STEPPING ON THE FIRST TEE BLOCK
HOW TO CLEAN YOUR MIND
We know that golf is not Quantum Mechanics, then why are we always nervous when getting ready for the first tee shot? Why think about being careful not to swing the club pass parallel at the top as you’ve been doing or not going too fast on your take away, etc... ? It seems that we need this type of analysis to tell ourselves that we are being careful and taking the precautions not to let the worst happen, especially on the very first shot.
Don’t keep your mind so busy with everything else other than hitting the fairway. This and only this, should be taking space in your mind when stepping to the tee block but then you will say: well, it’s not that easy, I try not to think about anything other than the shot but other thinking keep assaulting my head! A friend of mine told me that sometimes when he can’t stop thinking too much just before he hits the ball, one technique he uses is repeating constantly to himself the word “fairway”.
So, he steps to the ball repeating in his head: fairway, fairway, fairway then he address the ball and just hit it, most of the time works but sometimes it doesn’t. I thought this was interesting and a good way of trying to focus on the target, but this method doesn’t actually clear your mind from thinking and if anything, actually it gets your mind as busy as thinking of something else. One good thing about his method though, is that if you are going to think constantly about something anyways, it better be hitting the fairway.
Our mind is always thinking about the outcome of something you may have an idea of how it will form, for instance, you may not know how the universe was born, but if you are that type of person who likes science and mystery then you will have your own ideas as for what happened at the beginning of time. If you like soap operas you probably watch them constantly and after a while you could even write the episode because you acquired the logic and ideas behind the principles that keep the story alive and hence you have a pretty good idea of the next line on the show.
We need to find a way to stop any process that we may be familiar with and try to guess what the outcome could be, if I do this, this will happen, if I keep doing this then something like this will happen and so on. All you need is your mind quite for a few seconds while you are hitting the ball and the way to do this is keeping your mind ALERT. The way to do this is actually placing your thinking on a state of curiosity; this is because when we are curious about something that is just about to happen then we wait to see what’s next.
This is a very interesting point; make yourself curious about the results of your shot! WAIT to see what’s going to happen and once you are in that state all you have to do is swing through and see the ball flying, then you can start thinking again.