Page 70 - LVG&L 2018 WINTER

[ LEISUR E ]

MEN T AL G AME

In Your Head

W H AT
P ER CEN TA GE Mark Cheney is a Certified Mental Performance
Consultant (CMPC) and member of the Association for
OF GOLF IS Applied Sport Psychology (AASP). For 20 years, he has
helped performers do what they love to do, better.
MEN TAL?
You can learn more at www.CoachMarkCheney.com
or by following him on twitter @CoachMarkCheney.

hen I ask people this question,
they almost always seem to settle
Won 90 percent. Interestingly, I
seem to get the same response no matter the
sport or activity. New York Yankees great Yogi
Berra once said, “90 percent of all mental er-
rors are in your head.” Golf may be the most
mental game because of the time a round
of golf provides for thinking. In an 18-hole
round of golf, a golfer is only in action for 70
to 90 seconds, leaving over four hours of time
to think.

I’ve found that golfers spend very little
time thinking in the present. Instead, they
dwell on the past or the future. I call this
time traveling. Why time-traveling? Consider
the first tee shot of the day. Most people are
jittery and nervous. They are worried—wor-
ried about their swing, about where the ball
will go, about looking bad, and/or about what
their playing partners will say. Notice that
these worries are all about future possibili-
ties. Therein lies the problem—doubt, worry,
fear, and anxiety tend to dominate future
thoughts, and none of these help you perform
at your best. They increase muscle tension,
elevate your heart rate and respiratory rate,
and even change the area of the brain that
controls your swing.

How about the past? After the first hole (or
even the first shot), many players spend the
rest of their round traveling back in time—to
the putt they missed, the pitch they chun-
ked, the tee shot they sliced, or the hole they
should have birdied. Human nature seems
to fixate on the negative events of the past,
leading to anger, frustration, disgust, and dis-

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