A FRIEND OF OURS was playing in a summer-long match play tournament at her club. One day, she asked several of her fellow golfers, “Do any of you make a game plan for your upcoming matches?” The players, whose handicaps ranged from 10 to 36, looked at her with curiosity.
“Well, I usually know how many strokes I’m either going to give to or get from my opponent—so I know where my opportunities are,” one said.
“I don’t think that much about it,” said another. “It all comes down to putting, anyway.”
For 95 percent of golfers, we’d say this is the extent of thinking about a game plan. Recently, we decided to conduct our own test. We stood near the first tee and asked golfers, “What are each of your game plans? What are you going to focus on today?” One person said, “I’m going to try to lower my handicap.” Another laughed, “I’m just going to focus on winning.” And a third said, “I’ll try to play my best.”
Notice how vague and general their game plans were. It’s interesting to compare them to those of a PGA Tour or LPGA Tour player, who is usually highly specific about his or her game plan and focus. Brittany Lang’s game plan before the U.S. Women’s Open was to stay within herself and not look outside the ropes, or at the leaderboard. She focused on sensations such as sound (singing to herself) or feel (her feet inside her shoes). She created happy feelings during each round to build DHEA. In press conferences after a professional tournament round, a player will say, “I decided on my game plan before the tournament, and I’m proud that I stayed committed to it through all four rounds.” What they’re talking about is their process, the particular things on which they will focus. The external conditions will change during a round (and a tournament), but the game plan remains the same.
Most golfers have, at best, a one-dimensional game plan. If a part of their game begins to falter—they start slicing the ball or missing the green with their pitch and chip shots—they usually react to the last shot and blame their technique. We don’t blame people for this default tendency. They haven’t learned anything else. The most glaring blind spot in most golfers’ games, the biggest missing piece, is the ability to identify what is going on and to manage themselves on the course.
VISION54, and this book, are about adding a different set of skills and a different game plan to your repertoire. It’s a proactive plan that acknowledges variability, allowing you to manage what’s actually under your control. The word “process” gets thrown around a lot in golf instruction. People get confused by it, because they think process is a concept, not something real. We believe that human skills are your process. We’ve named them so they are clear: awareness of your physical, mental, and emotional states; commitment to your Think Box, Play Box, and Memory Box; keeping in touch with your balance, tempo, and tension; managing your self-talk; understanding your MY54s and NOT54s (and shifting when your NOT54s show up); and practicing emotional resilience. Executing these particular skills means staying in your process. This is your game plan.
Brittany Lang flawlessly executed her game plan when she won the U.S. Women’s Open. “I stuck to my MY54,” she says. “I was quick, aggressive, and decisive, no thought. The two things that I concentrated on were ‘good pictures’—that is, visualizing my shots—and ‘good commitment to my decisions and Play Box.’ I did those really, really well.”
Before we get to the specifics of how to create your own human-skills game plan, we’d like to tell you a story. In 2014, Kevin Streelman had missed four cuts in a row before arriving at the U.S. Open at Pinehurst. Kevin has always been a good ball-striker, but he wasn’t hitting the ball well. He was frustrated and upset. At the time, he was also working with his swing coach, who wanted him to make some technical changes. Kevin didn’t feel comfortable with what his coach was recommending, but they’d been together for so long that he went along with his recommendations.
We arrived at Pinehurst a few days before the tournament and followed Kevin for some of the practice and tournament rounds. We watched him struggle. After the second round of the Open, we sat down to talk with him outside the clubhouse and next to the croquet courts, in the scorching-hot North Carolina sun. We talked for several hours, and barely noticed the heat.
“One of the biggest things I took away from that conversation was a question Lynn asked me,” Kevin recalls. “She said, ‘Kevin, if you were coaching yourself, what would you say about your golf swing right now?’
“For five to 10 minutes I told Lynn everything I didn’t like about my swing,” Kevin says, recalling the conversation. “The gist of what my coach was telling me was that he wanted the club back deep in my swing, pretty far behind me. I felt the club was too far inside, getting shut on the backswing, and getting stuck coming down.”
Kevin told us he knew he wanted the club in front of his chest, so he could make his turn with a square clubface. It was a pretty clear-cut technique issue. Finally, Lynn said, “Kevin, this is your swing. This is your profession. Why are you allowing another person, even your coach, to override your best instincts?”
“It really hit me,” says Kevin. “I’d been avoiding confronting what was right in front of me.”
Kevin missed the cut at Pinehurst. But he was already in a better place. He traveled to Washington, D.C., after the tournament, where he talked with a swing instructor with whom he felt more in sync. Then he went on to the next tournament, the Travelers Championship at TPC River Highlands in Connecticut.
He texted us that he felt much better—and that he had made the cut. All of a sudden, things started to get special for him on the weekend. He hit the ball just the way he wanted to on Saturday, and shot a 64. In the final round on Sunday, he made the turn with a 36, including two bogeys and a birdie. Then he started an amazing run, one-putting on holes 9, 10, and 11. Like a Formula One car easing into lower and more efficient gears, Kevin birdied the last seven holes—breaking the PGA Tour record for consecutive closing birdies by a winner. He won the tournament with a 7-under 28 on the final nine, shooting another 64.
“It will probably go down as one of the top one or two rounds of my career,” he says. “And it never would’ve happened without that conversation I had with Pia and Lynn at Pinehurst. I started focusing on my mental outlook, on my belief structure, and on being in charge of my own game plan. I took control of myself and went from pretty much the lowest I’d ever felt in my professional career to the highest within a couple of weeks.”
Brittany Lang went through something similar in the process of becoming her own best coach. Several years ago, she had started working with a swing instructor who she felt, again, was too technical for her game. This time, she decided to split with the coach and to manage herself with the help of her brother and caddie, Luke. “At first, I was nervous that I didn’t have a coach,” she says. “I was on my own. In one way, it was really cool to go out and play nine holes and not have to listen to anybody. But now I was the one who had to decide what to work on.”
Brittany was out of our VISION54 harbor during this period. Now she says, “Ironically, it wasn’t until I stopped working with Pia and Lynn that I started to see more clearly the importance of the human skills they teach. I sat down and said, ‘Okay, well, I’m not going to do anything with my swing, because I have a great natural swing. Then I thought, Okay, Brittany, what do you need to do to play your best? I realized I had to go more inward to play well. I’d worked with Pia and Lynn and VISION54 long enough to know that I needed to strengthen my commitment to my decisions and my shots. I knew I needed to constantly be creating DHEA on the course. I knew I needed to guard against creating cortisol. On some level, this is simple, basic stuff. But like everything else, it takes discipline and practice. When I’m on the range now, I commit to every single shot I hit. I’m working on a good Play Box, on balance, tempo, and tension. I am never just hitting a ball.”
So now it’s time. You’re about to play in your club championship or a member-guest tournament, or a regional or national USGA competition, or a mini-tour event or a PGA or LPGA Tour tournament. You need to create your game plan. Yes, it might include general strategy for each hole, if you’re playing stroke play or match play—these are external factors. Now, we want you to add your own specific human-skills game plan. It’ll be the summary of the essential things that you want to pay attention to before a shot, during a shot, after a shot, and between shots. You’ve learned about the human skills in this book; now we want you to personalize them for yourself. The game plan includes your MY54 and NOT54 tendencies and the tools to shift from NOT54 to MY54. Before you head out to the course, think about the few most important things you want to pay attention to today. Depending on how you feel, is it your tempo? Might it be remembering to keep calm by taking deep breaths? Is it to be okay with “good enough” shots and processes? The things you decide on will become your game plan and playing focus for the day.
People often ask us, “Do professional players ever need help making game plans?” We chuckle, because professionals need help with game plans just as much as amateurs.
When we’re at tournaments with our professional players, we make sure that they are clear about the day’s game plan and the playing focus. It’s not a laundry list. It might be 75-percent tempo in their Play Box, and to loosen their hips every three holes. It might be a constant grip pressure with a balanced posture. If they’re feeling a slight lack of confidence, they might make sure their body language is extra strong between holes.
The warm-up before an important round is part of your game plan. It’s not mindlessly hitting shots on the range, hoping to feel one pure strike before you tee off. It’s not a practice session to improve your skills or fix something in your swing at the last minute. We like to call it Intentional Warm-Up. The purpose is to warm up your body, mind, and emotions. You will warm up your balance, tempo, and tension so you can step onto the first tee with confidence. The first thing is to check in with yourself on the day of competition. Who am I today? How am I feeling? How are my physical, mental, and emotional states? Is there anything I need to pay extra attention to today? Am I nervous, sluggish, extra-tight in my shoulders, off balance, or worried about things outside of golf?
Russell Knox starts with balance exercises, hitting balls on one leg, then the other, on the practice range. Brittany Lang listens to music on her headphones to get relaxed. Other players practice extremely slow “tai-chi” swings with their eyes closed to access inner awareness of their swings. Kevin Streelman hits balls with a slow tempo in his warm-up, gradually increasing the speed to his normal tempo.
Next, decide on the playing focus you’ll commit to for the day.
I’m going to pay extra attention to my grip pressure.
I’m going to use 80-percent tempo.
I’m playing with people who are quiet, and I like to talk, so I need to sing songs in my head or talk to imaginary friends between shots.
I’m nervous today, so I will take deep breaths between shots to calm myself down.
Ai Miyazato, an LPGA Tour player we’ve worked with for many years, used to carry a special “playing focus” scorecard during her tournament rounds. The first time she did this, her caddie said he couldn’t figure out what she was doing. She hit her drive into a bunker on one hole. In his opinion, it wasn’t a good drive, but Ai wrote down a 5 (on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being best). Later, she made a long putt and wrote down a 3. He couldn’t figure out the correlation. After the round, she told him, “I was keeping track of how committed I stayed to my decisions. The numbers weren’t about outcome.” Commitment to her shots was the main skill that Ai worked on strengthening. During 2010, she held the World No. 1 ranking for 12 consecutive weeks.
Ariya Jutanugarn learned that she needed to adjust her game plan during a tournament round in response to increasing levels of pressure and stress. At the 2016 ANA Inspiration, the year’s first major, she was leading by two strokes on Sunday with three holes to play. With her first major win in her grasp, she bogeyed the final three holes to finish fourth.
Ariya hadn’t realized how much her internal states were changing in response to stress, so she’d continued with her same Play Box feels during the final three holes, thinking they would work for her. They didn’t. After the tournament, we talked it over together, and she came up with an additional Play Box strategy. The next time she was close to winning and feeling pressure, she decided to take more deep breaths to release tension, get more present to her Play Box feel before she entered it, and commit even more strongly to the shot, going deeper into her Play Box focus and creating even more DHEA.
When Suzann Pettersen put her game plan into play during the 2007 LPGA Championship, she focused on not overthinking her shots and on maintaining her emotional resilience. She kept her Play Box under 10 seconds, she walked with her head up, and she conducted herself with positive body language and energy off the tee. She reminded herself to relax her jaw and talk to her caddie between shots, and she closed the door efficiently on shots she had just hit. The result: Her first victory in a major.
LPGA player Yani Tseng’s game plan for her final round at the Women’s British Open at Royal Birkdale in 2010 was related to a drop in confidence and negative self-talk. She kept her Play Box to five seconds, maintained strong body language when walking down the fairways, and sang Taiwanese children’s songs to distract herself between shots to keep her mind from jumping to outcome. That outcome, by the way, was that she won the tournament, becoming the first women’s player in the modern era to win five major championships.
Russell Knox’s game plan that led to his first win at the WGC-HSBC in Shanghai in 2015 was to visualize his shots, keep his Think Box simple, and trust his instincts. He kept his Play Box short; focused on his balance, tempo, and tension; and made sure he stored every shot he hit as Good Enough, Good, or Great.
If we were forced to create a one-size-fits-all human-skills game plan (which we wouldn’t), it would include these elements: Keep your Think Box simple and trust your intuition, or your gut brain. Be present in your body and access a sensory feel before you step into your Play Box. Keep your Play Box engaged and short. Be neutral and objective about your bad shots, and store your best shots in your Memory Box. Keep your body language strong, and focus your energy on something positive; stay mentally in the present, rather than thinking about the past or the future.
After your round is the time for evaluation. Again, most players look at their scores and statistics, and make their evaluations based on them. We urge you to evaluate how you did with your human-skills game plan first. It is your human skills and your process that produced the statistics. Evaluating process first will also improve your positivity bias and your storage of memories. How committed did you stay to your decisions and your playing focus? The more attention you pay to these skills (again, the only ones under your control), the more your outcomes will improve.
Here are three simple questions to ask yourself after each round: What did I do that was really good? What do I want to do better? How will I accomplish it? It could be that you noticed you lost your balance on a number of swings, so you’ll put extra practice into balance. You might’ve been confused about your decision-making on several occasions, so you’ll work on being clear on your decisions, then committing fully to them. It could be technical: “I’m not sure how to hit a high bunker shot, and I want to learn.”
After winning the U.S. Women’s Open in 2016, Brittany Lang began making her game plan for the Women’s British Open just a few weeks later. “My particular playing foci were alignment and keeping my head down during putts,” she explained. “But my real game plan is always my process, committing to my decisions, being present to my shots, and creating DHEA by being happy. These are the skills I’ve been working on for years. It’s easy to make them my game plan.”
