Golf Flow

buttress your confidence, and push you sufficiently to maximize your abilities.

Environmental Variables on the Course
    The features that frequently change in golfers’ environments include whom they’re playing with, how others are playing, the prestige of the tournament, and their own score or standing relative to other golfers. It is well known that golfers begin to feel different when they are playing with the boss or with an important client; it is just as well known that golfers begin to feel nervous as they start approaching their personal best scores.
    I knew a golfer who could shoot 67 at a golf course, but when he saw a banner announcing that a particular match was an official tournament, his 67 invariably turned into 76. The golf course, the clubs, and the golfer did not change. But one subtle cue—the banner announcement—changed everything. This trigger altered his behavior on the course, just as the lights and music were triggers for diners in the restaurant.
    In golf, allowing subtle cues to alter the speed with which we do things or to disrupt the positive thoughts that allow us to play our best is a recipe for disaster.
    Earlier in this book we established that a key characteristic of mastery golfers is that they view golf as a game in which they compete against two things—themselves and the golf course—rather than against a score, an opponent, or another golfer.
    Conceptually, that sounds great. The real difficulty, as most golfers quickly understand, is actually doing it. “How do I play the golf course? How do I ignore distractions?” Most rounds of golf have plenty of distractions that can take our focus off the golf course. For the amateur golfer, those distractions may come in the form of playing with a boss or colleague; for the professional, they may come in the form of cameras and leaderboards.
    Golfers who want to shift from an ego to a mastery mind-set must make the decision to change their behavior.
    What can a golfer do to defend against environmental cues and distractions, especially those that occur at a level beyond his or her awareness? The bulk of the answer can be summed up in a single word: routine.
    Competing in golf requires that golfers develop and stick to a routine as well as they can on every shot. On the PGA Tour, what appears to the gallery as one golfer playing against another is actually one golfer getting into his routine on a golf course as well as he can while another golfer gets into his routine on a golf course as well as
he
can.
    On the scoreboard of the 2007 British Open, the final holes appeared to be a contest between Sergio Garcia and Padraig Harrington. In fact, the real contest was between Sergio’s ability to immerse himself in his routine at Carnoustie and Padraig’s ability to immerse himself in
his
routine.

Accomplished pros like Padraig Harrington develop and use a great routine to tune out distractions and help generate flow.

    Ian Bines/Action Plus/Icon SMI
    I always teach people that golf is not a horse race as much as it is a dart game. You can’t influence your opponent as you can in football, and you’re not trying to play against someone else as you do in basketball. You pick targets and commit to those targets. The event is self-contained and isolated, just like darts.
    If you watched the 2007 British Open closely, and especially if you watched it through a psychological lens as I do, you would no doubt have noticed that part of the reason that Sergio’s uneven Sunday round differed so much from his first three flawless rounds was that his routine had changed. It had become quicker and tighter than it had been on the previous three days. On the other hand, Padraig Harrington spent time before the playoff working with his sport psychologist Bob Rotella on his routine to ensure that it was in sync and would be able to withstand the pressure of the moment.
    Certainly, both Nicklaus and Woods worked on their routines throughout their entire careers. Jack has said that he never went into a competition thinking that he had to beat another golfer. Rather, he prepared himself and his game for a particular golf course. Tiger learned that from Jack, as he said after winning the 1996 U.S. Amateur championship:
All I do is stay in my same routine. Even though I have certain putts that are bigger than others, you never see me out of rhythm. I always stay the same pace, do everything the same. So what I did the first hole today and the last