Objective:
It is cold and rainy outside. That makes it a good day for some ATN work.
If you don’t know, ATN stands for Above-the-neck. All sports require smarts. Whether it’s basketball or badminton, we have to use our brains to be successful. But like we always tell you, golf is different. In other sports you have to use your brain to react to make an immediate, split-second decision. Golf decisions take time. Time gives the gremlins a chance to get in our heads.
In the moments before we take a golf swing (and even sometimes during the swing itself) we have time to worry or even be scared about the results. In other sports we react to the situation and the results, good or bad, just happen.
Our self-awareness practices are some of the tactics we use to prepare us when we have moments of fear and doubt. The more we pay attention to how what we feel, think, say and do affects us and others, the more we prepare ourselves to be able to handle the fears. The fears never really go away. But when we learn to self-reflect, recognize our strengths and weaknesses, consider others, manage our emotions and accept criticism; we begin to understand our fears.
We learn to use our fears in our favor.
It’s really simple. We are not as good as we should be, and we are not as good as we’re going to be—at anything we choose to do. We know to just keep moving forward and get a little better each day. When the gremlins come and the fears set in, we’re golfers. We have seen it all before. We’re ready. We know the fear comes because we care. We also know that we just have to be our best.
That’s all we can do.
Rainy day golf options:
- Use this guide or use this one and find some new golf words you can use at the course. Share the new word with a coach and see if they know what it means.
- Take some time to learn some more of the Academy code.
- Watch some golf videos. This one shows swings basics. Use it or find one you like better.
- This one talks about golf basics. See how much you know.
- Finally, this one is just a bunch of cool shots. See if you can find cooler ones.
- Change. Think. Golf.
