Three Steps to Lower Scores

Three steps that will lower your scores are desire, awareness and transforming your negative emotions into positive ones.. Each step has different degrees of intensity, which will result in a variety of results. Basically, it comes down to "you get what you pay for" and that is OK depending on what you want or desire.

Take a minute to write down what you want to achieve playing golf, how much you desire it and how much you love playing golf. Everyone has different desires. It could be to break 100, 90, 80, be a scratch golfer, play on one of the professional golf tours or to be the best player in the world. The one thing that they all have in common is a desire to shoot lower scores.

Obviously, there will be a big difference in terms of commitment between a golfer who wants to break a hundred and one who wants to be the best player in the world. However, there should be consistent levels of desire depending on what they want to obtain. Even though their requirements are different, both should desire to do their best to achieve their goal. Your best will vary according to your circumstances. But, do the best for your situation and you will have no regrets.

Once you have set your goal to lower your score, the next step is to become aware of what processes you can improve to reach your desired outcome. In golf there are four variables or processes you can improve: 1) mechanics, 2) mental, 3) strategy and 4) physical conditioning. Improving anyone of the above will help you lower your score. Improving all of them will lower it even more.

Since I focus on how emotions affect performance, I will limit this tip to helping you to improve your mental game. However, I recommend that you work on improving all four processes.

The first step is to become very aware whenever you experience a negative emotion while playing golf. Don't make excuses or rationalize why it is OK to feel negative. Just become aware of all your fears and anger, from the big ones to the subtle ones.

In order to do this, you have to realize that negative emotions play havoc with your performance. Otherwise, you will continue buying into why it is OK to be negative and miss out on shooting lower scores. Also, you will never become aware how even the slightest negative emotion can throw your game off. Your negative emotions will always be your greatest opponent and your game will suffer because of your lack of awareness.

Once you become very aware of your emotions, you have two options. You can either repeat your negative emotions or transform them into neutral or positive emotions, which will enhance your performance. This process is never ending because as your awareness grows, you will see negativity in places that you would never have imagined at your present state of awareness.

Everything you experience in the pursuit of your goals is merely a fact. It is the negative emotions you attach to those facts that keep you from reaching your goals. Changing your focus is the technique used to transform your emotional association to facts.

For example, if your putt lips out, you can either be upset because you missed the putt or be happy because you did a lot of things right to be that close. You can be brave and let it rip or you can have fear and not go for a shot . But, you will never know if you would have made the shot or what you could do better to make that shot if you don't go for it. Even if you miss, at least you can feel good about not giving into fear. Eventually, you will learn to make those shots.

It is important to focus on the personal satisfaction of knowing that you are in control of your emotions, instead of having your emotions control you. In time as you keep improving the processes required to be good at golf, you will have lower scores.

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