I've been in a bit of a fog lately and have just played horrible, gradually working up to my worst score in a year last week, shooting 88. My lack of confidence reached such a low last week that I finally seeked professional help and took my first golf lesson. Fortunately, the lesson was more of a coaching session, and I found it very helpful. My shoulders are more square to the target and my posture has improved. In my horrible round following the lesson, although I played poorly, I hit 4 drives further than I've ever hit a drive before! Just incredible. I'm pretty sure I can work the changes I made with my driver all the way through the bag.


Fog no Itaara Golf by Claudio Marcon at flickr

But my swing isn't the root of my stuggles lately, it's my attention. It's transferred from simply taking aim at a precice target to just trying too hard to get my scores back down. Fortunately, I ran across a helpful article by Chuck Hogan this morning titled "Energy follows attention", which I hope inspires my play today. I've shared an excerpt from his article below.

When you are playing golf, your attention is supposed, and meant to be on ball-to-target. Now those are NOT three words! That is one comprehensive image. And the image includes, by definition, the hit, the trajectory, flight, landing bounce, roll and completion. This is NOT for study by the conscious mind. This is NOT visualizing as the industry has suggested. This is NOT for figuring out. This is simply a look at the ball, target and conditions and LETTING your experience do the figuring for you. You do the same thing in walking, driving, typing and a million other things. Simply allow your attention to do the doing. You do want to deliver this ball to that target don't you?

Without doubt, the golf instruction industry has lead golfers down the road of incessantly interfering with your attention. We golfers are the victims of our own "smart" minds. We somehow got the idea that bringing every nuance of the swing, chip, pitch, sand and specialty shot to the attention of the conscious mind is going to help. In fact, it is the highest form of interference.

Every golfer of experience knows that the best scores and shots "just happen" and "I didn't even think about it". The misinterpretation is that we didn't think about it consciously. The fact is that we temporarily forgot to think consciously and turned the "thinking" over to the subconscious to play the shot (instead of all the concerns of the conscious mind) and low and behold, energy followed the subtle directions of the subconscious. A golf shot was born.

Labels: Articles, Attention, Chuck Hogan, Disciplines