Mental Game Corner
Personality vesus Mindset
By Dr. Rick Sessinghaus PGA
"Golf's Mental Coach"

As I was coaching one of my professional golfers, the discussion turned to, how should I act on the course to be at my best? Many athletes confuse personality with mindset. In golf there have been a wide variety of personalities that have succeeded on the PGA Tour. There have been serious, withdrawn golfers such as Ben Hogan and there have been fun loving, extroverts such as Lee Trevino. We are not going to change who you are, we just want to make sure you have the mindset to play your best. The mindset consists of the skills of focus and emotional control. Where you place your attention, sustaining focus, and using your emotions to help your performance are key components of mindset. This is what can be trained and changed. Your personality is what makes you who you are and you want to honor that part. Think about what part of your mindset that needs adjustments, is it to be in the moment, focused on the correct cues, and/or emotionally confident and in control?

Mindset is a choice and being aware of your thoughts is the first step in training the performance mindset. Once you become aware of your thoughts it becomes crucial to identify if these thoughts are helping or hurting performance. If they are hurting performance then new habits need to be learned. Self-talk is the technique that can get your mindset back on track. Use questions to guide your focus. A simple question would be, "What shot do I want to hit in this situation?" A proper question gets the mindset to focus on the present shot and away from distractions.

Trigger words can also be used to sustain focus. After you have picked the shot you want to play it is important to remain focused to the target. Some players will get over a ball and start thinking of hazards, their swing, or their playing partners and this loss of focus will negatively affect their shot. By having a trigger word like "target" or "tempo" will help you be focused throughout the shot. Words create pictures, so it is very important to monitor what words you are using. Are you saying to yourself, "don't go into the water" or "let's hit a smooth 5 iron to 10 feet right of the flag", the choice is yours.

Self-talk also affects your emotions. After you hit a shot is the key time for emotions to take over. If you hit a poor shot it is not time to be critical and call yourself names and say to yourself "you stink". It is best to use the time after a shot to learn from the results so you can use the information for future shots. With so much time on the course you have to control your mindset and the best way to do it is to control your self-talk. Start today by using more positive language and stop yourself from becoming critical with negative self labels. Your mindset is a habitual choice, start developing a better mindset and you will start to play better golf.

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