GOLF MENTAL GAME TRAINING TIPS BY DR. RICK SESSINGHAUS
The Role of Environment in Performance and Results
Performance equals results. We can all agree upon that, right? Is what I’m doing in the moment, that action, performing, leads to a result. Yet, many people don’t understand that their environment that they’re performing in is going to have an effect on their results.
So working with competitive golfers, for instance, I’ll get a player who plays well on one type of golf course but not another type of golf course. The environment changed. Or they played with a different grouping of players, which played slow and they had a temper. And that affected their performance. Even though the game of golf didn’t change and a shot by shot basis did not change, unfortunately the environment affected them.
In the business world we see the environment of, let’s say, our desk, and who we share an office with, and is it an open floor plan where people can just come in and talk to you. That environment is going to be potentially distracting. It’s going to affect how we’re going to perform, and thus our success rate.
I want you to start to look at what is surrounding you in the physical world first. In the business world, it could be your actual desk. Is it messy? Do you have to find things? Is it noisy? Is the lighting bad? That environment is going to affect how you perform.
How to Control and Optimize Your Environment for Improved Performance
There’s some things that are maybe out of your control in your environment, such as the people you work with, your clients, those types of things, where their responses, their world now interferes with your world. And I say interferes because in performance you usually want to keep yourself in a bubble and be able to focus on what you want. When we look at the physical world we can then look at relationships. That’s part of your environment.
The other thing, though, is there is anything internal in your environment. And what I mean by that is are you choosing to put things in your environment that don’t need to be? For instance, I don’t watch the news anymore, because the news would either get me frustrated or depressed. That changed how I performed. Also, social media. I don’t like political posts, so they’re off of my feed now, because that would get me agitated.
When you look at your environment, what you are looking at, what are you listening to, all those types of things, is going to impact your golf mental game performance. So start taking a little bit more control over what you actually are reading and what you’re looking at and what you’re listening to.
But also, how do you get affected by so many things? Is it, “I can’t work in this environment anymore.” It’s like, “Whoa.” You could if we had different skill sets. And that’s the part of the environment, it’s that people want to blame their environment. But what can you control about it, first? Make those changes, but then it’s going to be your response to that environment that ultimately is going to lead to your success.
So let’s start removing some of the negative effects on us and start to replace that with some positive things, and you’re going to start to see that the environment now can actually be a positive instead of negative. So let’s look at our environment as a key tool for you to master the golf mental game.
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