Pro Tips

• TIP OF THE MONTH – December 2011

  The Positive & Negative Boxes:

  “Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out”
  Art Linkletter - (American TV Personality & Humanitarian)

  How many of us can honestly say that we are always positive about ourselves as golfers and about our games in general?
  I believe that the inherent nature of the game and its innate inconsistency makes us all tend towards the negative side of the scale.
  When I was forming Positive Impact Golf and choosing its name I was greatly influenced by a Diploma Course I had undertaken in Performance Coaching. This was a workplace-based coaching course that focused heavily on the theme of coaches having a ‘positive impact’ on their clients. I liked the idea of our coaches keeping this at the forefront of their minds whilst coaching and I like to feel that we are experts in helping golfers to achieve a more positive impact with the ball and to develop a more positive and confident attitude on the golf course.
  The term ‘positive’ reminds me of an idea I had come up with many years ago whilst coaching in France. I’d like to share this true story with you in this article.
  Marie-Pierre, a lady in her late thirties who wasn’t a member of the club where I was coaching, turned up for her first session and appeared to be of rather unsmiling and serious character. When I asked what had brought her to book a lesson with me she explained that she was a beginner whose husband was a keen golfer. She had tried to learn twice before and had hated it! She now had a pact with her husband that she would try a third and last time and then he would stop pestering her about playing golf. A friend had told her husband about me and advised him to send her to see me.
  She added that she was useless at golf and couldn’t ever see herself enjoying it. As you can imagine, this was not the ideal recipe for an enthusiastic and fun-filled golf lesson.
  Anyway, she hit a few balls with a 7 iron and, to my surprise, she hit the ball quite well and had a reasonably good swing. When I shared this with her it seemed to make no difference to her state of mind; she obviously had a very negative opinion of herself and the game of golf. I felt that I needed to get something positive going or it was going to be an unhappy experience for both of us.
  I began by asking her to say something positive after each shot. She could only continue to make negative comments. So, I told her that she would hit the shots and I would do the positive comments. Her next shot went straight, up in the air, not particularly well struck but about 60 yards. Before I could say a word she said “well, that’s pretty awful!” I told her that I begged to differ as I found it not bad at all considering the little she had played the game. She wasn’t convinced, especially when her next shot went 30 yards along the ground.
  “Nothing good to say about that one, is there?”
  “It went straight,” I replied.
  “Oh, you are positive, aren’t you?”
  I explained that, whilst I endeavour to be as positive as possible, there is no future in me kidding people, nor in her kidding herself for that matter, and that I was only seeing things as they were whereas I felt that she was being unfairly hard on herself.
  She confided to me that she was generally a rather negative person in life anyway and so this was only her normal way of operating. That’s when the boxes came to my mind.
  Pointing to her right, I told her to imagine a box which I called ‘positive’ and then pointed to her left, indicating that here was another box which I labelled ‘negative’.
  “The problem as I see it,” I told her, “is that every time you make a comment, or react to something, you put a token in one of the boxes depending on whether it’s a positive or negative reaction. You probably don’t realise it but your negative box is full and very heavy whilst your positive one is empty and light. The negative one is dragging you down. To get a better balance you need to start putting some tokens in the positive box. That is all I was trying to do in highlighting the good rather than focusing on the bad. I am not asking you to lie to yourself about how you are doing.”
  We continued in this vein for the rest of the first session and continued to do likewise in the second. Gradually, she became more at ease with the idea and started to gain confidence.
  I was chipping a few balls as I waited for her to arrive for her third session and suddenly heard a loud and enthusiastic “Bonjour!” coming from behind me. I turned to find a bright and cheerful Marie-Pierre bouncing towards me with a charming smile on her face. “Well,” she said. “Haven’t you noticed?”
  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can see that you appear happy to be here today, which I am delighted about but, apart from that, I’m not quite sure what you mean.”
  Pointing to her right, she proudly announced “Voila, the positive box.” She then looked to her left and seemed confused when saying “Oh! I must have left the negative one at home!”
  “Bravo, Marie-Pierre. You have fully understood the message!”
  Now, I can’t say that she went on to win the club championship as I left the club shortly afterwards, but I know that she had a chance of playing an enjoyable game of golf with her husband. She had also helped me to identify a simple way of using mental imagery that can help many golfers build confidence in themselves.
  How do you fill your boxes?
  Let me finish with a quote from Ernest Jones, a British pro who taught in USA in the early part of the 20th century and who is one of the few teachers in the USGA Hall of Fame:
  “I want to point out wherein I feel most people make mistakes. Briefly summed up, I think the fundamental difficulty lies in a negative rather than a positive approach; golfers start from a premise of trying to find out what is wrong when the shot does not come off satisfactorily, instead of getting back to the positive consideration of what it is that causes the shot to prove satisfactory.”
  If you have nothing good to say after a shot, say nothing!

  
  Should you wish to comment on this or any other article, please don’t hesitate to contact me on brian@positiveimpactgolf.co.uk