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Ten Great Tips to get you Playing Better

TIP #9: Tap In To Your Own World (The Zone)

Concentration...Focus...In the Zone...What do they all have in common? Before I tell you let me ask you a question. What was it that made us motivated as a child?

To play golf we have to deal with a lot of outside circumstances that can side track us from what it is we need to do. (Which is to get the golf ball in the hole!) There is no doubt that it is harder to focus when we are not having fun. So how do we tap into our own world? How do we get into the zone?

First of all, imagine what it would be like if you where playing eighteen holes of golf and during the whole round no one could penetrate your space, no matter what anyone said to you. Nothing mattered because you where so focused on getting the golf ball in the cup; you were soo relaxed...no bills to pay...no kids to worry about...no business deadlines to meet...no worries about where the next paycheck was coming from...no taxes to pay...no responsibilities at all.

WAIT!! Did I say no responsibilities at all? Can I go back to the question that I asked you before about what it was that made us all highly motivated as a child? No responsibilities. Would you agree that it is a lot easier to have fun when you have nothing to worry about or nothing to lose? Or should I say that having fun keeps us from worrying. If a young child is having fun, that child does not have the time to worry because they are always in the present! They are totally focused in the moment. Tapping into your own world and being totally focused on one thing at a time, however long that may be, is tapping into the zone. Time is suspended and it is easy to have fun. Because we are having fun, we become soo focused or zoned in on what we are doing, that it really takes no effort at all!

I know from experience that when I start making a couple of bogeys I begin to look for an escape goat or an easy way out. So the easiest thing to put the blame on is the golf swing. Or I will try to put the blame on the other players in the group or those kids yelling and screaming and having fun in the playground across the street from the golf course. I begin to lose my focus or my concentration because making bogeys is no fun. There are two ways that I have learned to face my fear of losing focus or stepping out of my world. The first is to practice over and over the thoughts that I want to think about on a daily basis or to practice over and over the kind of golf game that I want to shoot. I want to predict my circumstances before they predict me. By thinking about the great drives that I have hit in tournament golf on a daily basis, for about one month, I will have prepared myself to go out on a golf course and perform as I have predicted (or as I have thought about).

No matter how much you practice there might be those days when things just do not come together. What do you do then? The answer is in GOLF TIP # 10.

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