The Challenge of Controlling Your Mental Game

By: Garland Choate

Altering your feelings about the way you feel concerning a particular shot, can in reality allow you to win. I realize that sounds a bit confusing, but it's true, for instance, you've been playing a poor game up to the 9th hole.

You know that your mental attitude has become really negative, and you know that if you don't change your attitude, you wont get any better. You start to pretend that you're doing well, and believe that you will keep doing well until the end of the game.

Confidence in your ability goes a long way in the game of make believe, and is imperative for its success. Although we may make the differentiation between anxiety and anger, our nervous system cant tell the
difference.

While both are powerful emotional responses and activate physiological arousal which trigger our negative responses (such as fight or flight), they are two very dissimilar emotions.

Both of these are described by very different thought processes and produce importantly different reactions.

Anxiety may induce a person to become quiet, withdrawn or even to leave, at its worst it can cause a person to freeze up (stage fright is a sign of anxiety) and be
unable to carry on with what they are doing.

Anger brings about more apparent reactions and behaviors, both mentally and physically. Some people respond to anger in the same way as they respond to anxiety, holding their anger in often getting headaches and other troubles in their physical health.

Remember that you must master obsessive and perfectionist reactions when you play golf. You are not perfect and must remember this in order to play good golf. A perfectionist may struggle with the many bad shots (which are to be expected) while the obsessive golfer may not be able to put the one bad shot out of his mine, dwelling on it to the detriment of his total game.

People seldom realize how many things in their lives have become routine, from getting out of bed in the morning until you retire to bed at night there are several routines you perform. A routine is simply a series of motions that you do so often that it becomes second nature, in other words, you don't even realize that you do it that way every time.

As with other things in life, there is a need to develop a routine for your golf game, some golfers will start by standing behind the ball, aligning it with the hole, and then you may choose your plan of flight for the shot.

Article Source: http://www.bettergolfarticles.com

GR - Garland Choate - is a retired Airline Captain> who has been in internet marketing for many years. Now, he is retired in the US Virgin Islands where he writes and does more marketing from home. Find many great articles on Golf at www.Golf.WAHWarriors.com

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