GGA Mental Game Coach

The key to accessing your highest potential on the golf course is to cultivate a mindset that is built and nurtured far away from the course itself.

Bart Barnard is one of the fine master-instructors at Graves Golf Academy. If you’ve ever had a chance to work with Bart – either at a GGA school, in the video coaching program or near his home at the GGA training facility at The Legacy Resort in Phoenix – you know that Bart is smart, conscientious, attentive, observant, and a very skilled golf coach and teacher.

Just another example of the terrific people Todd and Tim Graves has brought to the GGA staff over the years.

Bart came to me a little over a year ago and expressed that he was interested in collaborating together in a coach-client partnership. So we put a plan together and began working on Bart’s most important initiatives.

If you attended the Alumni 5-Day Camp in Orlando in April, on the last day of the camp, you heard Bart speak about what he experienced while working on himself over the prior year. And if you weren’t there…that’s ok…cause I want to tell you about the message Bart had for all of us about the secret to taking on nearly any performance endeavor.

In addition to the qualities I mentioned above, Bart is a thinker. And he has thought a lot about the insights he gained over the prior year…as well as his own personal and professional growth. And he expressed those insights at the alumni camp in April in one sentence:

“Be better, not bitter.”

Bart explained that he noticed that any time he showed up anywhere with negative energy…any time he experienced negative emotions like frustration, anger, anxiousness, worry…etc. …that there seemed to be an underlying negative thought process which he was experiencing as bitterness.

Not the kind of bitterness that creates a 24-7 grumpy guy, mad at the world…etc. (Although I bet you know one of those guys!) But rather, the kind of bitterness that takes away from the sweetness of life at any moment.

Bart learned that he would much rather let the experiences in his past make him better, and not create bitterness within him.

Now, let’s face it. We’ve all been there. On the golf course, or off. (OK…especially off!!) We’ve all experienced frustration, anger, anxiety…etc.

But in holding this maxim – Be better, not bitter –  Bart reminds himself (and all of us) that we have a choice about how we show up in any moment. And that the bold, productive, BEST choice is to commit to being BETTER

Being a better co-worker, a better spouse, a better teammate, a better playing partner on the golf course…just BETTER. It means something slightly different to everyone…but we all know what BETTER looks like.

And it’s a much more pleasant way to move through life.

If you want to build a successful mental game on the course, you must know how to do it elsewhere. Being Better in every facet of your life will help you to:

• See things from a new perspective
• Focus on others, and not just your own neediness
• Soften the need to be right, to win, or to NOT lose
• Build the resilience necessary to recover from setbacks
• Bring a sense of confidence, calm and peacefulness to your experiences…which will allow you to tap into your genius, your creativity, and all your skills and abilities so that you can BE YOUR BEST…and perhaps even PLAY your best.

Focus this week on Being better, not bitter…as you prepare to play next weekend. See what a commitment to being BETTER this week can do for your mental game on the course next weekend. I think you will be pleasantly surprised!

Paul Monahan, PCC is a Peak-Performance coach, member of the International Coach Federation and a certified COR.E Performance Dynamics Specialist. He resides in Cleveland, Ohio with his wife Paula and is the proud dad to three young men. He works with elite-level performers and leaders, helping them to expand their awareness so that they perform at their best more consistently.

He can be reached at paul@paulmonahancoaching.com

GGA Mental Game Coach

Your brain is amazing.

It regulates your body process, allows you to analyze and interpret external stimuli and is the source of the very consciousness that allows you to read this sentence.

And it is also an incredible survival tool.

The brain has a very powerful (but primitive) threat response system designed to keep you alive. Great when you need to run from a tiger (as you may have needed to 50,000 years ago), but not so great when you want to perform at your best in a competitive situation (like the Spring member-guest against your buddies.)

Your brain’s threat response system is always monitoring your external environment to determine if your safety is in jeopardy, much like aa software program running silently in the background. You probably aren’t even aware of it.

The challenge with this system is that it is not smart enough to know the difference between a saber-toothed tiger running toward you (which could ACTUALLY harm you) and a slippery downhill 10-footer on the eighteenth hole to tie your match.

In both cases, your brain goes into threat response because it has assessed that you might lose something very important to you. It signals to your body that you are in danger.

The problem? On the golf course, this response has physical and mental implications. Sweaty palms impact your ability to hold the putter properly. Nervous, shaking hands affect your ability to move the putter as you would like to. And clouded judgment can impact the kind of decision-making that keeps you in your process.

So what to do?

I believe that we can be successful more consistently in nearly any performance context when we do certain things to prevent the brain’s threat response from activating.

I coach my clients on the distinction between operating from a Mastery Orientation versus operating from an Outcome Orientation. And I teach them how to adopt a Mastery Orientation whenever stepping into any kind of performance arena.

The primary difference between the two operating orientations is this: people who operate a Mastery Orientation are concerned with elevating their competence. People who operate from an Outcome Orientation are concerned with proving their competence.

Because of this, a golfer with a Mastery Orientation has a distinct performance advantage. They are more likely to stay connected to all their skills and abilities. And they can execute at a high level and do things like:

• tune into their surroundings in productive ways
• stick to their game plan and make clear decisions
• stay in the present moment and execute their process
• feel the putter move freely
• be playful and PLAY the game

This is because they are not wrapped up in results. To them, outcomes are important, but only insomuch as they (the outcomes) reflect where they (the golfer) are on their own path to mastery.

They know deep down that the WORST that can happen is that they will learn something: about their game, their capacity for resilience, their ability to compete in certain conditions…etc. And because they hold this knowledge, their brain’s primitive threat response is not activated as easily.

When they hit wayward shots, they see those shots in the context of their overall goals in golf – and not as defining moments in that particular competition, nor even how they define their own self-worth.

In a way, golfers who operate from a Mastery Orientation have written a story for themselves about what their experiences on the golf course mean to them. And they access that story each time they play.

For them, golf is not (entirely) about winning or losing, but rather about growing in their mastery of the game. Each shot – no matter the stakes – is an opportunity to learn and improve, not a challenge.

The result? They play better. They score better. And typically enjoy themselves more.

On the other hand, the golfer who operates from an Outcome Orientation is typically in for a much more emotionally-charged ride on the course. Why? Because their ego is heavily involved in how they see each shot. (Remember, they are trying to PROVE their competence, not grow it.)

When they stand at the first tee, they experience anxiety because they are trying to show the world the fruits of all their hard work on the range. (We call this pressure.)

And when they have to face that slippery downhill 10-footer, the dominant thoughts are not about what they could gain, but rather about what they might lose. They experience what my colleague and NHL hockey prospect coach Walter Aguilar calls horizontal thinking: they “move horizontally” in their thinking to the future, imagining how awful it would be to miss the putt and to lose their credibility with their friends and/or competitors.

As a result, they begin to lose access to their high-level cognitive functioning, as well as the physical skills and abilities they possessed prior to starting the round. And of course, this can start a kind of performance death spiral that is very difficult to pull out of.

The good news is that you have options. You can choose the mental and emotional stance from which to operate when you play. You can choose the orientation you want to adopt when playing golf.

I hope you choose a Mastery Orientation.

Paul Monahan, PCC is a Peak-Performance coach, member of the International Coach Federation and a certified COR.E Performance Dynamicsä Specialist. He resides in Cleveland, Ohio with his wife Paula and is the proud dad to three young men. He works with elite-level performers and leaders, helping them to expand their awareness so that they perform at their best more consistently.

He can be reached at paul@paulmonahancoaching.com

GGA Performance Mindset Coach.

Just had a great week in Orlando at the GGA 5-Day Alumni Camp.

It was a fun week of learning, instruction, growth, as well as some great conversation about what it takes to perform at a high level.

My job at the camp last week was to help the attendees to expand their awareness of the mental and emotional dynamics that allow them to show up at their best.

Said a little differently, I was there to help them learn how to tune into their energetic presence…the mix of physical, mental emotional and other elements that merge to form what I refer to as performance energy.

I believe that the key to performing at your best consistently over time is to build awareness of self… and a knowledge of how the things around you are impacting your thoughts.

How does the experience of standing on the first tee with an audience of other golfers watching you impact your ability to access your skills? Does it make you feel nervous? And if it does, can you identify the actual thinking that produces that nervousness?

If you can identify the thinking, then you are well on your way toward increased awareness. And then you can do something about thoughts that are unproductive, versus ideas that are supportive of your efforts, goals, objectives…etc.

For example, you might realize that you are nervous because you don’t want to be embarrassed by duffing your tee ball into the woods. You don’t want the harsh judgment of others. Understandable.

But what’s another way to look at that? Perhaps all the guys behind you want nothing better than to see you hit it well. They too are capable of hitting it into the woods – by in their minds, they are behind you, pulling for you to hit a great shot.

Or perhaps, they don’t care that much at all. So then you can forget about all that worry and anxiety. After all, it’s just misplaced energy.

All that is left, then is for you to step up and hit it where you want to. (And accept that you can handle the results…no matter where the ball goes.)

We talked a lot last week about increasing awareness of what is happening on the golf course to play better golf.

But here’s the interesting thing: you can practice increasing your awareness all day long, anywhere you go. In traffic. At work. In your interactions with colleagues or those closest to you. There are opportunities ALL DAY LONG to tune into the thought patterns that are driving how you interpret your experiences.

My message to the group last week is the same message I give you here: if you want to improve how you play on the golf course, a practice growing your awareness of self in every moment you can. Not just on the golf course, putting green, or during play, but in every situation you experience.

Try it this week. You will be surprised at how easy it is.

The opportunities are everywhere.

Paul Monahan, PCC is a Peak-Performance coach, member of the International Coach Federation and a certified COR.E Performance Dynamicsä Specialist. He resides in Cleveland, Ohio with his wife Paula and is the proud dad to three young men. He works with elite-level performers and leaders, helping them to expand their awareness so that they perform at their best more consistently.

He can be reached at paul@paulmonahancoaching.com