Imagine for a moment you are invited to play a fabulous golf course with some important individuals in your community. (Maybe you won a prize drawing to get this.) Let's say the foursome is made up of your local representative to Congress, an influential business leader, a sport celebrity -- and you. You know they are all pretty good golfers, maybe better than you are.
You're keyed up. You are nervous, but excited in a good way, on the trip out to the course. Despite first tee jitters, you hit a good drive on the first hole. After a routine par on the first hole, you knock in birdie putts on the next two holes! Two under after three! This could be your career round!
On the fourth hole, a par three, you again hit the green in regulation -- hey, this is easy -- then you knock the first putt way past the hole and just miss the five footer coming back. Oops, a bogey. Still, one under after four isn't bad. You're the center of attention in the group.
Next hole is a long, uphill par four. Maybe you usually would plan to take three shots to reach the green, but today you're thinking about getting back that stroke you just lost. You put a little extra juice on the driver and, bam, hit a big slice to the right, off the golf course. Out of bounds! Tee up another one quickly, try to correct your slice, and, whoops, a duck hook out of bounds to the left. Laying four and still on the tee!
Time is speeding up. You're a little disoriented. You go back to your bag, get another ball, tee it up and swipe it low but straight, about 150 yards down the fairway. Still 300 yards more to go, uphill, to the green. As you walk to your ball, how do you feel? Are thoughts racing through your mind? Did the "wheels come off?" Is your pulse accelerating? Are you flustered? Is that keyed up feeling gone, deflated? Is mental confusion a real possibility?
At this moment, one skill, above all, will determine whether you regain the magic of the first few holes or sink inexorably into the longest, most embarrassing day of your golfing life. That skill is emotional management. If you practice a couple of simple techniques, you will easily regain most of your lost composure by the time you reach your ball.
While this story is a bit fanciful, all of us golfers can recall numerous times when very good rounds unraveled into pathetic performances. We ask ourselves plaintively, "What happened; where did it go?" Most often, we lose our emotional equilibrium and our mind-body harmony dissolves. Somewhere along the way, our calm and confidant attitude is overrun by some combination of frustration, anger, anxiety, and uncertainty.
In turn, these restrictive emotions influence our body chemistry and degrade the performance of our nervous systems. Our concentration suffers. We get sloppy with our pre-shot routines. We lose our rhythm and tempo. We rush the downswing before completing the backswing.
In the energetic aspects of golf, your attitude, confidence, and coordination are enhanced or diminished by your emotions. Once insecurity sets in, for example, that's a strong emotion that causes a drop in the energetic of confidence. Loss of confidence, in turn, causes a drop in mental focus and physical performance, because these are all linked together in the human bioelectrical system. Insecurity affects your mind's and body's ability to operate in coherent coordination. No matter how many quick fixes you try, a drop in emotional energy affects focus, swing rhythm, and accuracy.
The folks at HeartMath have been helping individuals in all walks of life learn to manage emotions, improve mental clarity, and enhance biophysical functioning during the stresses of daily life. Businessmen began using HeartMath techniques they learned on the job on the golf course. Their scores got lower and word got out. Then amateur and professional athletes began using HeartMath to achieve sustained periods of peak performance, an emotional state termed "coherence" by physiologists. These techniques are surprisingly simple and effective. You can learn them, and benefit from them, in a relatively short time.
We discussed one of these techniques in a previous column on PGA.com (http://www.pga.com/improve/features/mentalgame/improve_heartmath060204.cfm).
Simple as it seems, each step of this technique is important to get the coherence you want. If you are reasonably comfortable using a computer, you can accelerate your ability to achieve coherence repeatedly and reliably, thanks to the Freeze Framer software from HeartMath. You can see how this HeartMath technique (or other techniques you use) is working as you watch your heart rhythms change into a smooth and coherent pattern as your emotions change. You can learn more about all this at www.golf.freezeframer.com.
When should you invoke the HeartMath techniques? Although they are invaluable for damage control -- to pull your disintegrating round back from the brink of the abyss -- they are even more powerful when used to set the tone for your entire game. Consider your thoughts, emotions and actions prior to your round of golf. Any disgruntled emotional undercurrents that flow through your body before you even get to the golf course can have an impact on your game. To better experience the joy of golf, start your preparation by getting into coherence before you get to the golf course.
As you go about your business, practice HeartMath's Quick Coherence and Attitude Breathing techniques an hour or more prior to game play to recoup any emotional energy you have drained that day from stress or to build up your energy accumulators. It's simple: start by focusing on the area of your heart, pretend that you're breath is moving in and out through the heart area, and find something to appreciate in your life. Keep breathing that feeling or attitude of appreciation through your heart area. This immediately will start to resynchronize your system -- mental, emotional, and physical. Ordered and harmonious heart rhythms from positive emotional attitudes send synchronized signals to the brain that create coherence, increase energy, improve hormonal and immune response, and improve coordination and reaction times. You definitely will notice a positive difference in your mental and emotional state as you approach the first hole.
Once your round is under way, why not be proactive in managing your emotions? It really does not require much effort. As you approach the tee or await your turn to hit, take a few seconds to breathe deeply through your heart and feel a positive emotion such as appreciation for something, then hold that positive feeling.
It's especially important to prepare yourself emotionally before each shot, and it's just as important to reaccumulate energy and regain emotional equilibrium quickly after you make shots you're not satisfied with. Finding "wholeness satisfaction" in a game comes from learning to calibrate your emotions on each end -- before a shot or after a bad shot or bad hole. Two of the easiest attitudes for emotional calibration are appreciation and compassion. Practice shifting into a sincere attitude of appreciation when you hit a good shot or improve in any aspect of your shot. Don't let one thing that didn't go right sap your emotional energy. If you hit a shot that's so pathetic you cannot find a single thing to appreciate about it, simply shift into a genuine sense of compassion for yourself and the lot of all golfers who suffer at the hands of "old man par." Compassion will keep you in emotional equilibrium so you don't drain energy and confidence.
These two attitudes, appreciation and compassion, used pre and post shots, will help keep you in emotional equilibrium during your game and help you to get into flow and ease of game play. In the HeartMath labs, researchers have found that appreciation and compassion are physiological triggers for mind-body synchronization and coherence. By practicing appreciation and compassion, you learn to recoup security and confidence fast; and that helps release the rest of the glitches. Just those two attitudes -- and the feelings, hormones and brain waves they generate -- are a strength builder to create and maintain emotional equilibrium in the face of the outrageous fortune the game routinely inflicts on us. It's finding that inner rhythm of emotional equilibrium that lets you play your best golf under all circumstances.
Deborah Rozman is a high performance psychologist, author, President and co-CEO of Quantum Intech, Inc. (QI) a technology company that develops and licenses products and services that reduce stress, improve health, and increase performance based on the HeartMath System For more information about on the HeartMath System, visit www.quantumintech.com or www.golf.freezeframer.com.
Michael McTeigue is the author of the acclaimed instruction book, The Keys to the Effortless Golf Swing.
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