OC Golf Course

If this is your first time visiting, check out the story behind this blog. Otherwise, please join the others by subscribing to my RSS feed or get updates via email so you don't miss any great golf articles!

This is a guest post from Carl, a 17 year old Blogger who teaches you how to Become a Better Blogger. He is also 2-handicap golfer who plays golf every day and would like to share his golf tips and advice with you.

Association and Disassociation
Why are the professionals as good as they are? You seem to have a good game going and you're building your confidence as you roll in a birdie putt and then all of a sudden, bogey, double bogey. Ouch! Where did that just come from? You ask yourself this whilst having raging thoughts running through your head. Then another double? ARGH! and maybe even a bogey on top to put a stop to your wonderful round? Golf over for the day. Your head drops and your confidence falls straight back down.

Something I've developed over the years I've been playing golf is the ability to manage my mental side of the game and deal with the bad shots. I'm no expert and I have my hard days but this is something you notice with professionals. Tiger Woods is a prime example of pure perfection of his management. Hardly will you ever see his head drop and within a flash of anger you're seeing him rebuild his mind ready for the next shot.

This is what I move on to in this post, the ability to associate and disassociate yourself within your golf game. It's the art of gathering thoughts in your mind and placing them and finally removing them for your next shot. Let's have a look at the whole process in the order you should be thinking about things:
Association is being within yourself. You need to feel the feelings you get when you get angry at a shot and let your head get down.

Now it's time to disassociate yourself and look at the shot as if you were watching yourself.  You will be able to see your actions much more clearly this way.

If you see yourself hitting a bad shot, do the following:

1. Draw a box around the bad shot in your mind.
2. You need to shrink this box, down to about the size of a football (but in a square).
3. Now slowly move this shot to the side of the image you have in your head.
4. Next, imagine a perfect shot and put it back in place of where the old bad shot was and picture yourself hitting the shot.

You may be thinking that it feels a little weird doing all this but think about it and how it can be used. Association and disassociation can be used in real-life situations to manage bad things that happen in your life. You can simply train your mind in bad situations to remove all the bad things that happen. It's important that you are able to remove yourself from within your body and watch your actions so you can learn to disassociate yourself and associate yourself at important times.

It's very beneficial whilst on a golf course to do this to help yourself manage your game. You'll start to find that you're not worrying about your bad shots as much and you're completely forgetting about the negatives. What's left are the positives which will help lower your score!