Golfers have been emptying clubhouses for decades by talking about how they’ve just played, in great detail and at great length. One thing that is for certain is that it should be limited – sometimes we like our stories more than others do. Also, a lot of the time our stories can be quite unhelpful, especially if you’re the person who comes in moaning that you’ve just shot a 75 and that it should have been a 70.
Number one, nobody is that interested in your golf even though you are. Number two, we are telling ourselves that it wasn’t good enough and the stories that we tell ourselves can be quite detrimental. We talk about the shots that we missed or the bad bounces that we got rather than what went well. That is probably not just a golf thing, we do it in everyday life and focus on what went badly on a certain day rather than the good stuff.
We have to limit what we talk about as people really aren’t that bothered and we don’t want to be the person who, when we leave the room, everybody else breathes a big sigh of relief that we’ve gone.
If someone asks how we’ve got on, that’s exactly what they mean. We can put a full stop after our score. If the human instinct wants to kick in and make a comment, then do so. We can explain that it was fun or tough but don’t linger on this as people’s attentions are quite short anyway and particularly after a Saturday medal.
It doesn’t have to be boring and we can have a bit of fun with it. Others will only hear what we say to them but we hear everything that we say to them and to ourselves. We’ve got to be really careful with that self-talk and we have the option to give an example of a knifed chip that’s gone out of bounds or, probably more helpful, we can relate to a great bunker shot at the 18th.
We do have that choice, for me it would be more beneficial to share the upbeat one. It’s not about shying away from the poor shots, you can address that with a lesson, but by just repeating the story of the poor shot it will just continue internally.
Generally speaking our B game will probably show itself the most, our A game will occasionally show its face if you’re lucky and our C game might also be quite common if we’ve been struggling. So, if we are in the bar in the clubhouse, we are going to be surrounded by people who will be telling one another that we’ve left a few shots out there. We’re all thinking similar stuff but we don’t have to externalise it.
(Image credit:…
..
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Golf Monthly RSS Feed…