Golf is a game that plays tricks on your mind and toys with your emotions. It can take you on a roller coaster ride through ups and downs, pushes and pulls, if you will excuse the pun! That however, is the reason why it is so addictive despite being so terribly frustrating. It is a game of imperfection where failure is a whole lot more common than success. To some it is an easy game where you hit a little white ball around a field which, in actual fact, that's all it really is!
Just imagine if we as golfers could have that mindset. Wouldn’t things just seem so simple? We love to cloud our minds with unnecessary thoughts on the golf course and that is truly the downfall of most who want to take it to the next level. Our main nemesis on the golf course is fear, fear of a certain shot, outcome or the expectations of others. Most problems have an origin and when it comes to golf, that origin is most likely fear. ‘Fear is the mind-killer’ Frank Herbert wrote in ‘Dune’.  Fear makes your thoughts turn into mental images of the worst outcomes. As an athlete you may be inclined to think that fear is a weakness that must somehow be cured. In reality it is a mechanism that all humans need. Fear is simply a defensive complex humans utilise for survival. Fight or flight, a phrase you may have heard before, is a key element in why humans have survived on earth up to now. The decision of whether to fight or to flee (flight) is fuelled by fear, the very emotion crippling so many athletes today. So how do we tackle this in a high performance environment? Well, we don't, we rather learn to embrace it for what it can truly offer us in that environment, adrenaline, renewed focus and decisiveness to name a few benefits. Fear is a given when it comes to pressurised situations and learning to walk along side it rather than to push against it will allow you to handle stressful scenarios that much better. The first step to befriending fear is to seek it out, again and again until it has run out of ways to hurt you. The only way forward for you and fear, is to simply move forward together. This way, the fear that used to cripple you, can become the very armour that protects you.
I challenge you now to actively find those situations that make you uncomfortable, those situations that you dread. Dive in head first and be open to failing, again and again until you start to crave those uncomfortable situations.
Let me know how you get on!