Tag Archive for: The Lost Art of the Short Game

It may seem a strange question to ask about your game, but it is one we would like you to consider. Who are you scoring for? 

Over the years we have seen so many players (including ourselves), fall into the trap of confusing golf as something you are, as opposed to something you do. When your whole self-worth hangs on the line with the outcome of a score, it can be a pretty lonely place. When your ego is attached so much to the direction a golf ball takes, you are walking on an emotional tightrope. 

When ‘you’ as a human being are on the line when you play the game, too much is at stake. Golf is something we do, not what we are.  

Our value as a human being is a given: one person is no better than another and has no more value.  

If you have a bad day as a golfer, you have not had a bad day as a person. It may seem a touch dramatic, but we have found over and over again, that very little golf improvement can take a lasting effect unless you are able to break some of these underlying and often unconscious barriers. 

The way to practically apply these concepts to your game is to fully embrace your understanding of acceptance. If there is a more powerful tool in your golfing mental toolkit than acceptance, we have yet to discover it.  

Acceptance, as a concept, is really difficult to grasp when you are ultimately looking to improve your scoring.  

We need to make really, really clear that acceptance is not resignation. You are not giving up on the desire to hit good shots or shoot lower scores. What you are doing is to be willing to truly embrace any outcome the game wants to throw at you. 

Good, bad or neutral, one thing for certain is during any round of golf, no matter how good it is, you will always get a sprinkling of all three. 

Our meditation teacher, Vin Harris, often says: “Most human suffering is an unwillingness to accept the experience as it is.”  

Think about this for a moment and perhaps repeat it back to yourself. It is that important! We spend so much of our lives resisting thoughts, feelings and sensations. We don’t want to feel the bubble of emotion arising within us. We don’t want to experience the sense of loneliness, frustration or disappointment, yet it is the resistance to experiencing these sensations actually happening which keeps us stuck. 

There has never been a truer phrase than ‘whatever you resist, you strengthen’. When you resist the feeling of anxiety and believe it shouldn’t exist, you actually halt the natural process of energy moving through your body. E-motion. Energy in motion. The energy wants to move through you, it wants to dissipate. It is totally counterintuitive and paradoxical to embrace the notion that, if we are prepared to be with whatever is arising within us, then it will naturally dissipate. 

Taken from The Lost Art of the Short Game by Gary Nicol and Karl Morris – with a foreword from Bob Vokey, the godfather of wedges.

Available now in hardback (£19.95) and Kindle (£9.99) formats.

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Shot selection is a fundamental element of the short game. How often are you selecting the right shot at the right time? 

For the vast majority of golfers, statistically, the most important shot on most holes isn’t necessarily the tee shot or approach shot but the third shot. That might come as a bit of a surprise when all we seem to hear and talk about is distance, but the reality is that your third shot will, more often than not, be the one that can either make or break your score. This is where you can really make a difference to your scoring and enjoyment of the game but it is sadly overlooked.  

Third shots can be crucial when it comes to the momentum of a round. They can either stop you dead in your tracks or allow you to keep a good round going. 

If you miss the fairway off the tee, you can generally get your ball back into play with your second shot. Once you get your second shot back into play and hopefully somewhere around the green or at least within striking distance of it, now is the time you can get back on track with a good third shot. 

It sounds pretty straightforward but you can only really make a difference here IF you have put your errant tee shot or second shot to the back of your mind. We’re not going to preach about the power of positive thinking because it can and will let you down. You can venture out on the course with the best of intentions, telling yourself that you will have a good day today. You will hit booming drive after booming drive. You will hit every green in regulation, and you will hole every putt you look at. Sounds great until reality kicks in and the chaos descends. As the former world heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson famously said: ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth!” 

You miss the first fairway. You miss the green with your approach shot. You duff your first chip. You knock the next one forty feet past the hole. You finish off with a three putt. Within the space of 10 minutes, your positive attitude has left you, never to be seen again, replaced with the polar opposite, a totally negative one.  

There is no middle ground here and the journey back from negativity is a long, arduous and exhausting one. You cannot be a little bit positive. It’s akin to being pregnant: you either are or you aren’t. 

We’re not saying you should adopt a negative mindset, far from it. A positive mindset is always preferable, but rather than think positively, we would encourage you to ask positive questions. Questions focus the mind and keep you grounded in the present. 

Rather than saying I will do this or I will do that, why not try a slightly different approach?  

When assessing any and every shot, ask yourself: what is the shot here? what does the ball have to do? is it possible that I could play a really good shot here? what does a really good shot look like? what does a really good shot feel and sound like? 

By asking these questions, we go into problem solving mode. As human beings, we have come a long way since living in caves and hunting down lunch as a result of asking good questions about how we are going to solve a particular problem, coming up with a good answer, formulating a plan and then executing it. 

Taken from The Lost Art of the Short Game by Gary Nicol and Karl Morris – with a foreword from Bob Vokey, the godfather of wedges.

Available now in hardback (£19.95) and Kindle (£9.99) formats.

Click here to buy now

You have the power to control the destiny of your short game. By doing so, the outcomes might just change for the better   

Think about when you play golf and you are very score focused. You want to make lots of pars and some birdies and above all, avoid bogeys and doubles. That is your focus. To get back into the clubhouse with a ‘good score’. The problem is we are focused on the score but can we control it? If we hit a perfect putt on the perfect line at the perfect pace, does it always go in the hole? If we hit a perfect drive and the ball bounces left instead of to the right, we have missed the fairway and the ball sits nestled in some thick rough.  

We can, of course, heavily influence the score by our actions but can we control it? 

When you look at the concept of perceived control, you can see all the dangers from a mental game perspective of focusing heavily on something we have very little control over. No wonder we have such high levels of anxiety throughout the game of golf. The key question going forward is, do you want to remain an anxious flyer or become a much calmer driver? 

We remember hearing a story about the great marathon runner and former world record holder, Paula Radcliffe, which gives us a hint at what we could potentially pursue as a point to focus our attention on in a more productive way than being hamstrung by a score focus. 

Clearly the ‘score’ in marathon running is your time and one of the biggest factors in such a long race is your ability to deal with discomfort. The phrase we have all heard is ‘hitting the wall’. The moment in the race when you seem to have more miles left than energy. So often it is as much a mental battle as it is a physical challenge. 

At those crucial points in the race when it would be all too easy to focus on time and how many miles were still left, Radcliffe had a mental trick up her sleeve.  

When the wall approached her, she would simply ask herself: ‘Can I count the next 20 breaths?’ The answer of course being yes.  

She had a point of focus she could control. A place to rest her mind as she got on with the job of running the race. Yes, I can focus on my breath. Yes, I can count the next 20 breaths. Suddenly a place where she did have control now became her immediate sanctuary to go to. Of course, the beauty of this profoundly simple, but immensely clever, trick was at the completion of each set of ‘breaths’ she would be significantly nearer to the finish line. 

She occupied her mind in a place giving her perceived control over a very challenging situation. She chose to place her mind and her attention somewhere useful. You can be liberated from the tyranny of score thinking by a similar process. 

Taken from The Lost Art of the Short Game by Gary Nicol and Karl Morris – with a foreword from Bob Vokey, the godfather of wedges.

Available now in hardback (£19.95) and Kindle (£9.99) formats.

Click here to buy now

A task is a piece of work to be done or undertaken, while technique is a specific way of carrying out a task 

When you are faced with a shot around the green, whether that be a shot that requires less than a full swing, a pitch over a bunker or water, a chip and run or a bunker shot from a plugged lie, do you start thinking about what the ball needs to do or what you need to do? In other words, are you thinking about the task or the technique? The shot or the swing? 

We would imagine that, initially, like most golfers, you are probably thinking about what your ball needs to do to get close to the flag. Great: you are focused on the task. However, once you are over the ball, there is a strong possibility your thoughts will quickly turn to what you need to do. Those thoughts might be about how you need to move your arms, hands, hips and/or shoulders. 

You have probably figured out how you would like your ball to fly, where you would like it to land and how it will react when it lands on the green. Visualisation is extremely powerful and something we strongly recommend you work on. 

You have created a nice clear image of the shot in your mind’s eye. You’re almost ready to go but then – out of nowhere – you suddenly think about the last time you played a similar shot that resulted in a double bogey because you duffed it three feet in front of you. You remember that one of your playing partners told you that you had bent your left arm in your backswing and lifted your head at impact. Now your thoughts are entirely on your technique. You have completely forgotten about the shot you face right here, right now and suddenly you feel fear and tension engulf your entire body. You can feel your hands tighten around the grip in a desperate attempt not to make a mess of yet another pitch. 

Only seconds ago, you were totally engaged and absorbed in the shot and now you are entirely detached from what, in reality, is a pretty straightforward shot and a fairly simple task. All thoughts and visions of playing a great shot have been replaced with numerous internal technical instructions, all vying for your attention. Your initial clarity has now been replaced with a maelstrom of mental clutter. 

All you have ever learned about staying in the present moment has gone out the window as your mind goes on a journey of time travel. Firstly, re-visiting previous bad shots and then, just as quickly, jumping ahead into the future, predicting and worrying about the result or outcome of the shot. 

You are not alone. This happens all the time to players at all levels. This is what can and does happen when thoughts and focus jump from task to technique. That being the case, what can you do to prevent this from happening time and time again? It is pretty simple. In a world where we are led to believe that complexity is the key, quite the opposite is true. 

Taken from The Lost Art of the Short Game by Gary Nicol and Karl Morris – with a foreword from Bob Vokey, the godfather of wedges.

Available now in hardback (£19.95) and Kindle (£9.99) formats.

Click here to buy now