So he finally says to you - “Go ahead and hit your shot, I’ll pick-up and skip this hole.”  And being a little flustered and out of rhythm, you try to compose yourself, which you do a good job of and you hit your ball onto the green.  You walk up to the green and as you’re about to attempt your 35-foot birdie attempt - you hear a voice in the distance…. “Hold it, hold on, I found it.  Let me hit up to the green!”

You step back off the green to wait and your buddy half shanks, half skulls a shot that ends up in the bunker right of the green.  You wait some more as he walks up to the bunker.  His first attempt out of the sand doesn’t get out, his second attempt doesn’t get out, his third attempt goes over the green.  And then he looks at you and says “Go ahead and finish, I’ll pick up.”

So now after watching this episode, you look down the fairway and there are 4-golfers standing there kind of leaning on their golf clubs glaring at you, like you’re holding up the golf course.  You want to blare out “It’s not me, its him”, but you know that might be the end of your relationship with your buddy or if you didn’t know this person before the round started, this wouldn’t be the way to make a new friend.

So you rush over to your ball and in a hurry you whack it about 25-feet past the hole.  Knowing you have a good round going and you want to make par, but there are 4-golfers waiting for you to get off the green, you scurry down to your ball without really reading the green and leave the ball 4-feet short.  From here you try to tap it into the hole and miss by inch, so you just end up picking it up for a 6.  Knowing the eyes of the upset golfers are upon you, you run back to your cart as you give the guys in the fairway a half of a wave while mouthing the words “Sorry”.

As you get back to the cart, your “buddy” looks at you and says “I’m going to take a 6 on that hole.  What you get?”

What happens to the average golfer’s game from here?  From experience I would venture to say - Not good things.  It’s really hard to get back to playing the way you were.  And the funny thing is it shouldn’t bother you.  It was only 1-hole that this unfortunate incident happened.  But, why can’t we forget it and move on.

You want to discover how to overcome this situation and be able to move on with your game?  The best, most consistent Players have - Short Term Memory loss.  Meaning they can’t remember what just happened.  What this means is that every time you get up to the next tee, you’re standing there with a clean slate, a clear mind.  The annoyance’s of the last hole are not there, you can’t remember that last 3-putt, you can’t remember your last chunked shot around the green, you can’t remember your last drive that went into the trees.

Notice how I say "you can't remember" as opposed to "try not to remember".

I’ll give you an example of Short Term Memory loss - A few years back when Tiger was just starting to play on the PGA Tour, some people would get offended by Tiger’s actions on the golf course.  For example if he hit a bad shot, he might bang his club against the ground or shout something the young kids shouldn’t be hearing.  And people would say - “Why does he do that?  It’s so unprofessional to bang your club.”

You know what Tiger was doing?  He was practicing Short Term Memory loss.  He was getting the bad shot and the emotions that go with it out of his system so he could get on with his round without the bad shot bogging him down.  Yet many people looked at his actions and said “Look at how mad Tiger is getting, you can’t get that upset and play good.  You’ve got to remain calm on the golf course.”  And they continued to say that as he won 4-Major Championships in a row.

What Did Tiger Know That The Monkey’s Still Don’t Know?

Tiger knows that if you want to move on after a bad shot, you need to get past that bad shot.  You need to release all that negative emotion.  Now I promise you that I’m not advocating that you start banging your clubs.  What I’m saying is if you want to become more consistent so that you get rid of the 7’s and 8’s that appear on your scorecard and wreck your good rounds, you need to establish a PLAN that allows you to have Short Term Memory loss.

We get calls and emails from Golfers from around the world, saying that they need to “improve my Driving” and “my long irons” and “my mid-irons” and etc.  And I don’t doubt that you could use improvement in these areas - everybody could.

But, You Can’t Improve Your Game, Until You Improve Your Mind!

This is why all the Videotaping and Video Analysis stuff doesn’t work to improve your scores on the golf course.  It doesn’t help you to play better.  And I still believe it doesn’t help your swing get better either.  Although some people would debate me on this issue.

But, if you ask anyone that has ever had their swing analyzed on video - “After you were videotaped, how many strokes did you improve on the golf course - 5, 6, 7, maybe 8 strokes?”  The answer 100% of the time is - I’ll repeat this - 100% of the time is - “No, I didn’t improve that many strokes!”

So my question is - “if videotaping doesn’t help you to improve your score, why do you want to do it?”  Well, then the answer becomes - “It will help me improve my swing and my ball striking.”  And if it did help you to improve your swing and ball striking, why haven’t your scores improved?

Shouldn't there be a direct correlation between better swing and better scores?

The answer being that there is much more that goes into playing consistent golf and making consistent swings and turning in consistent scores and consistently breaking 90 and playing Socially Acceptable Golf, than analyzing every aspect of your swing.

Again, I’m sure that you can improve your swing, and that’s something we help you with - I promise you we will.  But remember this - You can’t bring your video camera on the golf course and if you did, it wouldn’t help you anyway.  There are many golfers out on Tour that have as good or better golf swing then Tiger and Vijay, yet these 2 are always at the top of the leaderboard.  There were golfers during Jack Nicklaus’ time that had better swings them him, yet he was one of the best Players ever.  On the other hand, Moe Norman hit the ball better than any person that ever lived, yet most people never heard of him.

See, the key is this - You can practice and improve your swing as much as you want on the Driving Range and not become a better Player on the golf course.  This is shown to us time and time again.  And I’ll probably hear the Mantra of the Monkey till the last day I’m on this earth - lets all say it out loud, all 3,582 of us reading this Golf Improvement Weekly, ready? 1, 2, 3, go - “If I could just take my driving range swing to the golf course, I would …….”

To become more consistent on the golf course you need to have your PLAN - a PLAN, just like a recipe for baking a cake:  Your PLAN needs equal parts of Swing Training, Mental Training and Course Strategy.

And just like baking a cake if you leave out any of these items, the cake isn’t good.  If you said “OK, I’m going to use extra sugar (Swing Analysis) and no butter (Course Strategy) and no Flour (Mental Training) - you'll just have a pile of sugar (swing), but you got no cake (game)!

Monkey’s Eat Sugar - Player’s Eat Cake!