GOLF MENTAL GAME TRAINING TIPS BY DR. RICK SESSINGHAUS
Developing Habits for Mastery
When working with high performers, one of the number one areas is what we call mastery, which is how do you develop new habits that are of course going to lead to new results. There’s a lot of habit forming. But I want to talk a little bit about the importance of tracking and almost quantifying your actual behaviors because we can have these great intentions.
We can have a goal … We can write them down, right? We can be clear on goals. But it really is about action, isn’t it? So one of the reasons why I call Perform for Success is that to perform, we have to do something. There’s action behind it, yet creating habits that now are unconscious, really. We don’t have to think about them anymore. That’s when we’ve mastered something.
Unfortunately, we’ve mastered a lot of bad habits and they’ve led us down the wrong road. So when you look at developing new habits, we certainly want to have a goal that you are completely passionate about. But I really want you to start thinking about how you will know if you’re moving closer to it or not? That’s about evaluation
The Importance of Tracking and Quantifying Behaviors
One way is how are you actually keeping track of that. Working with business professionals, financial planners and such, everything is very data driven, isn’t it? The number has to add up and they know if they’re working closer or further away from an objective. Same thing in your life with habits. Are you actually moving closer to your intention or are you moving further away? Nowadays, we have … Awesome with technology is we actually can quantify behavior sometimes. It’s like, “What do you mean?” Well, right now, I have a Fitbit on, okay? So this is tracking my activity.
It reminds me to drink water. It reminds me to take a breath. It reminds me to move. It tracks my sleep, all these things that I can quantify download into an app and say, “Oh, that was a great day. Let me look at what happened. Oh my gosh. I moved a lot and wow. I took some deep breaths in the middle of the day,” and now we’re quantifying those behaviors. You can actually start tracking trends, and so we certainly have technology.
When I work a lot in the wellness community, we talk about food journaling, right? What did you actually cross your mouth, right? Because sometimes we go, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” and then we find out, “Oh, that’s right. I did take a handful of M&M’s and I did do those things,” and we are not actually journalizing and keeping track. That’s very powerful to understand the cause and effect in your life. So with a Fitbit, with all these different wearables, we can track progress.
Then when you can look at them, you’re not now creating excuses. That is what happened that’s gonna help you succeed in the future. So mastery is truly about developing habits that are gonna lead you closer to your intention. Closer to mastering your golf mental game. But if you’re not tracking those habits, you’re just kinda left at your own devices, unfortunately.
So start today by either journalizing, tracking, using technology to see where the data really lining up because, remember, every day, we need to be working on those golf mental game skill sets.
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