In summary

  • Golf advice focuses heavily on the swing, leaving mindset and the mental game largely overlooked, writes a high-performance corporate career coach who plays off a 34 handicap.
  • Mental resets such as watching the ball, walking intentionally between shots, hydrating and controlled breathing help manage the tension that stressed, short, fast swings create.
  • The author's journals, Play With Purpose and Play The Next Shot, encourage golfers to focus on mindset and process rather than chasing perfection.

For all the advice golfers can find about improving their swing, there is surprisingly little about improving what happens between the ears. That was one of the things which struck me when I started thinking more deeply about golf and the way we approach the game.

Being the best you can be doesn’t necessarily mean shooting the lowest score. If you want to play social golf and simply enjoy yourself, then that is perfectly valid. For me, it is certainly about being the best version of yourself, on and off the course.

I say that as someone who plays off a 34 handicap. When I use the Arccos app, the highest handicap I can compare myself with is 20, so you can imagine where I sit. Everything is generally in the red. I have also discovered that some of the comparisons, particularly around driving, are with male players. That made me realise that not only was there a gap for women using the app, but also for average golfers generally. I recently discovered that I am actually close to the average female golfer in Australia, which made me pat myself on the back a little. Maybe I’m not so bad after all …

However, as a high-performance corporate career coach, I have to admit that I don’t like being average. I set myself shot-related goals for my rounds, so of course my score matters to me, but I also know that growth happens when we push through the fear zone.

This is where mindset becomes so important. Whenever we try something new or attempt to improve, there is going to be a degree of fear and discomfort. The challenge is working through that, rather than allowing it to stop us.

Watch the ball and hit it, just like Grace Kim … simple, right? (PHOTO: Getty Images)

Golf is also such an individual sport. The ball just sits there, waiting for you to hit it. That sounds incredibly simple, but it means we feel completely responsible for the outcome. There is nobody else to blame. I’m a mindset coach and I still get incredibly annoyed with myself, so heaven help everyone else. The difference is that I know I have to do the work away from the golf course, so I can use those mindset skills when I’m actually playing.

That is part of the thinking behind my journals, Play With Purpose and Play The Next Shot. They encourage golfers to focus on the mindset and the process, rather than chasing perfection. We can all benefit from having something that brings us back to the present, rather than us dwelling on what has already happened.

My own reset is very simple: watch the ball. If I’m hitting a fairway wood and I can focus on watching the ball, it gives me a clear point of focus. I’m not sure I can actually watch the club hit the ball, despite what I tell myself, but that isn’t really the point. The instruction keeps me in that moment.

The same applies after a bad shot. I try to be intentional about the walk to the next ball. I prefer to walk rather than use a cart, giving me time to reset, think about the next club, consider my target and get myself ready for the next shot. If I’m anxious, I’ll have a drink of water; when we get stressed, we can forget to hydrate. I’ll also use a breathing reset: breathe in, breathe out and slow everything down. Then it is: slow down, watch the ball, slow swing.

When we get stressed on the golf course, our swings tend to become short and fast. We tense up, and tension is the killer. The more relaxed we are, the freer the swing is going to be; that is where the mental reset becomes so important.

Absolute Best's Jacqueline Smith. (PHOTO: Supplied)

One of the hardest things about golf is that our expectations constantly change. I was in the studio with my coach recently and hit a drive which wasn’t great, but it went 135 metres straight. My reaction was less than enthusiastic – there may have been a swear word involved. My coach, though, reminded me that six months earlier, I couldn’t hit the ball 100 metres. I would have been thrilled with that shot then.

He was right. The better we get, the higher our expectations become. We forget how far we have come because we are already looking at where we want to go next. That is why I think the mental side of golf deserves just as much attention as the physical side. We can work on our swings, buy the latest equipment and analyse every statistic, but ultimately we still have to stand over that little white ball and hit it.

Golf is hard – much harder than I expected when I first started playing. But perhaps that is also what makes it so rewarding. The goal isn’t perfection; it is learning how to handle the good shots, the bad shots, the frustration and the fear, and then finding a way to step up and play the next one. That is what I’m still learning to do, too.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT JACQUELINE SMITH'S ABSOLUTE BEST JOURNALS HERE.