Understand yourself to realize playing potential

Dr. Dan Vosgerichian, Director of Mental Training at Gary Gilchrist Golf Academy
Dr. Dan Vosgerichian is the Director of Mental Training at GGGA

It’s probably not the first time you have heard: golf is about you playing the course – not your opponents.  Everyone must play the same course and golf courses change very little on a daily basis, consequently one of the biggest keys to success is learning to manage yourself and your mental game for golf.

The ability to control your thoughts, decisions, and emotions starts with understanding your individual tendencies.  In golf psychology and mental training for golf, the practice of better understanding who you are and what you do is known as self-awareness.

At the Gary Gilchrist Golf Academy, an essential part of our mental training and golf coaching is centered around helping our golfers understand themselves and their tendencies on and off the golf course. This is one of the reasons why all incoming juniors and professionals complete several mental assessments before ever talking about their golf swing.

Even though coming to GGGA and taking these assessments would greatly help you improve your mental game for golf, you can still take some positive actions before ever visiting us, by following the suggestions listed below.

1.     Identify your mission – Take sometime out of your next practice session to write out a mission statement.

2.     Maintain your goals – write out your short-term and long-term goals and set aside a specific time to evaluate and modify them. Look at my post about New Year’s resolutions for a refresher on writing powerful goals.

3.     Assess your strengths and weaknesses often – keep track of statistics, such as: greens in regulation (GIR), fairways hit, and total putts. This will help give you a clear honest picture of how to maximize your practice time.

4.     Evaluate your time management  – there are 10,080 minutes and 168 hours in a week. This is true for everybody. What isn’t the same for everyone is how they spend their time. Keep track of how you spend your time for a week. You will be surprised how much extra time you have. I guarantee you will find at least a couple extra hours you can play or practice.

These four suggestions are a great start to accelerating your progress and self- awareness. Start with one of the suggestions then move to the second. Please let me know about your progress on twitter @DrDanGGGA. I’m excited to hear about your successes.

Want to work with or ask Dr. Dan a question? Shoot him an email at
[email protected].

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