what I notice with Olympians is very similar to what happens with our club golfers so as I’m teaching a coaching during the day at
Wood Ranch Golf Club as a director of instruction then I raise home at night and I run my private practice where I work with a bunch of different athletes on performance and different Avenues of performance and this has really helped me Bridge the World of Golf and psychology where it’s created a unique
Business practice for me and allowed me to uh be a national speaker and to share with my peers share some of the things that I’ve learned to help my students play a bit better when you think about yourself as a coach and the toolbox that you currently have on technology how to fix
Slices ground reaction forces increasing speed there’s so much education out there regarding how to get better as a coach in those in those disciplines but what really is there out there when it comes to some of these common issues that impact our students performances now I want you to think about this
Presentation not only for yourself as a coach with Club golfers but also as a player something that I still pride myself on is being really actively engaged in competition as a club professional I’ve played in two ppcs and seven LPGA Majors so I actually use a lot of these fundamentals and Concepts
To help me play my best but I want you to think about this presentation um sort of from that Trifecta if you still currently play you uh sharing your your ideas with your students as well so when we look at this list of the common things students might bring to us
They’re going to have Adverse Events that occur to them on the golf course embarrassing moments top shots Shanks scoring a 12 choking there’s also going to be issues with communication maybe between you and a student maybe if you coach high school teams the Dynamics that go amongst the players or college
Teams and then if you have elite players what’s the communication like between caddies and players goal setting it seems so simple that we just set a goal but there’s really a clear science on how to set goals that help us stay motivated and avoid burning out and then when you talk
To your students I bet a lot of them just go to the range and hit balls I call that exercise not really practice going to the range and having a clear intention and having a clear task that we’d want to accomplish fits within that goal setting component overthinking and
Over analysis we certainly know the um analysis the paralysis by analysis how do we help our students control their mind to think in the right way about the right things so they can play their best if we could bottle self-confidence and sell it to our students we’d all be
Millionaires but self-confidence is this thing that I feel students are constantly seeking like if I just felt more confident I could win this tournament if I just felt more confident I’d be able to play in the ladies nine holers self-confidence is actually a skill that we’re going to learn
Today conc ation we are faced with so many distractions in our common world I’m going to be vying for your focus and concentration over the next two hours super easy to check your email look at a text message shop on Amazon our students are experiencing that as well go to the
Range at 3:00 after school has let out all the high schoolers and middle schoolers are practicing and how many have their device in their hand Tik tocking instagramming listening to music so what are some of the tools that you might be able to help teach your
Students on how to improve the skill of concentration and focus handling adversity grit being able to uh swallow the tough stuff when it happens on the golf course looking at anxiety based disorders whether it’s clinical anxiety or pre-performance anxiety and then finally something that we all might be experiencing as PGA of
America golf professionals stress and work life management how do we take things that are happening in our personal life and maybe compartmentalize them and put it to the side process them so that we can be present and be available to our students in the moment
How can we play our best golf when we know that we’ve got seven lessons the next day um all of these components when you look at these common issues these are what our students are coming to us at the lesson two with not just learning how to make great
Contact we talk about that yes hey do is there anybody we need to let in and then also if anybody has any questions for Allison throughout the presentation please throw them in the chat thanks Alison yeah perfect thank you no one’s in the waiting room so we are good to go I
See we are good okay so in the big five of sports psychology these are going to be your basic fundamentals perhaps you teach grip alignment and posture on day one with a brand new student in sports psychology we talk about emotional regulation so the different emotions
That we experience in a given round U shoot sometimes the given emotions that we experience in one whole how are we as human beings able to manage this attention and concentration goal setting imagery and visualization this is sort of not taken as in-depth with a lot of
Students because it seems so easy oh yeah I just image my shot or I just mentally rehearse but there’s some fabulous science to indicate how powerful this is in improving your motor patterns but improving your OnCourse performance and then selft talk which ties into confidence the things that we
Say to oursel our self schemas and our narratives so let’s dig in like do you really know what emotions are I mean we experience them we we have them any given moment but like what really are emotions sometimes people feel emotions like happen to us but they’re actually
Created by the brain emotions are pieces of information and the Brain will create and pick the emotion that it deems that you’re supposed to feel based on the environment what’s happening in the environment and based on your history so if I know if my brain knows that in the
Past when I hit a shot to 5et I typically am going to feel happiness and joy when that happens in real life then my brain is going to say let’s run the pattern for happiness and joy let’s feel that emotion sometimes the emotion feels so automatic like anger someone cuts you
Off in traffic or you hook one out of bounds and all of a sudden anger all of a sudden races into your body but the brain is very quickly creating that emotion it’s also basically predicting what you might feel in the future so if you were to have a hole in one it’s
Going to take all that information and predict oh Allison should feel Elation and so that prediction is a little tricky because sometimes it might predict the wrong emotion when we are able to regulate and choose a different path let me explain a little bit more
What that means if we look at this cycle of emotions on the slide we have a golf shot that is created so let’s say um I top my drive okay so a top Drive is created and my brain is now going to take all the information and say wow there’s uh this
Is an LPGA Monday qualifier I’ve spent 32 years practicing the game of golf how many times have I really topped in my life not a lot and all this information says Allison should feel really angry so the brain is going to create the emotion of anger when that emotion starts moving
Through my body my conscious brain is now going to interpret the emotion so my conscious brain which tends to be more of your prefrontal cortex which is the brain part right behind your eyes this is the executive functioning area of your brain that is determining um what
Club to use how to respond to a social situation it’s basically sort of dictating um how we behave in life so my brain is going to pick up that anger emotion it’s going to say oh wow Alison is going to feel anger so let’s go ahead and make her heartbeat faster let’s
Flush her cheeks let’s have her be a little bit shaky in the hands because she’s just so so mad at what just happened so all of this now creates a behavior maybe I slam my club or I put my my club back into my bag really forcefully or maybe I turn that anger
Inward and I get really quiet and my body language changes when we look at this cycle there’s some opportunities for us to jump in and teach our students how we can interfere with that cycle so it doesn’t have to become complete we can’t really jump in front
Of the creation of the emotion because the brain is going to do that where we can jump in is in this conscious area of changing the interpretation of the emotion once anger is created in my brain I can choose to interpret it as information and I can choose to say wow
I need to be a bit more focused or maybe I should work on my breathing to make sure my nervous system is a bit calmer so that I can create a better motor pattern the next time I hit this t- shot I also have the opportunity to jump in
Between the interpretation and the physical sensation so when my body starts to have a rasing heart rate or my breathing becomes shallow I have conscious control over how to change that I can breathe slower to then influence my heart rate I can do some progressive muscle relaxation to take
The tension out of my muscles and allow me to become a little bit more relaxed certainly we spend a lot of time here before Behavior so we teach our Juniors not to throw golf clubs we teach them not to slam the club into the ground but if we’re focusing our time on the
Behavior we’re missing two critical pieces on how they can really manage the emotion the interpretation and the physical sensation now here’s an interesting fact as coaches we we have a part in our brain called the amydala it’s deep deep deep down in the center of our brain and
It’s responsible for a lot of our emotional regulation in fact it’s sort of a container for the feeling component of memories so if you think back to the birth of your first child a wedding your 21st birthday you think about those memories and all of a sudden you have
Some feelings that come up the amydala is the container for those emotions when you’re in a golf lesson your amydala can pick up the emotion of another person within 33 milliseconds and it can influence us to feel the exact same way so you might have experienced being in a
Round of golf maybe in one of your section EV ents someone’s having an awful day they’re super angry and all of a sudden that kind of bleeds and leaks into your attitude and your behavior when you’re in a golf lesson sometimes you can feel the frustration of your student maybe they’re just continually
Topping the golf no matter what Improvement strategy you provide them they’re just quite not getting it you can start to feel their frustration as well and that’s going to be from the power of the amydala so aerified greens we’ve all experienced that we tend to airify here in uh the
Springtime so if I was a little guy and I’m on aerified greens and I make a putt I’m going to feel like a rock star and of course if we make a close putt we naturally as human beings want to challenge ourselves so let’s say we put
The golf ball just a little farther away and we try again but oh how many times have you ended up farther away than what you’ve started this is a perfect example of the inability to regulate emotions hopefully you’re not experiencing this behavior on your aerified greens where we’re throwing a
Temper tantrum but I think this is a very cute and interesting perspective perspective on how we experience emotions as human beings and as adults we have a better tool box to regulate those emotions but as a young individual they experience the emotion and have little capacity to control that emotional and the
Behavior so one of the most common emotions and experiences that my students will talk to me about is pre-performance anxiety nervousness and anxiety in general anxiety and nerves are actually two different things um anxiety is going to be more of the clinical biological component of the experience and nervousness is going to
Be more of the psychological experience so what really is anxiety and nerves well it is your brain’s ability to protect you we have what’s called a fight flight and freeze mechanism and it helps keep you you safe we go back to prehistoric times and it’s a saber-tooth
Tiger running after you and you trying to find cover so that you survive it’s your ability to learn after you’ve touched a hot stove wow that really hurt I’m going to learn from this and not touch a hot stove again these experiences throughout your day will help try to keep you living in
Perpetuity so that mechanism though has a couple of choices you can fight what’s exper what you’re experiencing you can run away which we call flight or you can shut down which is called Freeze you want to be able to ask your students when they’re experiencing anxiety or
Nervousness what does this look like in you if you could describe what the experience is like what adjectives would you write down when does it start is it a day before the tournament is it walking to the first tea is it a week before the event I remember
Playing in my first LPGA Tour major was called the Wegman’s LPGA championship at the time I started feeling nervous like two to three weeks ahead of time because my mind was going into all of the what ifs what might happen what does this look like so we call that pre-performance anxiety before the
Performance happens if you’re experiencing that nervousness that uncomfortableness we call that performance if it’s happening in the middle of performance such as you’re just having a bomb round you’ve got eight birdies on the car this is going to be your career low and you’re playing in the section Championship qualifying
For PPC and you’ve got three holes left you might start to feel some performance anxiety so you want to ask your students what does this look like when does it start if you could describe it through the physical senses and the psychological senses draw me a picture of what that’s like
And it’s important for us to talk about pressure because a lot of our students particularly high schoolers and middle schoolers may be feeling tons of pressure internal and external external pressure might be their parents wanting them to play in a certain amount of agga events to earn stars or they want them
To go to this particular College they might want uh to get a 32 on the act so they get the bright flight scholarship there’s all these different pressures that a student could perceive and then we have internal pressure wanting to do the best for you putting pressure on
Yourself to win events score low hit great shots in front of your friends the interesting about pressure interesting thing about pressure is that there really is no such thing as pressure on you of course we have air that’s pushing on us but when we think about pressure it’s really
Expectations if we could change that word pressure and talk about expectations that could feel a little bit different so the expectations that I set for myself or a parent sets for their junior can tend to create some of this anxiety and pre-performance anxiety where does by uh anxiety really
Come from well we have some biological situations we have some situational and we have some conditioned situations biological would be um my neurochemistry creates anx and some people are born that way we have situational like I might be nervous every time I have a three-foot putt because I have a history
Of missing three-foot putts we have conditions such as I might go into a tournament with no fear at all when I’m seven years old but over time I might learn as I’m a teenager or an adult tournaments are scary tournaments are uncomfortable because I’m not performing
The way that I would like to what’s interesting about anxiety is that it’s not dangerous there ‘s no record in the world of someone actually dying from anxiety or a panic attack it doesn’t happen it feels like you’re going to die it feels like it’s dangerous but you
Actually will never die from a panic attack in fact the science of a panic attack or an anxiety moment is about 20 minutes from start to finish which is really interesting because for those that take medication for panic disorder the medication doesn’t kick in till about 20 minutes after they’ve
Taken it very interesting with that where are some of the sources well we have a particular skill set and then we have an expectation from the environment so let’s say I’m a 15 handicapper and all of a sudden I get paired into a proam where there’s no net event so I’m
Now having to count my growth score that environment is demanding more from my skill set than what I’m able to bring that can create anxiety the the history of our failures and embarrassment the fear of the unknown as I mentioned what might happen or me thinking into the
Future what this tournament might look like and then a big one for our club golfers can be performing in front of others I hear this a lot from higher handicappers and particularly some of the women students that I teach is hitting a poor shot in front of a friend
Or hitting a poor shot in front of a a women’s group when the anxiety and the panic become too overwhelming for the brain and the nervous system it can lead to choking which is performing much more poorly than you would given your skill set um I remember playing in a golf
Tournament and having a pretty fair round and all of a sudden I hooked one out of bounds and the anxiety started to fill me and I hooked my neck shot out of bounds and I hooked my third one out of bounds and all of a sudden you’re
Standing on the tea box and you’re like I don’t know what to do like how do I just keep this on the golf course I finished with a 12 on that particular hole I was able to use some emotional regulation tools to sort of decompress
After that and then I was able to birdy the next hole so I had a nice bounceback effect but that choking moment performing much more poorly than I would ever expect myself that can create sort of some Scar Tissue within our mind some of the physical sensations of
Anxiety that your students might talk to you about or what you might experience could be muscle tightness or shaking trembling of those muscles we might even see that exacerbate into some Yips erratic Rhythm where all of a sudden the tempo is like oh I was way too fast on
That swing or I rushed transition over time being in an anxious State creates fatigue and tiredness because your nervous system is amped up running on high of course shallow breathing and a rapid heart wrath almost creates a little bit of a hyperventilation type experience you’re not getting enough oxygen in the
Exchange of CO2 isn’t being created all of a sudden the heart is trying to pump faster the psychological symptoms of anxiety are the feeling of overwhelm Panic I’m fearful I’m worrying about the future I’m worrying about what happened in the past I’m worrying about what might occur now and just feeling that rushed
Sensation like I need to hurry to the my my ball maybe I’m holding my group back these are some of the things that your students will sneak into their conversations with you and if you have a fine-tuned ear you start picking up on these words you can sense that they
Might be experiencing some anxiety so what do we do with this this is the F first tool to add into your toolbox is to develop with your students a self-awareness of what the emotion feels like how does it show up in you I have an emotion chart that has a little
Over like 880 or 90 emotions and they’re categorized by themes and I’ll pull that up on the screen as I’m working with a student and I’m like look at all these choices of emotions that you could experience can you name it can you describe where it’s at can you describe when this
Happens and we notice that a lot of our students tend to stick to the core five emotions of like sadness happiness um Joy depression anxiety once we develop a self-awareness of what the emotion looks like in you what does anger look look like in you
Now we can do something with it we can decrease physical tension we can decrease and regulate your heart rate you are always in control of your heart rate and that is through your breath finally we need to psychologically reframe what the emotion means to us so
What does anger mean to me does it mean that I’m not good enough does it mean that I didn’t practice as much does it mean that I set an expectation for myself and I’m disappointed that I haven’t met that in order to regulate the emotion we can use this five-step process to really
Contain it and I put up there anger is one letter away from danger because I find that a lot of students will experience either happiness frustration anxiety or anger those are like the top four that a lot of my students will talk to me about and anger when is when that
Student is trying to do something and they just can’t quite get it or they have an expectation that they should be doing something and that word should is so detrimental so anger is just that one letter away from danger because if you are in an anger State you’re going to tend to
Underperform whatever emotion you’re experiencing the first step is to locate where that emotion is being sensed and felt in your body so if we take anger for a moment where would you feel anger in your body if you hooked one out of bounds on the first T of your section
Championship some people might feel anger in their jaw in their chest in their throat in their shoulders so locate where it is in your body the next step is try to identify a color that best represents the emotion that you’re experiencing so with anger we might pick
A red red and orange maybe a spectrum of red and orange once we have a color assigned to it now put a shape to it what would this emotion represent in terms of a shape could it be like a spiky amoeba could it be something with triangles something that’s
Rectangular so we have a location a color in a shape now we’re going to name it you can certainly name it the emotion anger or you can come up with a a silly name I’ve had a student who just named it shank because they were so upset
Every time they hle shanked it so once you have a name location color and a shape you can actually do something with it you have this mental image of where this thing is located it’s not just happening to you you are now in control you own it by breathing it out of your
Body so by using some imagery when you have this red triangle that I’m going to call anger that’s hanging out in my chest I can imagine using some slow breaths to push it out and have it exhale through my mouth and through my nose when you get really good at this
You can do these steps very very quickly and it can help you in situations outside of coaching Golf and performing in golf someone cuts you off in traffic later today and maybe you just want to throw up the middle finger and slam on the horn because I can’t believe that
Person cut me off find where it is in your body color it shape it name it do something with it maybe you’re having a really tough day at work and your boss has said something and put some more responsibilities on you and it just makes you feel really belittled and
Really small and frustrated before you say something or you type that nasty email use this process to help you compose yourself and find control over the emotion you’re experiencing another tool to add to your toolbox is controlling your breath and in this systematic way we call this box
Breathing so with this image we see that we can breathe in for 4 seconds hold for 4 seconds exhale for four hold again for four so while you’re sitting at your your desks let’s go ahead and try this together we’re going to breathe in for four hold for four exhale hold for
Four it’s pretty amazing how quickly you can compose yourself you can create that interference before saying something that you put your foot in your mouth or saying something you regret I’ve certainly used this when I’ve been in maybe a conflicting conversation and I just want to attack because I’m so angry
Because things aren’t Fair things aren’t right and so using this just allows me an opportunity to compose that emotion and then to think a bit more clearly I’ll share with this um kind of an interesting brain model that shows when we become overwhelmed how we have an inability to think clearly so this
Could be a bad shot on the golf course and you try to hit the hero shot or you rush through your pre-shot routine so you can just get it back out into play so I’m going to use my hand as an example so if we look at this in terms
Of a brain model my wrist going into my hand is going to represent the spinal cord going into the brain if I tuck my thumb inside my palm this is going to represent the limic system which is your emotional control House of your brain my thumbnail is going to represent the
Amydala that is that emotional container that we talked about when I wrap my fingers over my thumb we create a cortex that’s all the wrinkly part of your brain and you’ll notice that the lyic system is deep down in the middle of that brain well the cortex is responsible for interpreting what’s
Happening in the outside world making decisions and when I turn my brain to the side the front of my Knuckles here that’s that prefrontal cortex that we mentioned in the beginning that’s the executive functioning system that helps me pick the right club that helps me put
The ball back in my stance when I want to hit it low into the wind when something happens that overwhelms our nervous system and exceeds our capacity to cope in the moment we essentially become overwhelmed and we flip our lid when we flip our lid we put our foot in
Our mouth we say the wrong things we make the wrong choices on the golf course we make a bunch of mistakes because we’re not thinking clearly the emotional component of the experience is so overwhelming our conscious brain can’t gain control except we use box breathing or we use that emotional
Regulation technique it creates the interference to allow us to be able to think a bit more clearly now back in 2020 when we were all experiencing a little bit of lockdown and some covid the Master’s tournament was impacted and it was pushed back to like October November of
That particular year and it was kind of interesting to watch The Master’s tournament later on in the year because the colors of the trees were all different and lo and behold tiger gets to play and I remember watching on Sunday afternoon um watching him play and playing pretty good I think he was
Like three under going into 13 and then some of you may remember that this happened so we have the notorious 13 first shot hits the green rolls back in we see that a lot so not necessarily a big deal but now we have shot number two little too much
Backspin and now goes into the water once again compilation skips over the third shot but the third shot goes over Into the Bunker hits it too long into the water again want you to notice how tiger composes himself no Club slamming there’s no body language to indicate oh
My gosh I suck very calm cool and collected we know inside I’m sure he’s very upset but just sort of notice the care and diligence even tapping in this small putt walking around people’s lines even having the time to tap down some spike Marks here in a moment he
Finished with a 10 it was the biggest number I had ever seen uh tiger make live on TV if you recall what happened in the next several holes he went on a birdie train so having a ten on one particular hole composing himself with maturity professionalism and some of
These tools we know that his um mother had a very Eastern influence into his spirituality and his upbringing for his mindset he was able to bounce back and go on on a birdie streak there to finish with pretty respectable score for having a 10 so with that being said we think
About all the different things that can happen on the golf course I’m curious when you think about your performance over the course of your career have you ever experienced a distressing memory about a failure on the golf course have you ever experienced a dream about that failed performance or a bad
Hole of it happening again have you ever had a flashback like an image that just pops into your mind unexpectedly at a time that you’re not really anticipating it occurring about that porot or a sense of it happening again have you ever experienced anxiety or nervousness when being in a similar
Situation as a failed performance I know that when I played in my second KPMG and my third KPMG I felt very similar with the amount of anxiety about what I was going to go through intrusive thoughts or negative feelings about a poor shot or a failed competition have you ever tried to avoid
The memory or the thought or the Feeling by doing something else to cope some people might like excessively talk on the golf course or they might smoke or they might drink to Tred to avoid the feeling of the thing that had happened to them maybe you just avoided the
Situation that reminded you of the failed performance like I’m not going to go to that Golf Course ever again I’m never playing that Golf Course again I’m never going to play in that tournament again what’s interesting is this is actually the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder Disorder so if an
Individual met five or more of these components from a clinical situation we would call that PTSD but isn’t this interesting that all of us as golf pros have experienced at least one or two of these components on the golf course maybe in life so we think about the severity of
What our students have gone through and we can’t just coach them out of it by fixing their slice we can’t just coach them out of it by teaching them how to rotate more we really need to look at the students from an inside out perspective and understand their situation on a deeper
Level when we have these situations that exper that we experience on the golf course they can look like physical and emotional traumas we call I call them golf traumas we might have the physical components such as like a wrist finger or a hand injury shoulders and backs we can have interpretations of hurtful
Comments from coaches parents and mentors I remember I use this example I remember working with um a top 100 coach and I was trying to play a bit better in my major tour experiences because it’s such a big stage and super super nice guy and I was like really eager to get
Some insight and some consultation on how I could play better and at the end of the lesson he’s like you know your your swing is a lot like Jennifer’s song and I was like it’s kind of interesting some of you might be like who’s Jennifer song she probably like
250th on the money list so we’re basically like not in contention on the LPGA Tour and we don’t have a tour card and I was like oh what do you what do you mean by that and he said well it’s it’s great that you’ve gotten this far with that
Swing and so from the outside it might be like okay that’s kind of a compliment in a way you’ve gotten this far with that swing but in a way it was a major major dagger to my heart to be like I’ve gotten this far with that swing maybe
I’m not good enough maybe my swing isn’t good enough and that created a little bit of scar tissue for me in my belief system so we want to be super careful about the comments that we make to our students because they may interpret them as being hurtful which could be an
Emotional trauma for them hitting shots that are egregiously offline I’ve had clients that have hit a shank and it’s been so egregious where it almost hit another person or it did hit another person and they become so fearful of having to be in that situation again choking on the final
Hole of a very important tournament I remember being in the Missouri high school state championship it was my senior year there was a lot of conversation about you know Allison has a good chance of winning and I was winning on the last round of the last
Day and I got to the 18th hole and double bogied to finish in second place that would be a choking moment that was important to me that created some golf trauma and for players shooting a higher than usual score after a really solid round so are players that go 70 the
First day 85 the next day these experiences from a physical and an emotional way can be really detrimental to a player and it can start to accumulate over time where it creates performance barriers the brain is certainly capable of process seeing stressful life events it does so every single day you might be
Stressed at work you talk it out when you walk your dog at night you feel better about situation the next day you learn from it you have a nice day however there are certain times where a traumatic event whether it’s in Life or in the golf course is so
Overwhelming for the nervous system that it essentially becomes stuck in your brain and that stuck memory is what triggers us and creates a physical reaction in present time when you think about PTSD and some of our maybe PGA hope veterans they’ve served in war and maybe the backfiring of a car or the
Slamming of a car door creates a like impulse a reaction to that sound that is a PTSD response if I have hit a shank in a tournament that was so embarrassing and so overwhelming for my nervous system and that trauma memory becomes stuck when I now get into a like or
Similar situation my body is going to respond the exact same way as what it did in the trauma now of course there’s tons of events that occur on the golf course that are embarrassing and you’d like to forget and you don’t seem to respond that way that’s good that means
That your brain has processed it in a productive way but there are those rare moments where those embarrassing moments become too overwhelming for the brain process most of our memory is stored in short-term memory for about 30 seconds and if your brain deems it as being important you’ll store it in long-term
Memory if your brain is like I don’t need to remember that I buttered my toast this morning for breakfast then my brain can go ahead and discard it our perception of the importance of golf events is what we attune to so if I had 72 shots in a particular ular round and
One duck hook I may fail to remember my 71 awesome shots and attune all of my attention to that one duck hook because it created a bigger emotional experience because of the negativity of the brain wanting to hold on to that experience to try to protect me to avoid it from ever
Happening again these memories are created from all five senses what we see what we felt what we heard what we tasted all in that moment and our body is going to try to store this memory to learn from it to protect me from it ever happening again but what’s interesting is when it’s
Trying to protect me from happening again I just continue to manifest it happening again so it’s like I don’t hit it in the water don’t hit it in the water don’t hit it in the water where do you hit it in the water it’s what our brain attunes
To we also hold on to our physical and our emotional trauma in the same way the brain cannot differentiate between the two so the words that were said to me that perhaps hurt my feelings that’s going to be experienced in the same way as if I sprained my ankle while I was um
Running in a canyon so our brain holds the fear and the scariness of that in a very similar way you can get a sense of where your student is at in their experience of emotion and Trauma based on some of the things that they say and how their
Nervous system is regulating itself so we have parasympathetic and sympathetic um systems within our nervous system and we sort of say parasympathetic is rest and digest it’s you getting enough recovery sleeping enough feeling like you’re making gains and progress not feeling fatigue after a workout or having an intense practice session you
Feel rested you feel alert you feel in a good place so that’s when the nervous system is really lowkey and very mild when we add in a little bit of attention and focus we’re now in what’s called a flow State when you’re completely engaged in the moment when
You’re in an Optimal Performance place when time either passes slowly or fast but you’re completely engaged and little disruptions may not interfere with you your students may say like I’ve got this I’m really prepared I’m ready to go I’m excited to compete if the nervous system becomes a
Little bit more disregulated and a little too overwhelming we might start to Teeter into this fight or flight response we can still adequately perform here but you may hear some things from your students like feel like I just can’t perform well anymore or I’m just
God I’m so mad that my coach didn’t put me into the lineup or my swing coach just isn’t listening to me when I’m telling him that I just want to stop hooking the golf ball I just don’t know if I can do this anymore but you can
Still perform in an okay place here when the nervous system becomes so overwhelmed and we have these continual Perpetual experiences I just seem to always fail in every tournament I just seem to never be able to hit this shot straight this is going to be tapping into the sympathetic nervous system
Where we are freezing we’re experiencing Yips might call it bulks you’ve heard of Rick ankel from the St Louis Cardinals who couldn’t throw a pitch anymore and had to reinvent himself as an outfielder because he essentially had pitching Yips the student might feel just tired all the time demotivated they’re just going
Through the motions and they might also have a high experience of injuries when you can take these statements and start to attune to your student and what they’re telling you you can understand and start to predict what their nervous system is experiencing and then help them be able
To cope with some of those experiences so if you don’t really have a concept of what athletic traumas look like yet or golf traumas I should say I’ve created a little bit of a compilation some of the PGA Tour and LPGA Tour moments of what a golf trauma
Could look like you had a bad day going down you sing a sad song just to turn it around you say you don’t know you tell me don’t lie you working a smile and you go for a ride you have a bad day the camera don’t lie you coming back down
And you really don’t mind you had a bad day you had a bad day Marcus Russ hey you you trying to Call a blue sky Hol day the point is they laugh at what you say and I don’t need no care and you had a bad day you take a one down you sing a sad song just to turn it around you said you don’t move you tell
Me don’t Li you work a smile and you go for a ride you had a bad day the C don’t lie you come the back down and you really don’t mind you have a b Day sometimes the system goes on theing and the whole thing turns out you might not make it B and you know that you could be well but strong and I’m not wrong so where was the passion you needed the most oh you and I You so we see quite a mix of different responses to those experiences some of those players kind of laughed it off we see Jason day at the end like can’t believe I just did that probably recovered quite nicely and then we look at Jordan spe and his experience on
13 and at the Masters and what happened in that particular year when he was leading the tournament and had a big number and then you look at his results on that particular hole the next year and the same exact thing happened so certainly there was some scar tissue and
Some traum that was experienced there within the field of golf trauma before we get into attention and concentration you’ve got some tools that you can start to share with your students in terms of regulating emotions and breathing from a clinical aspect a lot of the clients
That I work with they’ll come to see me for a technique that I’m trained in called EMDR which is eye movement des sensit and reprocessing and it essentially helps the brain unstuck the memory the traumatic memory so that the student doesn’t have have to feel uh that physiological response in the
Moment something that has happened maybe 15 20 years ago that’s still resonating in someone’s Mind through EMDR I can help them overcome that and one of the studies that I’ve published is looking at two LPGA professional golfers their perceived traumas and their level of confidence and anxiety pre-treatment and
Post treatment with the MDR and how their anxiety decreased and how their confidence increased after they were able to overcome that trauma through that psychological technique okay so now as we move into attention and concentration again I have been holding hopefully your attention for the past 54 minutes and knowing that
There’s a lot of distractions that come into your world at any given time how are we able to focus on the right thing at the right time we have so many visual obstacles on the golf course with water out of bounds bunkers trees we have our playing partners and competitors I
Remember working with a student who was very sensitive to sound and anytime any of the women in her group made a sound like a iron touched another iron or there was a little bit of rattling um digging into a golf bag she just completely freaked out so we have to
Deal with the noises from our playing partners and competitors crowds and Spectators standing on the first te at a major tournament seeing Grand stands TV cameras the Fairway looks of about this big because it’s lined with people and you just hope that you don’t hit any one of those that becomes an intention
Hijacker of course the experience of emotion anxiety and nervousness that can hijack our attention and then sounds and we’ll talk a little bit about music so I ask my students like where are you are you in the future are you thinking ahead two or three holes from
Now are you in the past thinking about the three putt that you just had or the three birdie putts that you made that you should have made mindfulness is doing one thing at one time and knowing that you’re doing it and that is one of the antidotes to attention and concentration
Deficits I’ll say the definition again because I find it so valuable mindfulness is doing one thing at one time and knowing that you’re doing it it means when you took a shower this morning and you were under warm water and you had all these wonderful scents of soap you were thinking about what
Time you need to jump on the seminar you’re thinking what’s my lesson book look like this afternoon what emails do I have to shoot out and what am I going to eat for breakfast that’s doing like five things at once or when you’re eating dinner tonight and you’re watching Netflix and
You’re talking to your spouse and your family and you’re checking in and you’re eating while you’re on Instagram that’s five things at once that’s what a lot of our society does now is we multitask and we think that we’re so so successful at multitasking but really we absolutely
Suck at it because when you multitask you are half-assing all the pieces that you’re engaged in so when your student is listening to music or a podcast and practicing and working on some motor patterns they’re being distracted in all those different components they’re not listening to the podcast they’re not
Focusing on the motor pattern and they’re not engaged in the practice so we want to ask our students where is your attention when you’re practicing or when you’re on the golf course how do you how engaged do you feel so I’m going to test your attention and concentration
Right now this is called The Monkey Business illusion there’ll be some directions that appear on the screen so you’re looking for players in white and how many times they pass a ball okay so in your chat box right now be able to see who’s paying attention I
Want you to write down in the chat type in the number how many times the players in white passed the ball we’ve got 18 16 16 16 14 16 and a 17 pretty good well I have to give it up to my coach Brian M and my friend Barbara for being attentive the
Answer is 16 however did any of you see the monkey or the gorilla that passed through and did any of you see the curtain in the background changing colors so as we review it again so there’s the gorilla we see a red curtain changing to Orange and then changing to a yellowish
Gold so what’s interesting about this is when you are someone who can engage in one thing at one time and you can be singularly focused you get the answer of 16 you don’t see the gorilla you don’t see the curtain change you have a higher opportunity to get into flow States
Because you have that capacity to be engaged and Amed in one thing if you maybe miscounted and you saw the gorilla and you were distracted and the curtain changing you’re taking in a lot of sensory input and in a way that can be good for coaching because we don’t want
To maybe necessarily get so fixated on Club face we want to see how the body is responding to Club face or how the shaft movement is related to weight shift and pressure shifting you might be looking at multiple things at once however when you’re performing and you’re trying to
Get into a flow State being able to go from a broad attention to a very narrow attention allows you to access that flow State and to be attuned and focused in the moment some ways for us to build the skill of attention and concentration can
Come from Hue words so we might come up with a mantra or a one-word inspirational statement that allows us to get back into the present moment we certainly know when we’re playing around of golf you don’t have to concentrate the entire 4 hours 4 and 1 half hours that is nearly impossible we
Know science tells us that particularly in a learning environment like right now I’m going to get about 20 minutes of good concentration from you and then you’re going to start to fatigue and Teeter out that’s why attention breaks are very helpful if I were to use a word
Or a q word to bring me back into the present moment I can then snap myself back in to being focused one of the words I like to use a lot is wi w n and that stands for me what’s important now so if I’m finding myself becoming
Distracted either in a lesson or when I’m on the golf course when I say the word when it’s asking my brain a question to say what’s important right now let’s get back into the present moment developing effective routines allows our nervous system to be comfortable and calm that’s why pre-shot
And post shot routines are absolutely helpful think about your morning routine today you got up you brushed your teeth probably at a particular um sequence you took a shower you maybe used the restroom then you sh U then you got ready for the day in terms of clothing
Then maybe you ate breakfast you typically have a morning routine if you were to skip a step and you’re like oh shoot I forgot deodorant today it kind of throws you off your Vibe and your energy for the rest of of of the day when you develop an effective routine it
Allows your nervous system to feel calm collected and helps you focus teaching a pre-shot routine that has the same steps over and over allows the individual to feel um prepared to hit the shot I’ll provide an example one one time I was asked to be on Golf Channel live with
Susie wayy um when I was at one of the kpmg’s and showing up at 6:00 a.m. we go live at 6 15 and they throw at me we’re going to talk about hybrids from the rough Bluegrass rough that was probably 4 and 1 half inches deep no practice
Swings at all live TV ball goes in the rough four hybrid in the hand let’s talk about how to hit this and then Susie throws one in there okay Allison let’s show us and in that moment I instantly went into pre-shot routine I stood behind I did what I normally do and was
Able to successfully hit the shot the routine allowed me to be attentive and focused when the task was presented to me as I mentioned take attention breaks if your students are going to have giant practice sessions or our high schoolers or middle schoolers are like yeah I’m
Going to practice for three hours on Saturday you need to make sure that they take attention breaks because when the attention starts to falter the swing pattern is going to falter it’s going to become a little bit more lacad isical and inattentive so have them go 20 on 10 off
20 minutes on 10 minutes go get a drink of water go to the restroom rehydrate uh look at your phone if you need to take a break keep in mind though there is distraction residue so when you do take that break it’s going to get a little bit challenging to get back into
That flow State because you’re going to have to re-engage yourself but you can do so through with a q word we want to make sure that we are redirecting our attention through mindfulness our attention is constantly going to be attracted to many things trees shiny object wind water how do I
Go from broad to narrow and we ask ourselves what’s important right now what am I feeling right now what’s the grip feel like in my hand what’s the feet feel like in the on the on the ground can I feel the wind direction on my cheeks one of the questions that I saw
In the chat is what are some other ways besides uh mindfulness to uh besides meditation what are some mindfulness techniques that you use with golfer mindfulness is just attention and it is knowing that you’re doing a particular thing so I’ll have them do a 543 2 1 exercise name five
Things that you see in your environment name four things that you hear in your environment name three things that you feel in your environment two things that you can smell and one thing that you can taste B you’re moving your attention on command to the thing that you want to pay attention
To and again we want to avoid multitasking sometimes we can’t do it look I’m the queen of driving uh to and from work and completing conference calls it’s doing two things at once it’s driving and it’s communicating so there’s going to be sometimes that we just can’t avoid multitasking but when
It comes to motor learning when it comes to practice we want to be as engaged and um in tune to the thing that we’re doing in the moment as best as we can so our next our third component of the big five is looking at goal setting
All of you are setting goals with your facility maybe their revenue goals maybe their tournament participation goals when we’ look at our performance are your students setting yearly goals what do they want to accomplish by December 24 what do they want to accomplish in the first quarter how do you break that
Down into to small segments I’m sort of a nerd when it comes to goal setting I really strive it makes me feel comfortable when I set goals so at the beginning of the year I have a notebook I write down all the things that I want to accomplish and then I start breaking
It down segment by segment what can I do every day what can I do every hour that can help me get one step closer to that goal and then I have that long range picture what do I want life to look like and Golf to look like when I’m 50 when I’m
60 if we don’t have goals then we increase the chances of what’s called burnout it’s that state of mental and physical exhaustion due to prolonged stress and that prolonged stress can come from not having a picture in mind of where you want to be I consider goal setting more
Of a road map it’s what you’re going to follow for your success and even if a student goes to the range to practice practice for 60 minutes if they don’t have a goal they have no idea what they’re doing they’re just swinging they’re just hitting balls I call that
Exercise not practice so I encourage my students let’s have a goal for that particular practice session what are you going to walk away feeling like you have accomplished better sometimes we need to get so specific that I request them to write that goal on a Post-It note pin it
To the mat or Pin It to the Ground so every time they want to look at um what their lead wrist is doing at the top whether it’s CED or whether it’s flexed but they’re really working on rotation and pressure shift boom that Post-It note is on the ground reminding
Them Allison wants me to stay on task with this particular Concept in mind that’s my goal we want to use some smart features or some of you might be familiar with smarter goal setting it’s specific it’s measurable it’s attainable it’s relevant it’s time bound when you’re student
Comes with a lesson te and says I want to get better what does better mean let’s break it down how do we measure it is it handicap based is it Strokes gained based is it scoring average green hidden reg Fairways hit we want to be able to look at the ability to measure
It it’s so simple when we think to Fitness and Nutrition I step on a scale I can measure my weight I can track my calories in I can track my calories out we have a goal we have a plan in golf it can be hard for our students
Because they’re not quite sure how to measure practice so you as a coach want to build in some games some challenges to have them be able to measure their progress if they’re doing a driving accuracy game on Tuesday of this week what is it going to look like two weeks
From now and did they get any better our students will tend and sometimes us as as Pros will tend to fixate on outcome goals that’s the end result of performance I myself have found myself getting too caught up in outcome that is making a cut finishing in first place earning the trophy the
Problem is it’s only partially controlled by us as the golfer I can’t control the cut line I can’t control what other players do on the golf course so then we can look at some types of goals that are a little bit more achievable for me to control and that’s
Performance goals this is a specific standard of performance that we can measure such as numbers of Fairways hit greens and red up and downs putt proximity bunker saves and I encourage my students to use a variety of stat tracking apps um I prefer decade and I will input my recreational
Rounds and my competitive rounds into the system and then I’ll set some goals hey in the next 60 days I really need to look at my Strokes gained for putting right now process goal is where we can really shine because this focuses on specific actions to become successful this is the
The day-to-day the moment by moment things that you can actually do to perform better so a process goal could be adding in a box breathing breath before I hit every single shot now the outcome is a successful shot I can’t necessarily control that I remember seeing Pat Hurst one time in a
In LPGA major event hit an awesome drive it randomly struck in the middle of the Fairway on a sprinkler head and it kicked straight into the hazard she can’t control that outcome she did everything possible to hit a great shot things are just out of her control when
It comes to the outcome in terms of process what we can control is our Behavior our actions um our approaches to how we hit things how we hit our shots so look looking at either adding in breaths um practice habits attention and focus strive and move your students
More towards process oriented goals and I layer them outcome performance and process for a very specific reason because outcome is sort of like the umbrella this is where I’d like to go to Performance would be some ways for us to measure it process is what I can actually
Do in terms of goal setting Styles a lot of our students focus on success oriented this is our social comparison to others I played better than this person I’m number one on the team the problem with success oriented goals is it causes us to choose less challenging
Goals because we want to be successful why would I want to set a goal when I’m probably not going to achieve it when I’m going to fail well if we focus on performance oriented goals this is setting goals that are relev uh relevant to me me comparing myself to me what’s
My Strokes gained in putting in 24 versus 23 what does my swing shape look like now compared to five years ago has my up and down percentage changed with the best version of when I’ve played compared to presently so it’s less concerned with judgments of success and
More on am I making Improvement it’s a little bit of some growth minded mindset in that as well is always seeking to be better some ways for you to build in the goal setting with your students is to create drills that have um a lad component to them so that the difficulty
Of the drill continues to increase once you’ve accomplished a task so let’s say you’re playing uh an example I’ll do for putting is five holes you have to putt a three foot a 6ot and a 9ot putt per hole in any order and so if you were to make
All putts you’d earn 15 points so I have my students first try to accomplish eight points or better once they accomplish eight okay let’s see if we can get 10 points the next time we T try the drill the tour average on that particular game is 11 and 12 so if they
Can play that 369 game and score an 11 or a 12 then they’re seeing quite a bit of progress in their putting latter increments we certainly have done this in putting where you’ve got a 3-footer four-footer 5f footer six-footer and you kind of attain success in latter increments this is
Really great for younger populations or operation 36 is fantastic where you start students close to the green have them experience success and then you move them farther away looking at repetition Automation and then challenge if I’m changing something in my motor pattern in my
Swing I need to do it a lot to feel the actual change and I need to do it a lot so that it becomes automatic so I don’t think about it anymore because I certainly don’t want to think on the golf course because what we say is when
You think you stink if you’re overthinking you’re overanalyzing how to move the club it’s going to create a blockage into your Automation and it’s going to be more challenging to swing the golf club so when we’re looking at goal setting in terms of a player development program you put a lot of
Repetition up at the front of their learning plan then it starts to phase into automation we take away some of that thinking now we start to add in challenge we want to make sure that they’re feeling shots Under Pressure that they have about a 70% success rate
30% fail rate that fail rate is very important I help my younger students build their tournament program around 70% of the tournaments they have a really good chance of winning and 30% they have no chance in heck of winning because they need to learn how to come
Back and bounce back and build adversity so you want to build in a little bit of that high challenge so that they experience what failure is but you balance it with great success of course recreating um situations mentally trackman combines flight scope combines are really helpful in that setting up
Parameters for success and failure having a little bit of pressure or maybe you say I get ice cream tonight if I accomplish this goal or I have to do 25 burpees when I get home if I don’t accomplish this goal and my favorite is bringing students onto the golf course
To experience adversity so we set a goal of we need to improve our recovery shots most of our club golfers who are a 15 handicap and higher are spending a large percentage of their time recovering they’re not playing from the middle of the Fairway they’re not playing playing
With an easy access to hit the green and rag so we need to have them experience adversity and then overcome that so I’ll set up a development plan for them where I pick 15 different recovery shots so maybe a low one that you have to cut
Around a tree maybe a a high pitch shot over a bunker and we determ determine what those 15 recovery shots look like and we start let’s say on March 1st how successfully they can complete those shots and we look at April 1st how successfully can they complete those
Shots so we have a 30-day plan to see how they can improve recovering from adverse situations makes them feel like they are gaining some confidence and they’re improving but we’re also measuring and setting goals to get better so then when they hit it behind a tree they don’t feel so angry because
They’ve been there before it’s frequent and they know how to get out with more ease all right moving into our next component of imagery visualization and mental rehearsals I say if you see it in your mind you can hold it in your hand or the old cliche whatever you put your
Mind to you can accomplish there is some science to support this mental rehearsals and observing other people performing actions will actually activate the same areas in your brain as if you were doing them yourself so for example let’s say you’re having a player who comes over the top they lead
Transition with their upper body their lower body is out of sequence you’ve created a really fantastic drill for them to wind up properly feel like their hands are staying behind them longer as they lower body is moving first let’s say that’s the drill that you’ve come up
With so it’s raining it’s snowing in St Louis they can’t go outside they don’t have an indoor Sim how do you practice if they were to imagine the themselves performing the drill that you created for them closing their eyes finding a nice quiet place um to rehearse and they
See themselves going through the motion precisely as you have prescribed that is activating the same cortical areas in the brain as if they were at the range doing it live and in person which is pretty fascinating because I sort of use this as a hookline if I could help you
Get better without ever going to the range would you do it and every student’s like yep sign me up I’d be more than happy to do it well you can and it’s through mental rehearsals and visualization there’s even some fabulous science to indicate that Imaging your biology can change cellular biology for
Example there’s been some cases on record of individuals having a tumor and rather than going through cancer treatments of chemo and radiation they had a imagery schedule of imagining white blood cells going to the area of the cancer cell and cancer mass and slowly eating away the cancer and
Digesting it and processing it and then they measured what that tumor looked like and it decreased in size looking at injury and Rehabilitation if you have let’s say a sprained ankle and that’s preventing you from going out to the course to practice using imagery really focused and engaged Imagining the inflammation of the
Tendons and the muscles and the joint decreasing seeing it go from red to white or blue you can you can uh increase and speed up the healing process you can change your cellular biology through imagery and visualization and the research through pain management and mind mindfulness is
Off the charts um for example J John kabat Zen with catastrophic living has done a tremendous amount of research in individuals who have chronic pain where there’s no um pill or anything that they can do to make the pain go away through imagery and visualization after 21 days of
Mindfulness and meditation practice you can rewire your brain to not experience the pain at the intensity that it’s been feeling so through all of this scientific research it’s pretty starking evidence to say we can change our golf swing with our mind we just underutilize it because
We’d rather go spend $500 on the brand new Callaway smoke AI driver and I’d rather go bust a bunch of big drives at the range then spend 15 to 20 minutes closing my eyes in a quiet space and imagining my ideal swing or Imagining the new motor pattern that I’d want to
Create to make imagery and visualization really robust we want to use different perspectives so face on Down the Line maybe a bird’s eye view maybe from the Fairway looking back and from my perspective this is a skill as well so your students May at first say I can’t
Imagine my golf swing that’s okay you can practice by imagining what’s in your car right now or can you identify what your bedroom looks like did you make the bed what color is your comforter where’s all the furniture positioned so if you can practice forming images in your mind
With how uh your living situation is you can start to build that skill set and build that connection in your brain where you can start to see your golf swing I also like to have my students have on their phone their ideal golf swing on video and they can watch it
Time and time again like it creates a a mental reel in their mind and then when they close their eyes they have a better opportunity to to see that the mental learning absolutely does transfer to physical performance seeing yourself overcome um scoring a 10 and then coming back birdie birdie birdie seeing
Yourself change motor patterns changing technical pieces in your swing mentally will start to speed up the process when you do that physically and then hypnotherapy is a really great way to work on building confidence and changing your belief system hypnotherapy is a very deep relaxed state with a hypnotherapist using
Suggestions to tap into your belief system so you might have heard of individuals um overcoming a smoking habit through hypnotherapy if you’ve ever been through hypnotherapy it’s kind of interesting and if you haven’t it would look like laying in a chair having a really dark room having the
Hypnotherapist calm you and relax you through sounds and their voice and you kind of get into this almost like pre-sleep State and then the hypnotherapist through words will start to suggest and identify beliefs about being confident about overcoming obstacles on the golf course and then as you come out of that hypnotherapeutic
State you start to have an influence onto your belief system the best players in the world do have an imagery schedule it is like going to the gym it’s like eating 170 G of protein it’s like getting in 250 um golf reps a day having an imagery
Schedule and knowing that I’m going to either imagine myself playing the course that I’m going to be competing on or I’m going to do 50 to 20 25 reps in my mind of the motor pattern that I’d like to change can start to really move the needle on your
Performance a couple of questions popped in uh John’s last name John cabit Zin he has worked in Massachusetts on chronic pain and the book is catastrophic living he’s a big wig in mindfulness um meditation practices and can the ideal golf swing be someone else’s or does it need to be yourself we
Have a component in our brain called mirror neurons so we can see somebody else and we can copy them it’s like an infant learning how to smile for the first time because they see the human that the caregiver holding them smiling at them and the infant learns how to
Smile so it does not need to be yourself you can certainly use models of other people however for a true confidence booster you would want to then blend that and evolve that into your best version of yourself so I always have on my phone a star for Allison’s best golf
Swing or what I deem as my best golf swing and I tend to use that as a good model but lo and behold you look in my photo album there’s lots of anuka and there’s lots of other players in there as well some areas that you can image would
Be the timing of the imagery so looking at the sequence and the movements of the golf swing looking at the actual length of time it would take for a putt to roll to the hole you want to make sure that you’re not doing the imagery in like
Fast Forward mode where things are going really really fast but taking the time of the imagery to represent what happens in real life now that doesn’t mean if it takes me four hours and 15 minutes to play a competitive round of golf that it’s going to take me four hours and 15
Minutes to image a practice round of golf the night before a tournament I’ll have my yardage book out I’ll close my eyes and I will image the t uh the difficult shots that I might be faced with in that round the timing of the imagery would be more related to the
Timing of my golf swing or for example like a putt seeing the putt actually go two to 3 seconds long if I have a 8-footer or a 10-footer on the golf course in performance we can look at the Flight of the golf shot I have my students pretend
They see that shot Tracer and they pick their favorite color to represent the shot Tracer in the pre-shot routine are they seeing the ball from start to finish the entire flight of it going the direction and the curvature that they wish for that is a great way to preset
The mind to perform that action live we talked about the body in motion we’ve talked about performance so seeing yourself play 18 holes get your Juniors get your competitors to play around a golf in their mind before they play the actual Golf Course mental toughness training training is Imagining the worst case
Scenarios and then seeing yourself overcome them if you do top your drive on the first hole can you see yourself hitting a fantastic recovery shot and then we spend some time on the injury recovery and Rehabilitation I remembered uh when I was trying to train in a different
Discipline outside of golf I ran in the New York City marathon for PGA hope um my first step was I wanted to complete the marathon never ran a marathon before in my life I liked running I thought this was a huge hurdle to accomplish So reading some sport psychology books and
Running I found so many similarities to golf I imagine the entire course of the New York city streets I found a video on YouTube someone ran it with a GoPro and I was able to see what it looked like and then before um before I would go to
Bed at night I would imagine myself completing the race so step one was just a complete the next year I decided to run I had a particular goal in mind of time so I would see myself run the race and accomplish um the outcome goal of
That time then I started to break down Imaging what’s the process what’s my Cadence per mile when am I taking my nutrition my hydration so all of these different components in golf and in other sports and in life can be helpful for you to perform your best giving a speech in
Front of your club members I’ve had some pros come to me say that they’re really nervous about announcing the results of the tournament at the end of the tournament standing in front of the club membership and saying who got first second and third handing out trophies so
We’ll go through a imagery and rehearsal schedule of what it looks like to walk up to the podium what it looks like to have the preparation of the results in hand and that can decrease a lot of the anxiety and help them perform better so let’s do a little exercise to
Trick your nervous system just to show you how valuable imagery and visualization is so I invite you to join me and just sit back comfortably in your chair go ahead and close your eyes and we’re going to talk a little bit about some lemons so as you’re getting comfortable
In your seat I want you to imagine walking into your kitchen right now and you see all the different layout of where the chairs are and maybe where your Island is and you happen to notice that someone just went to the grocery store and bought a bunch of fresh lemons it just
Finished coming back from schnooks they’ve laid them out on the table and they look amazing you see the bright vibrant yellow color they even look really shiny like someone’s washed them and you decide that you’re going to go over and you’re going to take one of
Those lemons from the left hand you pick up the lemon with the left hand and you start to look at the size of it it’s about the size of a small potato you feel a little bit of the waxiness of the skin you squeeze it a little bit and
It’s kind of quite firm so you know it’s just perfect just perfect to cut open so you pull out a cutting board and you grab a knife and you put the lemon down on the cutting board and you take the knife you position your fingers properly
On the lemon and you start to insert the blade of the knife into to the skin of the lemon and immediately as you cut through that first firm layer you notice a little bit of resistance within the smell and the aroma of the lemon just really invades your nostrils and it
Feels so fresh and so clean and as you cut a little bit deeper there’s a little bit of juice that kind of squirts out even enhancing that smell you finish cutting the lemon in half and you pick up the left half of the lemon and you hold it up to your
Nose and you take a big inhale and you just feel so relaxed because wow it’s so fresh it’s going to be so tasty and then you stick out your tongue and you take the lemon and you gently squeeze it and one or two drops trickle onto the tip of your
Tongue now go ahead and open your eyes for a moment and in the chat box go ahead and just put a thumbs up if you could smell the lemon or if your tongue or mouth had sort of a pucker reflex as soon as the juice touched your tongue we have a pucker
Reflex yeah a couple of the pucker reflexes interesting because you look around your environment right now and no lemons Andy was saying it was sweet absolutely no lemons around you and we tricked your nervous system into believing that you were actually having the juice of the lemon touch your tongue
Or that you could actually smell it now this only works if you have a history of smelling a lemon seeing a lemon or experiencing that and so through those verbal cues your nervous system manifested having this lemon in your environment it activated the same cortical areas as if you actually went
And did that after this webinar so it just shows the value and the promise of mental rehearsals and how helpful it can be for our students Barbara needs to sharpen her knives all right as we get into our last component um of our big five of psychology we’re going to talk about
Selft talk and gosh I wonder if you were to record all the things that you said to yourself in a given day in a round of golf and you wrote them down and you said them to a 5-year-old how would you feel most people tell me that the stuff that
They say to themselves they would never ever say that stuff to their child to a junior golfer that they’re coaching so then I wonder why is it okay for us to be so negative and critical to ourselves but we would never ever do that to another human being our selft talk in Clinical
Psychology is called a schema it’s the belief that we have about ourself we have these scripts and these narratives that go through our mind and it influences our behavior and our beliefs and our attitudes and our schemas are developed in adolescence and they are influenced by our coaches our parents our teachers
Our peers the things that have been said to us there’s been a lot of research as of late in how to develop growth mindsets for youth and rather than congratulating a junior golfer on the win it’s more productive to congratulate them on the effort that they put in to accomplish the
Win that way they don’t develop this confidence that’s solely attached to outcome so think about only congratulating your Junior golfers every time they won a tournament oh I saw you on the podium again yeah you got your us kids medal that’s great and that happens maybe one out of 20
Golf tournaments so the other 19 golf tournaments when they didn’t get the win they don’t get that confidence boost or that congratulations from you they may feel like a failure and the only way to get your praise is if they win so we want to congratulate and encourage based on
Effort hey I saw that you really tried hard after you had a double bogey on that hole you bounced back with a part wow it was so so fun to watch you play nine holes today I’m so proud of you for carrying your bag and finishing nine
Holes man you did an awesome job of keeping someone else’s score it’s really hard to keep your own and someone else’s and play golf so when you start to congratulate and praise based on effort you can develop healthier self schemas for our young athletes our schemas which are developed
In our youth they start to create more Crystal Concrete forms in adulthood so we have some most common schemas like I’m not good enough that started when we were a kid and that can be perpetuated into adulthood our behaviors will start to support our beliefs so if we feel like
We aren’t good enough it will show up in our practice it will show up in demotivation it’ll show up in not being fully engaged in practice and it’ll become so unmotivating that it could then lead into burnout out if we don’t have sort of proper proper goals that
Are set our attitudes our moods our performance States they are all reflected by our selft talk an exercise that I’ll do in junior camps but I’ve also started to do it in adult clinics is a very simple Ball Toss drill so you start with 10 golf balls and you have a
Player underhand toss to about 10 ft away on to a towel a golf ball and as they’re underhand tossing that ball the goal is to land the ball on the towel and as they’re tossing the ball you’re asking them to say really awful self- statements about themselves like
I’m an awful ball tosser this is so stupid why is Alison making me do this I’m such a horrible athlete meanwhile they’re tracking how many times the ball lands on the tow then they try the experience again 10 golf balls this time they use more positive selft talk I can do this that
Was a great Ball Toss I’m getting closer and closer all right that one hit the towel and they track how many balls landed on the towel and you’ll tend to see more times than that there’s always outliers so this is not a one and all Beall but there’s always outliers you’ll
Tend to see that the individuals who are more positive in their selft talk in doing this underhand Ball Toss drill will get more balls on on the towel than when they are trying to be negative to themselves so it impacts our performance it’s a very simple performance drill to
Show this but just think about your attitude and your mood if you’re having a really bad day you start to notice that your thoughts circulate around that if you’re having a really good day you’re like yeah I feel awesome your thoughts start to circulate that what
About if you flipped it if you were to start off with different types of thoughts could you influence your mood absolutely if you were having a sensation that you weren’t feeling so great could you change how you felt by using different types of thoughts absolutely by no means am I promoting to
Have positive self- thoughts because they don’t always work if you have three options negative thoughts neutral thoughts positive thoughts which one do you think is a guaranteed uh guaranteed influencer go ahead and type it into the chat box negative neutral or positive which one is guaranteed to work curious what your responses
Are got some neutrals some Positives some positives hopefully positive I am so sad to say positive is wrong the one that actually works is negative if you are a negative thinker you are almost guaranteed to have those negative outcomes it’s very rare that if you stand on the te don’t hit it left don’t
Hit it left don’t hit it left do you rip it right down the middle it’s really hard to wake up in the day and say today is going to be horrible oh my gosh it’s going to snow it’s going to rain I’m going to get into
A car accident this is going to be awful there’s going to be ice on the road I suck today I’m not going to make any money on the lesson te nobody wants to take a lesson with me are you going to have a fabulous day negative thoughts are guaranteed to work positive thoughts
Do not always work I have had some days where I don’t feel so great I have tried to use positive thinking it didn’t make me feel that much better the population that you want to be careful about using positive thoughts with are teenagers because they will see right through you
And there is research to indicate that if they don’t feel the positive thought is authentic it will actually make them feel worse about themselves I always would get a little bit more upset when I would have a bad round of golf and someone would tell me
Ah it’s going to get better my response would be like how do you know it could get worse my dad always taught me don’t question worse because it could get worse the safer bet is a neutral thought a neutral thought is one that is factbase if we have a positive thought
It could influence our performance it could make us feel a little better but it’s no guarantee negative is definitely a guarantee neutral is kind of like the safe spot just call it as it is okay there’s water on the left there’s water on the right here’s my target okay the
Ball went left I can recover I’m going to try to recover there’s a really great book called getting to neutral that sort of describes this idea of negative thoughts and positive thoughts and how neutral thoughts are less judgmental more factbase don’t elicit as much emotion
One way or the other and can be quite helpful in terms of self-talk it basically is calling it is what it is so it’s kind of interesting to uh to look at that and um the sports psychologist in that book getting to neutral works with a football player
Named Russell Wilson as he’s preparing for the Super Bowl and looked at the different types of thoughts that would help him perform when he got to the big stage here is a self schema test so that I like to perform with my students so I’d like you to take a moment to just
Think through these statements and I want you to think of the very first word that pops into your mind when we say I am a blank golfer so you come up with an adjective that pops into your mind I am a blank putter so I’ll give you a moment to think through
Those now I’ll have these statements or a variety of other ones on a piece of paper and I have my student or client fill in that very first word that is unfiltered so we’re not going um I’m a crappy golfer wait no I’m an okay golfer
It’s the very first word that pops into your mind that is your self schema if you were to have any negative self schemas those are the areas that we’re going to begin to work on our goal is to move from negative to neutral so if I say I’m a crappy golfer
Maybe something that’s more neutral is I am a work in progress golfer that is a bit more specific that’s a bit more neutral but it’s not positive where it’s inauthentic or if someone says I’m an erratic driver of the golf ball they might replace it with something more
Neutral like I a um working towards more consistent driver of the golf ball so it’s more growth-minded it’s not an absolute it allows for some flexibility when a student or maybe yourself has identified good okay or fine those to me indicate ambivalence you’re not certain one way or the other
Whether you’re really good at this or whether you’re not so good at this so I tend to look at good okay and fine as another area to work on to see if we become more specific in that belief system and if the word is encouraging and positive like I’m a fantastic IC
Bunker player we know that that’s a strength within that person’s skill set so I like using this self schema test to kind of Identify some areas to work on now there was a question in the chat about the amount of words or thoughts that we have in our
Mind and one source indicates that the inner voice is equivalent to about 4,000 words per minute that’s your subconscious brain we have a conscious and a subconscious your conscious brain can process about seven pieces of information in a given moment and that equates to our typical Us phone numbers our subconscious
However which is responsible for 95% of our brain processing the conscious brain is only responsible for five 4,000 words permitted holy cow that’s a lot of words because the US president’s state of a union address which is delivered in about an hour over TV it’s 6,000 words
6,000 words in an hour to deliver and the human brain has 4,000 words per minute going on so that’s roughly 320 State of the Union addresses going through our head in a given waking day that’s crazy that’s a lot of stuff going on so if you have a lot of
Negative self schemas that are continually running through your mind it’s going to influence a lot of mood and performance so we want to work that into becoming more harmonious neutral maybe some of them are positive one way to distance yourself from the negative self chatter is to work in third person verse
First person talk it creates an emotional distance it reduces the shame and embarrassment of a particular thought so for example if we go into I missed that three-footer I’m an awful putter by saying Allison missed the three-footer Allison needs to work on her putting it
Creates a little bit of a safety and a distance from the blame when we use I within our self statements it’s very accusatory it’s very blaming if we use third person your essentially stating the facts Allison missed the putt she sure did Allison can practice to get
Better at it as well so just one little tip to kind of combat the chatter with that chatter comes confidence because the things that we say to oursel influences our feelings so the more that we have going through our mind that makes us feel competent and
That we can believe we can do something a state of certainty the more we feel confidence but it’s a skill so when we think a particular way we can influence a particular feeling and I love this quote from Muhammad Ali I am the greatest and I said that even
Before I knew I was that’s pretty interesting that the words that he said to himself were so powerful that it created this certainty that I can be the best boxer in the world and I say it’s a skill because it’s something that we need to work on through the words that
We say to oursel through our skill sets through our performances and all of that creates this opportunity to build confidence or um the feeling of belief that we can do something some ways to investigate confidence would be through confidence profiling confidence resumés a SWAT analysis which you may
Have done in your business and then looking at practice conditions so we’ll go through these a confidence profile is something that I use for my clients where we are inventorying and assessing different aspects of our game so in the outer part of this spiderweb so in this area here
If you can see my mouse cursor I would have them write down different areas of their game they’d like to inventory it could be driving putting iron shots could be nutrition could be mental game could be on course tactics and strategy it could be golf
Workouts and then they fill in from 1 to 10 10 being the highest amount of confidence one being the lowest amount of confidence how confidence they feel how confident they feel so if we were to write putting here and the players like yeah I’m a pretty good putter they might
Fill it in all the way up to level eight it is a great activity for them to do this personal inventory to assess some areas that they can work on and it’s interesting that people like to do things that they’re good at so if you’re really good at driving the golf
Ball you’ll find a lot of Club golfers spend time drilling drivers it feels great I am a notorious range rat I love to be on the Range ever since I was a little kid I could spend way more time on the Range than I ever could on putting and chipping I think that
Certainly shows now where I have spent more of my time but I liked to do the things that I was good at I liked to hit the golf ball so as I’m doing a personal inventory I would recommend to that player hey the confidence as low as this
Particular area is it a skill set is it a belief let’s come up with a plan for us to feel more confident and improve those skills there a confidence resume would look as if you listed every single Golf Club in your bag and then you were to write down a
Specific memory with that club of when you were a rock star what is your best five iron ever where were you what did it look like what were you wearing what course were you at how far away with you can you see the entire shape of the
Shot this activity can take a couple of days as a student is going through it and I want them to create this resume because we’re going to use it when things go bad so when confidence plummets when a player is not striking the ball well we can can go back to
Moments in time that we have felt really confident and we can say you remember that seven iron that you hit back in um Bandon Dunes when you traveled with your family to go play that course think about the things that you embraced and what you exhibited when you hit that
Amazing seven iron let’s look at some of those qualities and characteristics what were you thinking about how’d you feel and using those memories can help bring us back to reality that we don’t suck so bad and we certainly get back to swinging our best self but it’s a great
Way to remind ourselves of where we’ve come from and so building this conf confidence resume can be extremely helpful for players to help them feel better about their game if you’ve ever done a SWAT analysis for your facility I like to do this SWAT analysis for my teaching business but
Also for my own personal golf game what am I really good at what are some areas that I’m weak and underperforming where are some opportunities for me to get better and what are the threats to me getting better so let’s say I’m really good at driving the golf ball let’s say I’m
Underperforming in putting some opportunities are I have access to a putting green I have access to Great technology blast motion I’ve got great peers who are willing to give me some insight and consultation and what are some threats to my success it could be my time not having enough time to practice
Could be my lack of motivation because I don’t find it as fun so when you have a student fill this in you can then start to work with them and say okay let’s take these weaknesses in the next 60 days and let’s come up with a good plan let’s create some
Antidotes to the threats that are helping you prevent you from not being successful how do we make this practice fun how do we make this more Mo motivating and then in your practice condition we create more game like training on the Range we have more opportunities for um consequences
Boundaries tasks that we’re trying to accomplish we’re getting away from block practice once we’ve learned the skill moving more towards random practice that’s where combines can be helpful or writing down specific clubs and targets that you want your students to practice we also want to match the interval of
What we’d be experiencing on the golf course in our practice what I mean by that is when do we really ever hit four drivers in a row within the course of two minutes I mean of course if you hit one out of bounds you might be hitting
Another drive but more times than not you’re hitting a drive and then maybe 12 minutes later you might hit another driver so I’d have a student hit a drive on the range and then go to the putting green and maybe do a quick 369 drill or
An up and down challenge so they can create intervals that mimic what happens on the golf course in the practice um conditions we want to understand are we practicing motor patterns or are we practicing performance motor patterns is going to fall more into that block practicing
Where we’re trying to learn a skill then we might try to practice the motor patterns in a random setting and then we might try to disengage our conscious conscious thoughts and go into performance how would I hit this shot going through my entire pre-shot routine being in a engrossed and meshed and
Fully focused and that’s going to certainly help us transfer what we’ve learned on the driving range onto the golf course as I already mentioned our students are more apt to go spend $500 on a new driver than they are to get coaching they’re more apt to go get
Physical coaching than they are mental coaching but even as you all specializing in um the physical components of coaching and the performance side of coaching you’re also a therapist to your students you’re a friend you’re a mentor you’re a mental coach to them sometimes our students
Just have no idea what the mental game is so through your coaching share how important your brain is to the process of them performing their best there’s also a lot of negative stigmas about the mental game like oh I’m going to have to go see a therapist about playing better
Laying on the couch and talking about my inner deepest darkest Secrets it’s not always the case often times it’s helping a player understand what to think about and how to think about it and sometimes our students feel that other areas of the game are more important if I spend
Five hours on the putting green maybe I’ll get better or what if I change my belief about putting maybe I can get better quickly and build a team around you you may have little interest in coaching the mental game and that’s okay build a team where you have a sports
Psychotherapist a sports psychologist or a mental coach that you can refer your students to I work with a lot of different coaches across the country who are like I got the physical stuff I need you to help with the mental stuff cool we got it let’s create a
Team so know how to add some of these tools to your personal toolbox for playing your best golf but share them with your students so that they can start to integrate some of these components into their performance as well so I want to thank you so much for your attention and concentration during
These last two hours talking about these sport psychology Concepts that we’ve integrated into golf hopefully you found some value in that if you wish to stay connected after today I’ve got my contact information up on the screen and certainly open to any questions that you might have right
Now yeah guys so if anybody has any questions just throw them into the chat box um got a couple minutes left we can um answer some questions uh Alison I I had one question uh I’ve heard that selft talk uh you can have up to 60,000
Thoughts in a day um I don’t know what you’ve heard but how do you reduce those like what are exercises to reduce the amount of thoughts you have in a day um because that would add more cognitive load um you know you just hear a lot of bad
Things on it so what’s some things you do to reduce you know just thoughts in general right so those thoughts are going that number is going to be variable depending on whether we pay attention to the thought or not so with some premises of mindfulness we can have
Multiple thoughts that enter into our awareness and then we can choose to pay attention to it or we can choose to pay attention to something else so what happens for the anxious brain is let’s say those 60 or whatever number you come up with 60,000 thoughts a day the
Anxious brain wants to pay attention to all of them so that’s where it becomes overwhelming through training of um intention and where we want to focus our attention on mindfulness breathing the skills of attention and concentration we can then choose to pay attention to one single thing at a given time
So there can be a lot of stuff that goes underneath the radar in our subconscious brain but they don’t have to actually reap the surface of Consciousness because of our ability to stay engaged in the given moment for example if you have a child who’s watching TV and you
Call their name to come for dinner and they don’t hear you because their eyes are glazed over and they’re engrossed in watching TV and you’ve called their name five times and you’re like come on dinner’s on the table oh sorry I didn’t hear you they are actually being mindful they’re being
Engaged and engrossed into the activity that they’re um participating in that’s a good thing let’s redirect it to golf let’s redirect it to our work um so I wish there was a whole bunch of different ways that I could say how we practice that but mindfulness and informal and formal meditation can be
Helpful ways for you to choose what you’re going to pay attention to very good thanks does anybody else have any questions go ahead and throw them in the group chat I don’t see any crickets Alison you did great that’s a good thing everybody’s questions yeah yeah so all right Alison we appreciate
Your time we thank you very much um and I think everybody enjoyed what you did today you know you’re you’re awesome I learned a ton I have a boatload of notes here so awesome well thank you so much Logan for the invitation it was great to
See some familiar names and faces on the call if you have any questions feel free to reach out and uh have a great season enjoy the 80 degree weather today thank you Alison thanks Alison thank you
