The time spent out on the course is plagued by doing a lot of not much to do with technical skill execution. Let’s face it there is a huge amount of time on the course where the club is nowhere near your hands. It is no wonder that the mind takes its chance to interfere – it wants to chat!

The way in which you allow your technical skills to shine can be dependent on how well you can manage your mind. The mind can work in a variety of weird and wonderful ways on the course particularly if you tend to chat to yourself during the round. Chatting in your own head is as common on the course as it is in everyday life – most people talk to themselves about a variety of subjects.

The following is an extract from Greg Norman’s 100 Instant Golf Lessons cited in Inside Sport January 2006.

“Every player likes to hear words of encouragement as he faces a tough shot and congratulations after he pulls it off. Unfortunately, unless you play golf with your mother, you can’t depend on hearing these things. That’s why I talk to myself. Not aloud, but inside my head. The tougher the shot I’m facing, the more I talk.”

“If I’m on the last hole of a tournament, facing a long iron shot to the green and needing a birdie to win, I’ll say to myself something like: ‘You know this shot cold, you’ve knocked it stiff a thousand times, and now you’re going to do it again.’”

“Those are nice words to hear as you settle over the ball, even if they’re coming from your inner self. I also talk after I hit shots. After a particularly long, straight drive, I’ll often say: ‘Damn, Greg, I’m pretty impressed by that one.’”

The amount of chatter that occurs on the course can be extremely influential. The amount of chatter counts as does the timing of the chatter, the tone of the chatter, and the speed of the chatter. All of these characteristics count for something when you review how your chatter affects your playing performance.

What you say and when you say things to yourself count because each time you do approach or react to a certain situation in a particular way you are starting to develop a relationship between that certain situation and what it means to you.

For example, if you start to dislike putting because the success on the greens appear to be declining and you walk towards the green and say, “Here we go again, let’s see some of that fantastic putting on display”, with a strong hint of sarcasm it is more than likely that the putting will continue to decline at a rapid pace.

The chatter is sarcastic, low, helpless, and hopeless. There is little room for your putting to improve based on the way you are chatting to yourself about your putting as you approach the green.

Pick chats that have are negative and positive in their influence on your golf performance. If it is difficult to pin point the actual words you say start with situations that tend have negative or positive influences on your performance or search for situations that create negative and positive feelings.

Try to understand what relationship you have set up with these situations. What meaning or explanation do you give these situations? If you can try to work out what these situations are you can then discover the type of chatter you use during the round.

A quick revision of the Course Mental Plan will assist this as you can aim to plot what you want to think about and when you want to think it according to how you have set up your pre-shot, shot, post-shot, and walk stages on the course. Your chatter should become more consistent through adhering to your Course Mental Plan however there will always be situations that come along that will require you to review and revise your chatter!

The aim is to become aware of the mind’s ability to become too much of a chatterbox. It sometimes wants to make comments when either it doesn’t need to or when it simply doesn’t assist the state of play. Breathing can assist with quietening the mind; it can be likened to turning the volume down.

Being mindful of the situations that evoke chatter and the exact words is the first step and often the most beneficial when it comes to getting your mind to work for you. Frequently this awareness enables you to self-monitor your chatter and move it back to the type of conversations that you know will assist your performance.

Chatting is good as evidenced by Norman’s words above, so embrace the chatter however be mindful of when the volume needs to be lower so that you can give yourself the best change of using your mind to enhance the discrete moments where you do have a club in your hand.

Discuss this article in our forums

Join iseekgolf.com - It's Free

Become a member of Australasia's number one golf website today!