We spent a lot of time over the last week talking about the mental game and the psychology of golf. I went through what I felt were my biggest flaws in that area and laid out my plan for addressing them. Well, I had a chance to take what I’ve been working on to the course on Sunday for a nine hole round.

Before I went out, I had a specific plan that stated what I wanted to accomplish. Here are the basics:

• Play with discipline. The round was to be a scoring round, and I was planning on keeping stats. There would be no quitting or switching to practice mode.
• Live in each moment and play each shot without worrying about the previous shot.
• Do not fixate on the score.
• For each and every shot, devise a plan, absolutely commit to it, and execute.
• Resist the temptation to bring range-oriented swing thoughts to the course. No working on technical details. Keep the swing thoughts simple.

I have to say that being honest with myself and uncovering these problems, then devising a plan to fix them made a huge difference, both in my score and in my attitude.

I ended up shooting a 43 on a course that was slightly easier than my home course (that I’m very familiar with). I’m not happy that I shot a 43, but I feel like it was a good 43.

I had two double bogeys that resulted from minor misses. The first time, I had an 8-iron into a green over a bunker and missed my intended carry distance by about two yards, ending up right near the front face. I got the ball up and out, but just barely, and left myself with a really long putt on a tough green and three putted. The second time, I was laying up on a very short, uphill dog-leg left par four. I hit a 7-iron up the hill with a draw and it drew just a tiny bit much and took a big bounce of off some hard ground up there and rolled under an evergreen tree. I had to declare it unplayable and still didn’t have a shot at the green after my drop.

Now, I’m a believer in the fact that what you score is what you score and there’s no rationalizing a bad score by saying “well if this or that didn’t happen…”, but in this case, the score was a big improvement over what I’ve been doing lately. Also, even though I hit no greens in regulation, I was less than a pace off the putting surface on several. Consequently, I only had 14 putts, making three over 6 feet.

In general, my misses were manageable, instead of wet, lost, or embarrassing.

Most importantly, I had no blow-up holes. I had no give-up holes. I had a few shots that I didn’t pull off, but none that were total mental errors.

What that tells me is that I need to keep working on the range, but that I can make the changes in my frame of mind that I need to succeed.

For the entire nine holes, I felt like I had a mental clarity that I haven’t felt for a while. I had more confidence than I’ve had in who knows how long. At the end, I had a sense of accomplishment instead of a sense of failure. In fact, I never had a sense of failure during the round, even after I hit some bad shots. My normal pit of despair turned into a rally to get up to my ball and live in that new moment and do the best I could with that shot, without consideration for my overall score for the round or for the hole.

I know I have a long way to go, but I’m very encouraged at the results. I’d recommend that anyone looking to improve take a serious look at the mental aspects of the game to see if there are improvements that can be made that will improve scores (and fun) right off the bat and for the future.

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