Though I’d learned better in tennis, after almost every mishit golf shot I found myself subjecting my swing to critical analysis. On the next shot I would try to correct whatever I thought had caused the mistake. But it seems that every time I managed to fix one flaw, 2 more would emerge. The harder I tried to control my swing, the more mechanical and less rhythmic it became.

In short, what I learned on the tennis court was that the way most of us are taught to control our bodies simply doesn’t work. Telling our bodies how to do something is not the most effective way to improve performance. Our muscles don’t understand English, and our thinking minds don’t really understand hand-eye coordination. Trying to make their bodies conform to the instructions or their last lessons, most tennis players inhibit free movement of their bodies and interfere with coordination rather than assist it.

On occasion I would drive 230y, right on target. The sight of the ball soaring high and true was exhilarating; it filled me with a sense of mastery and power. The frustration lay in the fact that I couldn’t repeat the experience at will. Fed by seemingly undying hope, I repressed my annoyance at failure and would reach for ball after ball.

It wouldn’t have hurt so much if we hadn’t hit some excellent shots, giving us that cruel knowledge that the ability was there within us somewhere.

The most agonizing aspect of my own game was clearly its inconsistency. I was perfectly capable of hooking a ball 40y left on one shot and then, with what seemed to be the same swing, slicing an equal distance on the next. Even more disconcerting was hitting a long drive down the middle on one hole, followed by a topped ball that barely dribbled off the tee on the next. I was used to inconsistency in tennis, but nothing on that order of magnitude.

It is interesting to note that if you miss your 1st serve in tennis, you get another try. Golf is not so forgiving.

Every shot I take in golf counts. In tennis I can lose 3 straight points and still win the game; many lost points will never show up in the final score. Tennis forgives a few mistakes; golf forgives none. Thus, pressure can seem constant.

Because the game of golf is inherently a game of the golfer against himself, the Inner Game is intensified. The ego is both more challenged and more threatened. The player’s spirits tend to rise or sink in direct proportion to his score, the sole product of his own efforts.

The walk between shots is one of the most critical parts of the game. Though this period of time is recognized by some pros as a potential mental hazard as well as a benefit, I feel its importance in most golfers’ minds is generally undervalued. It is most often in the interval between shots that both the Inner and Outer games are won or lost.

After he has played a few rounds, he will have hit enough good shots to provoke unquieting thoughts of heroism — if only he can learn to repeat consistently what he has shown that he can do on occasion. But unknown to the novice player, the mechanics of the game dictate that the probabilities of hitting those shots consistently are almost nil.

Golf is assuredly a mystifying game. Even the best golfers cannot step onto the 1st tee with any assurance as to what they are going to do. It would seem that if a person has hit a golf ball correctly 1000 times he should be able to duplicate the performance almost at will. But such is certainly not the case.

The golf swing is a most complicated combination of muscular actions, too complex to be controlled by objective conscious mental effort. Consequently, we must rely a good deal upon the instinctive reactions acquired by long practice.

In playing a golf shot it always helps if the player can shut out from his mind all worry over the result of the effort, at least while he is in the act of playing the shot. After taking the stance, it is too late to worry. The only thing to do then is to hit the ball.

I realized that what I may have thought I discovered had, in fact, been around for a long time and had probably been discovered by many others, perhaps by everyone who had truly achieved excellence in his or her field. Yes, the problem is ultimately a simple one of control, but most things requiring excellence are too complex to be controlled “by objective conscious mental effort.”

The primary feeling in the relationship between these 2 selves was mistrust. Self 1 didn’t trust Self 2 to hit the ball, and, precisely to the extent that he lacked trust, he would try to force Self 2 to conform to his verbal instructions.

When I was on a streak, there was no talk in my head at all.

Like most tyrants, Self 1 didn’t like losing control and resisted efforts to minimize his influence.

The primary focus of attention in golf should not be the ball but the clubhead, the critical moving object.

One thing I had learned in tennis was that it is more important to know where your racket is than to know where it should be. The tennis ball is hardly ever where it should be but always where it is. What the body needs to control the path of the clubhead is not a lot of instructions but accurate, moment-by-moment feedback about its position.

But you have to make the effort every time; momentary relaxed concentration is easy but it has to become constant and continuous. Techniques to help gain that concentration are only as effective as your steady use of them.

The single most common physical cause of error in golf, and perhaps in all sports, is over tightness.

Actually, “overtightness” is an inaccurate word when applied to muscles, since no individual muscle unit can be over- or under-contracted. It is either relaxed or flexed. When the muscle fiber is relaxed, it is soft and pliable. When it is contracted, it folds in upon itself and becomes rigid enough to support many times its own weight. Strength is measured in the amount of weight that can be supported by contracted muscles. This is not the same as power. Power is the ability to use strength, and it requires a very sophisticated cooperative effort between contracting and relaxing muscles. Some muscles pull, while opposing muscles remain relaxed and pliant so as to allow the movement to take place.

What we experience as over tightness in golf is often the contracting of too many muscles — more than are necessary to accomplish the task at hand.

Another kind of overtightness occurs when rigid muscles fail to release.

Just as instructing your muscles to contract is obviously futile, telling yourself to relax is not a solution. The command from someone else or from yourself to relax, often spoken as if to an idiot, only causes more tension and tightness.

To gain maximum relaxation in the body, first tighten it to the maximum extent, and then let go. Hold the muscles as tight as possible for 5-10 seconds before releasing them.

When you tighten before the swing, you reduce some of your tendency to do so during it. A lot of our tightening comes from anger and frustration that build up at an unconscious level.

When in doubt, we tighten.

Most players admit readily that golf is largely mental, but when it comes to confronting the mental cause of physical error, we become shy. We’d rather stick to the physical symptoms, analyzing one error after another, satisfied if after each bad shot we can point to the technical mistake we made.

When faced with the unknown or the uncertain — a common condition — human beings tend to enter a state of doubt and to tighten instinctively to protect themselves. Metaphorically when we doubt our mental capabilities, we tend to constrict our minds or become closed-minded; when we doubt ourselves on the emotional level, we constrict our feelings. And on the physical level, when we doubt that we will achieve the results we want or think we may “do it wrong,” we tend to over-tighten our muscles.

No matter how much pressure we may feel is riding on a given putt, we do not feel anxiety if we do not first doubt our ability to sink it. Fear increases as our sense of our competence decreases. Therefore, if we can lessen our self-doubt, our fear automatically wanes.

It’s a voice in my head that says I’m stupid and that I can’t do something.

“I’m not very good at sports,” a not so judicial statement about one’s abilities in all sports before the 1st nine holes is finished. Finally, there’s an awful feeling in your chest and you find yourself believing “There’s something wrong with me.”

Most of us would not put up with someone else sowing seeds of doubt in our minds. If that person persisted, we would know he was trying gamesmanship on us and we would ignore him. But, for some reason, when the voice of doubt is coming from inside our own heads, we find it harder to ignore.

The first physical symptom of doubt is weakness. When a golfer stands over a crucial putt, he experiences weakness in his knees and wrists, light-headedness, and a general loss of feel and muscle memory. In short, he loses command of his own resources.

5 common types of trying too hard in golf:

  • Trying to hit the ball.
  • Trying to hit the ball up into the air.
  • Trying to hit the ball far.
  • Trying to hit the ball straight.
  • Trying to hit the ball “right.”

Golf is traditionally a game played in silence. Few players will tolerate another person saying a word to them once they have addressed the ball. Then why are we so tolerant of Self 1’s distracting voice chattering within our own head?

Golfers experience self-doubt and start trying hard when they look at the game as difficult. Part of this difficulty is, of course, inherent in the exacting requirements for precision and power in the game. On the other hand, it is within almost everyone’s experience that when we hit our best shots they seem easy, in comparison with the difficulty so often experienced during our worst shots.

The true issue is not whether golf is natural; the point is that learning is natural.

Speaking would be virtually impossible if you tried to learn how to pronounce words by studying the necessary tongue positions.

It works to relax the mind in the same way as associating with past failures works to produce tension.

If asked to state the imbalance concisely, I would say that institutional education has overemphasized conceptual learning to such a degree that the value of, and trust in, the natural process of learning directly from experience has been seriously undermined.

I sometimes wonder what man’s fate would have been if in the development process he taught himself to understand language before he learned how to walk. No doubt parents would have coached us when to shift our weight from left foot to right, and we would have spent a lot of time on the floor analyzing the causes for falling down again.

The foundation of the Inner Game approach to learning is that experience itself is the primary teacher and each individual must learn to learn directly from his or her own personal experience.

Learning is about change, making an inner change. The change can take place in a person’s understanding, perceptions, and / or capabilities. It is provoked by new meaning given to experience. It is what enables us to grow and to cope more successfully with external changes.

If you want to change something, first increase your awareness of the way it is.

Besides the general tendency of the ego to resist being told what to do, there are 5 basic ways in which do-instructions engender doubt:

  • The communication gap between teacher and student. The student doubts that he even intellectually understands what the instructor means. Teachers are notorious for developing their own jargon and assuming that everyone speaks the same language.
  • The internal communication problem with the student. Intellectually the student may understand, but his body doesn’t. Because the mind understands, the student assumes that he should be able to make his body conform. But unless the body can associate that instruction with an already familiar action, it can’t conform.
  • The student may understand intellectually and his body may understand, but the action called for is outside his present capability.
  • In many cases do-instructions given by teachers to students and by students to themselves are just plain incorrect.
  • Doubt arises when one tries to conform to too many instructions at a time.

It is a command to the attention of the student rather than to his body. Instead of saying, “See if you can do this or that,” it says, “See if you can see, feel, or hear what is happening right now and right here.”

Even after I understood the instruction intellectually, I had little confidence that I could do it, so of course I tried. I didn’t get it right, so I tried again and, of course, only became tighter. A couple of times my friend said, “That time you got it,” but I couldn’t feel the difference between the “right” swings and all the others.

But this isn’t how to see something well. The eyes work best when they are relaxed. Even a slight tension in the mind can cause a tightening of the muscles that regulate the shape of the lens. The eyes don’t need help to see; you don’t have to squint or stare.

The grip of the club is your feeling contact with the putter. Therefore, you want a grip that (1) allows your 2 hands to act as one and (2) allows for maximum feel of the putter’s movement. I like to get as much skin as possible in contact with the handle to allow for maximum feel.

Focusing attention on one of these variables at a time without trying to make any changes can provoke spontaneous swing improvements:

  • Awareness of the alignment of feet, hips, and hands.
  • Awareness of the clubhead speed.
  • Awareness of the direction of the path of the clubhead.
  • Awareness of the length of the backswing and the length of the follow-through.
  • Awareness of the angle of the clubface before, at, and after contact.
  • Awareness of the spin imparted to the ball.
  • Awareness of the position of the ball between your feet.

Since you know where the ball is, the best place for your eyes is on the target and / or on the intended line of the putt. After all, where does an archer look?

When I am looking at the hole, I can imagine that it is an easy matter to place the ball into it. I imagine that I am just reaching out to touch the hole or to take something out of it. This reduces the tension that arises from assuming that I am attempting something “hard.” With reduced fear of failure, there is also less chance of steering the ball or having a breakdown in my wrist or a dreaded yip. I also find that the more I use “soft eye” to focus on some interesting aspect of the hole, the more I keep myself in the present and allow for a tension-free swing.

Precision in putting is as much a state of mind as it is a technical accomplishment. One of the ways I find the state of mind that produces precision is to imagine that I am threading a needle. I think of the delicacy required, the accuracy of hand and of eye required to put a thread through the narrow teardrop at the end of the needle. Immediately, my mind is focused and geared for precise movement. I notice if my left and right hand move the club at exactly the same moment, if the club is resting just above the grass so it touches it but without the slightest friction. These are simple things to notice, but they require a fine-tuning of the attention that prepares of the surgical accuracy required in putting.

But the basic strategy for increasing feel is consciously to switch games from a game of results to one of awareness. Usually, it is over-concern with results that leads to over-control and decreased feel, so change your goal to increasing awareness.

It was not unusual for me to stand over a chip shot and feel quite uncertain. I would take 5-6 practice strokes mainly for the reassurance, only to stand over the real ball — and yip. It was especially embarrassing when I was playing with people who knew I had written a book on “the mental side of golf.”

The first step to making any improvement in your swing lies in increasing the feel in your swing as it is.

Balance is a good place to learn about natural learning precisely because it is so natural. You can’t learn to balance a bike by reading a book or being taught how to balance. You have to feel the difference between balance and imbalance. At first you can feel only the big differences — and by that time it is usually too late because you’ve already fallen. But with attentiveness, you learn to feel smaller or more subtle differences in balance and learn to make automatically subtle adjustments that enable you to ride without falling.

The golf stroke is basically a 2-beat rhythm: back and forth. These 2 beats are fundamental to most movement — the rhythm of breathing, for example. We don’t have to force it; it is there. Two common errors in swinging — failure to complete the backswing and forcing or rushing the downswing — are fundamentally errors of interference with that natural rhythm. Either we want the swing to descend before the backswing has been completed or we doubt that the transition will happen without help and so we force it.

As I experimented with my own tempo, I found that if I took the club back too slowly, I increased my tendency to swing down harder with my right arm. Although in point of fact the speed of the backswing shouldn’t affect the speed of the downswing, my Self 1 thinks it does, so it makes up for a slow backswing by giving it the gun on the way down. I noticed that as I let the tempo of my backswing increase just a little, a slight momentum would build at the top of the swing that would heighten my sense of coil and increase my confidence that the club would descend at a reasonable speed. When my club came to rest at the top, I felt more inclined to force the club down to the ball. Bringing the club down willfully is nowhere near as effective as letting it descend as a response to the coiling of the backswing.

It is also worth mentioning that experiencing balance, rhythm, and tempo provides much of the enjoyment of golf.

My main suggestion is that you allow yourself to experiment and don’t become locked into an absolute doctrine. Use awareness exercises to experiment with alternatives in ball placement relative to your feet, with open, closed, or square stance; shoulder or hip alignment; head position; and amount of knee bend. The goal in each of these experiments is to find a position that (1) is comfortable for your body (2) allows you to swing freely from a stable, centered platform, and (3) gives Self 2 a vivid sense of the target line.

When a beginner first hears all the so-called rules of a correct stance, he can grow so concerned that he’s doing something wrong on the setup that he’s tense before he even hits the ball. After some experimenting, I found that even if I didn’t obey those rules, my Self 2 could hit the ball straight. This was a great relief to me.

One of the few universally agreed-upon principles for accuracy in every golfing situation requires the clubface to be square to the target at impact. For this reason, awareness of the angle of the clubface is crucial in learning to increase accuracy.

The path of the clubhead in relation to the target — not the angle of the clubface — should determine the ball’s initial direction. But sensing that direction is one of the most difficult kinds of awareness to achieve in golf.

There is much speculation about the cause of outside-in swings. To me, one reason seems predominant: It’s more natural. Since the body is standing inside the target line, it is natural to swing across your body or in the direction of the body. If you try hitting from an extreme inside position to the outside, your body is in the way.

Releasing optimum power on the swing comes from learning how to express your potential for it on the one hand and discovering how not to interfere with it on the other.

As a way to quiet Self 1, I find it useful to think of the generation of power as a flowing river. I find that reminding myself before I swing to use energy not strength, often results in a more powerful drive.

Mike took a lot of care with each shot. Even on 2ft putts he would study the lie carefully and prepare himself mentally as fastidiously as on more difficult shots. I realized that, for him, caring was a discipline that made the game of golf what it was. After a shot had gone astray, he would usually say something like “I lost consciousness in mid-swing” or “There was a big gap in my awareness on that shot; I wasn’t very present.”

For centuries Zen masters have wrestled with the problem of balance between these 2 extremes, and they eventually generated the ideal of “effortless effort” — caring without caring.

Slumps don’t exist. We create them in our minds. Some people say they’re in a slump after 2 poor shots in a row; others don’t feel they’re in a slump until they’ve played poorly for 2 months. Therefore you’re in a slump when you think you are. The deeper you think it is — the more deeply you believe in it — the harder it will be to get out of it. A slump is a belief that poor past performance is going to continue, and the best thing to do is not to believe it. Stay in the present, and let each shot, good or bad, stay in the past. The past doesn’t have power over the present unless you surrender that power to it.

Just forget the bad shots and make each shot a new one. All the past is good for is that maybe it taught you something.

When you’ve got a streak going, how do you keep yourself from thinking it’s going to end?

That damned Self 1 gets us going both ways. When you’re playing badly, it tells you you’re in a slump and will never get out, but when you’re playing better than usual, it tells you that you’re in a streak that can’t last.

Golf can be a setup for creating limiting expectations. More than almost any other sport, it lends itself to precise measurement. It’s one of the few sports where every shot is scored.

Gradually, I realized that there was a common denominator in the achievement of excellence in all things. There is one master skill underlying the myriad of specialized skills required to excel at anything. I call it “relaxed concentration.”

Relaxed concentration is simply the capacity to focus totally. It occurs when commitment, abilities, and attention can be channeled in a single direction. It is being truly conscious and free of fear, doubt, and confusion. It is what enabled Ted Williams to say that sometimes he could see the baseball so well “that it almost stands still for me.”

In the flow state, action follows upon action according to an internal logic that seems to need no conscious intervention by the actor. He experiences it as a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which he is in control of his actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present, and future.

My experience of such people is that they are often surprised and humbled by the achievements that they attain in this state, giving less credit to themselves than to something that is at least a step beyond their control. They usually shy away from trying to teach the attainment of this state, knowing intuitively that no words or formulas can promise to take student or teacher through the door to this valued experience.

I was totally lost in the action.

It just seemed to all come together at the right time.

I seemed to disappear and something else took over.

I was playing out of my mind.

Such fragmentation of thought is so commonplace that it often goes unnoticed. There’s just that uncomfortable feeling at the end of the conversation that much was said but little accomplished.

So we try to concentrate. But if we try too hard because we doubt that we will be able to achieve the desired concentration, then we will be subject to the law of doubt. When in doubt, tighten. The focus becomes forced and anything but relaxed. When you try too hard to concentrate, you will soon get tired because you are not actually receiving the benefits of the concentration. It’s only a matter of time before distraction comes and you are happy to be distracted from your painful effort.

Imagine that the mind is like a lake. When its surface is calm, reflections of trees, clouds, and birds can be seen clearly and in rich detail, as can whatever is in its depths. Quieting the mind is the first step in concentration.

In this state we experience an intensified contact with reality. Relevant details are seen more clearly: Golf balls and holes seem more distinct than usual, and actions flow with an uncommon ease even in the midst of extreme exertion. You just seem to know the best thing to do with each change in the situation.

The essence of awareness skills is learning to see things as they are — that is, non-judgmentally. When a golfer sees his swing in terms of “good” or “bad” he will not have a clear picture of it as it is. True awareness is like a flawless mirror.

The much-discussed benefits of muscle memory are not derived so much from “good memories” as from vivid feeling experiences.

When I listen to the conversation in my own head, I can reach no other conclusion that Self 1 simply does not like to trust Self 2.

Whatever is at stake, it is not a part of the game of golf but of the meaning that the players bring to the game. Put another way, the pressure to be found in the games we play while we are playing golf, games made up in the culture and passed along quite efficiently from generation to generation.

While we cannot easily alter golf’s rules, we are free to change the rules of our Inner GAmes.

What became clear was that golf was one thing and “what’s at stake” was something else. And this something else was not real but made up.

The pressure is not in golf. It is in the beliefs and meaning we bring to the game.

Game means a pretend reality. Game means that we are going to make believe that it is important to hit a little white ball into a hole.

We put our self-respect up for grabs — and something in golf is always ready to do the grabbing.

Games are simulations of reality devised by man to create a “safe” environment in which to hone skills and develop qualities useful in real life. Because the consequences of a game are not real, it is safer to experiment and take risks that, if taken in the “real world,” might be too costly.

I do not know how many times I felt I had found Excalibur. One day my salvation lay in the movement of my hip, the next day in the way my shoulder turned, and again I felt I had found it when I opened my somewhat closed stance.

It seems as if our appetite for formulas in golf and in life is as unending as the cycle of hope and disappointment that these illusory mental constructs engender. We want encapsulated wisdom. We want to read the formula in a book and apply it to our lives. We don’t particularly want to think about the formula; it’s enough to know that someone who calls himself an expert has thought about it.

The moment I try to reproduce a feeling, I take a step away from where natural feelings originate. I need to learn a little old-fashioned humility I need to be willing to feel whatever is there at the moment, not just what I expected to find.