In my mind there are two types of golfers: analytical and emotional.
Both have their strengths, and both have their weaknessess, of course. The analytic golfer is prone to overwhelm by knowledge and data, and the emotional golfer is prone to four bogies to finish.
But, knowing who you are allows you to guard against yourself, so to speak. When you know your tendencies, whether they are swing, tempo, or personality, then you can prepare and create environments that allow you to perform your best, most consistently.
For an analytic golfer, when used correctly, you should finish your rounds better than you start your rounds, because every single hole and every single shot provides more data in the vault to draw from.
Your warmups should also heavily emphasize the ability to understand what you have, game wise, that day and how you’re going to find and develop trust from the get-go.
The emotional golfer is going to move much more in the direction of creating an environment for his or her happiest state. That may mean doing the same thing as before, or it might mean tweaking the normal process. Regardless, it’s going to be about producing the emotion that produces best performance.
The guard will be against when the inevitable bad shot or hole happens, getting yourself right back on track.
Prime examples would be Tiger Woods for the analytical and Rory McIlroy for the emotional.
Tiger almost always finished golf tournaments better than he started, and he used data point after data point to bring trust and commitment to everything in the future. If a ball flew five yards too far on the 6th hole, then he logged that away and made sure to understand why it did and how he can prevent that on the 18th.
Rory has visible tells to his current status. When he’s playing well and happy, he sort of bounces down the fairway. Oppositely, when he finds struggle, his shoulders can slump a bit more and posture looks less optimistic.
This produces 62’s by the truckload and also head scratching moments, where you sometimes looks like he can’t be beat, or like he’ll never win again.
I assure you they both know these things about themselves and have worked tirelessly to find ways to use their personality to their advantage, and limit the attitudes and distractions from taking away from their performance.
The task for you is to identify what your personality is, what your strengths are, how to use them to your advantage, and guard against the potential negatives that might come with who you were born to be.
-Michael
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