How Great Golfers Think- 7-31-10

Background Bob Skura

Bob discovered the secrets to the mental game of golf in response to failure. He had ambitions to play professionally but a stint on the Canadian tour didn’t turn out as planned.

He was 21 at the time, and like most golfers, was perplexed by why he could shoot the lights out one day and hit it sideways the next.

So Bob sat down and took stock of his attributes.

First he wondered if his physique was the problem. There were players on the Tour who were taller, smaller, heavier and lighter than Bob. They were making a great living at it, so he eliminated body type as a factor.

Then he wondered if his mechanics were good enough. Some players like Anthony Kim swing perfectly on plane, but others like Jim Furyk and Kenny Perry have unorthodox styles, yet still manage to win big money. So Bob concluded that swing mechanics alone don’t determine a golfer’s success.

Finally Bob considered his equipment and training. But he realized that all of the money he had spent over the years on drivers, utility clubs, books, videos and swing aids had done more to make his basement look like a golf warehouse than help him lower his scores.

So Bob concluded that the secret to making those days of stellar performance a more frequent occurrence wasn’t based on anything he could do physically.

The answer had to have something to do with what was going on between his ears.

Intrigued by these observations, Bob began reading all the psychology literature he could find on human performance, hoping to uncover secrets to the mental game.

For many years he studied the ideas of more than 100 renowned psychologists like Maria Montessori (childhood education), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Guru of Flow), D.H. Meichenbaum (SIT Stress Inoculation Training), Lev Vygotsky (function of language in human development), Edwin Locke and Gary Latham (goal-setting), and Albert Bandura (self-efficacy).

As a result Bob came to realize that our mental skills – how we think, talk and play – are as fundamental to success in the mental game of golf as grip, posture and alignment are to the physical game.