CHAPTER 8

WEDGING IT WITH THE MIND OF A CHAMPION

In the mind of a championship competitor, emotion comes first.

Great wedge players compete with what I call a “championship feeling.” You’ve heard of “playing like a champion” or “thinking like a champion,” but this is something different. I use the term “feeling” because when it comes to being mentally strong, emotions (i.e., your feelings) come first, and if they’re not up to championship level, they’ll end up owning you instead of the other way around. You can’t play like a champion until you learn to think like one, and you can’t think like a champion until you feel like one.

Case in point? Me, the struggling mini-tour player of the late 1980s and mid-1990s. I remember how the worse I played, the harder I worked—and the more brain-dead I became. Actually, it was just the opposite: I thought way too much—bad stuff—and despite knowing better, I couldn’t turn my brain off or stop it from running negative highlight reels in my head. I tried reading books on sports psychology and listening to tapes, but nothing worked. The information was good, but my mind wasn’t in a place to receive it. For example, if someone instructed me to “visualize the shot,” I’d visualize the ball kicking into a bunker, sliding out of bounds, or lipping out. I had spent too many years “beating myself down” instead of building myself up.

CONTROLLING EMOTIONS

At the 2008 Honda Classic, I saw a new face working with my longtime student Charlie Wi and, later on, three-time major winner Vijay Singh. I hadn’t met Dr. Bruce Wilson before or knew much about him, but after researching who he was and his involvement with the revolutionary Heart Math method (heartmath.org) for controlling emotions, I hired him on the spot to teach me as much as he could.

For years at his medical practice in Milwaukee, Dr. Wilson witnessed people who could not deal with stressful situations and saw how it led to cardiovascular disease. He taught me how emotions affect physical health, athletic performance, and quality of life, and how the ultimate performance state is one of high-energy, positive emotion. Through his guidance, I began to recognize the destructive mental patterns I had experienced on Tour. Rarely did I play in a high-energy, positive-emotion state (i.e., excited, happy, having fun yet determined). I toiled in either high- or low-energy, negative-emotion states (i.e., fearful, anxious, angry, and helpless). Other times, I completely tuned out my feelings, in the mistaken belief that showing any emotion was a sign of weakness.

It was time to undo the damage. I began to explore strategies to change those emotions and to channel my negative energy toward something more productive. I started to realize just how important a post-shot routine (the things you do after you swing) is to maintaining a positive vibe during practice and play, and I began teaching these techniques to my students. It made a huge difference in their games, not to mention to me personally. The mental game is an essential part of every one of my coaching sessions—it’s just too big a piece of the performance pie to ignore.

Are you managing your emotions or are your emotions managing you?

“See” Yourself as the Player You Want to Be

At Ben Crane’s year-end team meeting following the conclusion of the 2010 season, I was introduced to his mental-game coach, Lanny Bassham. Crane had raved about him all year: He was a world-class rifle shooter with multiple Olympic medals and world records who had become one of the top performance experts in the business. As Bassham reiterated his philosophies at the team meeting and explained what he expected from Ben in 2011 from a “Mental Management” (Lanny’s trademark term) perspective, I wanted to stand up and applaud. The beliefs I had developed about the mental game since working with Dr. Wilson almost three years earlier finally had a voice.

Bassham spoke a lot about self-image, or how Crane viewed himself in relation to the activity he was performing. “Ben,” he asked, “when you walk up with a wedge in your hand to a tough finesse shot over a bunker, if you could look in a mirror right then, what would you see?” This is a make-or-break question when it comes to performance, because the mirror will reflect an image of either emotional health or damage. Moreover, the image changes with the situation. You may have a high self-image with a driver in your hand, but a low one with a wedge. Your self-image is probably higher on your home course during a round with your buddies than it is when playing in a member-guest on a course you don’t know.

The fact that your self-image (what Bassham calls “S.I.”) changes in different environments means that it can be controlled. You’re not stuck with the same S.I., like you are with your eye color or height. If I pay you a compliment after you hit a great shot, your S.I. grows. With a higher S.I., you’ll start to walk with a swagger, feel like time is slowing down for you and execute fluid shots. Perfect. Unfortunately, it works the other way, too, and your coach won’t always be there to prop you up. This puts you in charge of your S.I., and unfortunately, from what I’ve seen, most weekend players fail to manage it. The self-deprecation is amazing: “That was horrible,” “I stink,” and “I’ll never be any good if I hit shots like that.” Giving your S.I. a beating like this makes subsequent shots seem harder, which in turn makes you anxious. And the more anxious you are, the more your mind will race. The game will speed up and you’ll have difficulty maintaining focus and fluidity. At this point, technique and conscious thought no longer matter—your feelings are driving your poor shotmaking. Basically, you’re spiraling out of control and becoming your own worst enemy.

My experiences with Dr. Wilson and Lanny Bassham have taught me that feeling like a champion is dependent on your ability to protect and grow your S.I. on a daily basis. This is the first step toward becoming a strong mental competitor. I teach four strategies to help make it happen.

1. Develop a Post-Shot Routine

How you react and evaluate yourself immediately after you hit a shot is critical if you’re going to feel like a champion and play up to your potential, because this is when your S.I. is most conducive to change. If you think about it, only one of two things can happen after a swing: an outcome that makes you happy or one that doesn’t. Here’s how to deal with both.

When You Hit a Good Shot . . .

. . . immediately take a moment and internalize it; take ownership with some emotion attached, and imbed it in your mind. Say, “Yes, that’s the real me.” Doing this creates positive emotions and increases confidence. It sounds simplistic, but most golfers never give themselves credit for hitting good shots. They stiff a shot from 170 yards and act like it was supposed to happen, as if pulling off a successful shot is always a forgone conclusion (which it isn’t)! Watch Tiger Woods or any elite player react to a great shot. They twirl the club, pump their fist, flash a smile—they get fired up! Emotion cements memory, and most of us only display it after bad shots, which of course is counterproductive.

When You Hit a Bad Shot . . .

. . . immediately objectify it. Keep your emotions in check and literally state a solution. Think, “If I had a do-over, what would I do differently?” The solutions are endless (a different club or target, higher commitment level to the shot, more hip turn, etc.) and vary for every shot and every player. This is where the true role of a coach comes in. A good coach should be able to help his or her player understand their misses with absolute certainty, then provide simple solutions. When I hit a weak flare to the right, I know that my upper body tilted back in the downswing and I carried the handle, so the solution for me is to stay level as I rotate. When I chunk a finesse shot, or fly it farther than I intend to, I know that my tempo in the transition was quick, which ruined the sequence. My solution is to maintain a lighter grip pressure and feel as though the club is doing all of the work. Because I know what my misses mean when they happen, I can immediately play the swing over in my mind the correct way and recommit to my fundamentals. And even though I hit a poor shot, I end up being even more committed to my fundamentals and sure of myself. I control my emotional state so that it can’t control or limit me. The immature or undisciplined can’t imagine this possibility.
With this approach, every shot has the opportunity to make you a better player, regardless of its outcome. Your good shots are confidence-builders, and your bad ones are learning opportunities. There’s nothing but winning and learning when you have a championship mentality.

The facts are simple: humans learn by making mistakes, processing information, and adapting based on their knowledge and experience so that they can avoid repeating them. A baby falls hundreds of times before he learns to walk. Would he learn to walk faster or better if every time he fell he told himself how pathetic he was? The great U.C.L.A. basketball coach John Wooden once said, “Why do we dread adversity when we know that facing it is the only way to become stronger, smarter, and better?”

Completing Your Routine

The last step of a quality post-shot routine, and perhaps the most important, is “letting go.” Once you’ve mentally corrected a bad shot, be done with it. Don’t take the negative experience of the last shot to the next one. Don’t take it to the next hole. And for sure, don’t take it home. Negativity stifles the learning process and makes peak performance impossible. It’s like carrying around a ton of bricks; it tires the body and burdens the mind. Is that what golf is supposed to be like? No! Golf is a journey that should be filled with joy! Regardless of what happens, each round has the potential to be a great one.

2. Count Your Blessings

One of the strategies Dr. Wilson suggested to me was to start an “appreciation journal.” I’m 100 percent certain that everyone, regardless of who they are and what’s happening in their life, has many things to feel blessed about. It’s more a matter of whether you choose to recognize and focus on them or not.

On the computer you use daily, or in your short game journal, create a document (or page) and title it “My Blessings.” Invest two minutes per day, every day, to feel the strong positive emotion of counting your blessings. Do it the first thing in the morning, or as you have your coffee. Don’t wait until after you check your e-mail or start returning texts and phone calls or any activity that may distract or derail you. Write down one thing that you’re either thankful for or recognize as a blessing. Keep it to one sentence, and don’t make it difficult. It can be anything as long as it’s true. Here are the first five entries I made in my appreciation journal, started more than five years ago:

After a while the blessings will start to accumulate, and you’ll marvel at just how good things really are. Before you put away your journal, randomly pick and reflect on two previous entries. It takes two minutes to write down one blessing and reflect on two others—a very quick way to get your day started off on an emotionally positive note. Having the right perspective and attitude is a habit. So is winning. Win those first two minutes and you just may win the day.

3. Dare to Dream

You can’t control your dreams when you’re asleep, but you can when you’re awake. Use them to build an image of how you’d like your round to go with the intent of imbedding the acts you want to take place into your subconscious. Get comfortable in a nice quiet place and start taking slow, deep breaths: Inhale for four seconds, exhale for four seconds. As you focus on your breathing, let your muscles relax and your mind clear. Now, imagine yourself as you want to be when you show up to the course. You’re confident and unhurried as you walk through the parking lot to the clubhouse, your belief in yourself growing with each step. Go through a typical warm-up. You’re graceful and relaxed as you hit a few drivers, a few putts and some short-game shots. See your swings in slow motion and mentally feel their motion right where you sit. Go through your pre-shot routine. You’re walking into each shot clear and committed to your strategy. Recall previous great moments on the course. That’s how I’m going to feel today when I play. See yourself knocking in a putt on the last hole and feel satisfaction with the result.

Your dream exercise is complete. Repeat it every day. It takes but ten minutes. Remember, the type of work that you do and your approach to improvement has as much or more to do with greatness than talent.

4. Gain Perspective

Golf is what you do, not who you are. When you play poorly, you’re no less the human being than when you play great. There’s you and then there’s your score, and never the twain shall meet. To make sure the number on your card doesn’t swallow you up (or put your nose in the air), find something outside the game to put energy into and draw satisfaction from: your church, your family, your physical fitness, etc. Make it something positive. I call this “having a glass of perspective.” (Those of you old enough to have an adult beverage know what I’m talking about.) Sometimes we make the little things more important than they are and lose sight of the big picture. With the right perspective, a bad shot or poor performance will have no effect on your S.I., or deter you from the vision of what you plan to accomplish.

CHAMPIONSHIP THINKING STRATEGIES

You now have three strategies and a mindset to feel like a champion. With your emotions under control, you can now start thinking like a champion. Like anything else, it comes down to the choices you make. As humans, we have volition, the power to choose our thoughts and actions. Volition—not prudence—allows us to climb Mount Everest, win medals of honor in battle, and create fine art. How we think and what we do are choices. Here are nine areas of mental performance that’ll either make or break you, depending on the route you follow.

1. Choose Mental Toughness: Make decisions with conviction and a commitment to “this is how it’s gonna be today!” Picture a swimming pool—in January. Even though the water is freezing, you think it’s a good day for a swim and test the water with your big toe. The rush of cold from the water, however, suddenly creates uncertainty and weakens your resolve. Now you have second thoughts. But what if you made the conscious decision to walk to the edge of the pool and jump in as soon as you reached its edge, freezing water be damned? That’s commitment. That’s the power of volition. The more committed you are to your decision, the more control you have over what’s going to happen (jump in the cold pool, finish that proposal at work, hit wedge shots without fear, etc.), and the easier it’ll be to do it.

2. Separate Internal and External Focus: As you read the guidelines for effective training in the last chapter, you likely noticed the terms “internal” and “external” focus. These refer to where your thoughts reside and what you’re focused on. If your thoughts are internally focused, you’re thinking about specific movements within your body during the swing, such as keeping your head still. Internal focus is essential only during block practice. That’s when the little details matter as you work toward mastery. This is how you learn, not how you play. Internal focus can be a drug, and those that become addicted to it lose feel for the game and rarely have those rounds where everything falls easily into place. Great golf—great shotmaking—requires external focus, which resides outside the confines of your body and club. Focusing externally allows an action to occur automatically or subconsciously, like when you tied your shoelaces this morning. There’s no “how” when you’re externally focused, there’s just “do.”

Most players, however, go to the range for an hour, thinking internally about mechanics for the entire sixty minutes, then head to the course somehow expecting to see the shot and “let it go.” Since your habits are defined by what you do most of the time, it’s not going to happen this way. This is one reason why I’m so particular about the type of work I ask my students to do. You have to take the time to ensure that your fundamentals are in order (internal focus, block practice) before you can trust them, which requires its own type of training (external focus, random practice). The proper practice mix is built into the training programs outlined in this book, but it’s important that you’re aware of its ingredients. Remember, your intent dictates your focus.

With this in mind, I have two additional guidelines for practice and performance. First, I believe it’s impossible to focus on the target and your movement at the same time. That’s why I ask my players to remove the target during block practice and hit into open space, which allows them to focus and evaluate solely on movement and not outcome. When it comes to random practice time, I reintroduce the pin. A clear target essentially becomes a cue to think about only what you want the ball to do using external focus and positive images.

Second, manage your thoughts. Imagination and feel are right-brain activities that require mental clarity and focus. Your conscious mind can only hold one thought at a time, so if you’re thinking about your technique, you’re failing to engage or react to the target—the ultimate goal. This doesn’t eliminate the usefulness of swing thoughts, however. A single swing key can buoy confidence and be a catalyst to great execution. Where it resides in your mind is the critical factor. Is it something you’re simply aware of, or is it a predominant thought or a command on how to play? Commands tend to ruin athletic motion and timing, while a simple awareness of a mechanic (if subservient to a strong focus on the shot) doesn’t. Understanding this dynamic can make a huge difference in your mental game and on-course performance.

3. Choose to Prioritize “Quality Position”: Quality position refers to your ability to keep the ball in the right area of the course relative to the pin so that you leave yourself easy shots. Whether it’s creating an open angle when hitting into the green so that you don’t have to carry a hazard, or leaving yourself an easy finesse wedge or putt, maintaining quality position is one of the most important ingredients of good scoring. I know a lot of amateurs who can reel off four or five pars in a row without blinking but fail to break 80, because they make several double- or triple-bogeys each round. The ball won’t always go where you want it to, but if you identify the quality position before you select each shot, and strategize as if a Tour caddy is on your bag, I bet you’d cut the amount of times you leave yourself an impossible short-game shot in half. Easy shots lead to low scores. Hard shots lead to the occasional train wreck.

4. Master Your Process: When I talk about process, I’m referring to the steps you run through, both physically and mentally, that optimize your chances for success and long-term growth before you even hit the shot. It encompasses your pre-shot routine, the shot itself and the post-shot routine. The goal of your pre-shot routine is to narrow your focus so you can clearly commit and react to what you see. Picture a funnel. At the top is where you pour in all of the information you’ve gathered about the shot you’re facing: the wind, yardage, lie, slope, etc. As this data moves through the funnel, things get narrower and clearer until a strategy is formulated. As it nears the bottom, you start to visualize the shot and feel the movement necessary to produce it. Ultimately, you end up with a precise output that allows you to react without conscious thought or effort; an automated response to your vision. All that’s left to do is calmly pull the trigger with a clear committed mind. The illustration on the next page shows the funnel-like process for a 10-yard finesse wedge shot.

Your shot is either going to be good or bad—intended or unintended. After a good shot, take ownership emotionally—imprint. After your poor ones, choose to be solution-oriented and learn something. Make and replay the correction and then be done—move on.

The Process

5. Choose to Make Process the Most Important Thing: Champions often choose to make the process more important than the outcome. The reason this is a championship mindset is that it’s easy to control the process of a shot but not always possible to control its results. I’ve hit plenty of great-looking and great-feeling shots in my day that flew the green, plugged under the lip of a bunker, or took a wicked kick into shrubs. It’s counterproductive and draining to worry about things outside your control, which are numerous in golf: wind, temperature, course conditions, annoying playing partners, misjudgment, and your standing to par or other players.

Only think about and evaluate things you can control. If you executed a solid process and the shot felt like you imagined it would feel, it deserves high marks regardless of the outcome. Sometimes this is difficult to accept, but you have to make it a way of life. I know several PGA Tour players who evaluate and “score” their process for each shot and each round and let the chips fall where they may. I suggest you create a process score when you play and practice and work on improving it daily. When the process becomes the thing you care about the most and evaluate the hardest, you’re free from expectation and liberated to simply play the game.

Your new mantra is: “I’m not overly concerned by the result of any shot, because I’m not a robot and hitting both good and bad shots is a natural part of the game. I know that being a champion takes faith and resiliency. I have faith because my fundamentals are good, and I’m working hard on doing the right things the right way. In the long run, the results will take care of themselves and I will achieve my goals.”

Expert at Work!

Watch me run through my full process for hitting a successful finesse wedge shot on a special video. Visit jsegolfacademy.com/index.php/james-sieckmann.

6. Set Process Goals: Setting goals is clearly valuable. In Chapter 3, I asked you to come up with some performance goals (“I will shoot in the 70s”) and write them in your journal. Now I’d like you to set a few process goals. A process goal deals with the little things you can control today that’ll add up to something bigger in the end. Here are some quality examples:

  • To have the most effective, most disciplined post-shot routine at the club, in the tournament, in my state, etc.
  • To win with attitude. (I borrowed this from student and PGA Tour player Cameron Tringale.)
  • To walk into every shot with clear commitment, thinking only about what I want in a positive way.
  • To practice harder and smarter than anyone I know.

7. Invest In the Future (but Live in the Present): Helplessness, anger, and frustration are emotions tied to the past. Fear and anxiety live in the future, along with outcome. Ignore both and commit to playing in the present. Perform one task at a time, one shot at a time, and one step in your process at a time.

8. Try Just the Right Amount: Can you “over-try” in golf? Of course you can! Doing so, however, creates tension, which ruins timing and fluidity and makes it more challenging to be resilient when things don’t go according to plan. Develop an awareness of your “try” level and set yours to “just hard enough” all day. To me, “just hard enough” lives somewhere between “let’s just have fun out there today” and “look and play fearlessly today.”

9. Be OK: There’s a famous mental-game story on Tour about a father-son duo that any golfer can learn from. (The father is a famous coach, and the son would go on to become a major champion, but I won’t name names.) As the boy became a teenager and started competing on a national level, the father took him out one day to a particularly difficult driving hole and instructed him to tee up a ball and hit it into the lake left of the fairway. The son gave his father a quizzical look, but did as instructed. The father then asked his son to tee up a second ball and hit it into the houses beyond the course’s boundary to the right. After launching the ball O.B. and into the neighboring homes, the father asked, “Are you OK?” The son answered, “Yes, I’m fine.” “All right,” the father replied, “now tee up another ball and hit it down the fairway.”

The message is simple and clear: Regardless of what happens to your ball, it’s just a shot. It can’t really cause harm unless you let it. Don’t allow yourself to be defined by your results. In big moments, you have to be willing to lose—and be OK with it—in order to win. This takes maturity, a healthy S.I., and perspective.

As Shakespeare wrote, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

JOURNAL WORK

  • Go to the championship-feeling section of your journal and start the proactive process of becoming the player you want to be. Write down the four strategies to control emotion and grow and protect your S.I. Define your post-shot routine, start the first day of your blessing journal, and define a suitable time and place every day to dream and see yourself as the person you want to be tomorrow, and to note the instances or circumstances where you commonly lose perspective. Write down an action plan—what you’re going to do about each.
  • Next, review my championship-thinking strategies. Be honest with yourself and note which ones, if any, you’ve been failing at. Once again, getting in touch with your mental-game deficiencies is an important step, but it’s the development of an action plan to improve them that’ll make the difference. Write down what you’re going to do to change your habits.
  • Your mental plan should start coming into focus. Review and amend this section of your journal regularly to keep your plan relevant and up-to-date. Remember, the little things add up to great things.