Stephen D.  Simmons

Editor and Publisher - StrategicGolfer Instruction Series

Think back to some of your best rounds or greatest shots.  Everything around you at the time seemed to be moving in slow motion; with vivid colors, sounds, and smells.  It was like you were part of a painting that was happening without effort and you were the center of attraction.  Your canvas was the course.  Your brush was creativity and sense of inner calm.

There were many things you noticed; birds chirping, the wind, the warmth of the sun.  Many things…other than swing mechanics.

Great players express their paintings with a lot of detail.  Poor players struggling with their performance do not see details or they see a lot of details, all of which are about the wrong things.  A beginning or poor player will tend to see a lot of detail about process and mechanics….head still, arm straight, low and slow.  Good golfers tend to see a lot of detail about the intended outcome.  Good golfers see the process of playing golf as part of a bigger picture with successful outcomes being paramount.  Amazingly they paint  smaller paintings that become part of the whole; several shots that become a great round of 65.

Learn how to play golf with good mental pictures.  Your pictures can be created from the creativity of your brain in the form of visualization.  See the result before you make the golf swing.

I recall Jack Nicklaus talking about playing golf is going to the movies.  He saw very vivid and detailed pictures about hitting good shots before he would swing the club.  His greatness came from his ability to do this repeatedly, time after time.  He would see the flight of the ball and its roll.

Raymond Floyd talked about seeing the ball in the air with the proper trajectory, hitting the green, bouncing twice, and then spinning back into the hole.

Intention is a very powerful expression of the mind.  When you intend to do something you set the stage for success.  You give the brain all of the signals needed to chart a great course of action.

I believe that Tiger Woods is the epitamy of the power of intention when it counts the most.  His last two putts at Bay Hill on the 18th green to win his last two starts there are the story of legend.

After his last Bay Hill victory this year he described what his mind and his pictures were like as he pondered the putt.  Among other things he spoke about a temperature change, more dew on the blades of grass in the late afternoon,  the impact those things would have on the grain, and how that would influence the break and speed of his left to right downhill breaking putt. 

 Are you getting the picture…."a master at work".

It’s as if he is willing the ball into the hole.  Non of us would presume that his mind can control the ball after it leaves the putter blade, however, his power of intention is strong enough to control all of the variables before the stroke is made and that intention manifests itself as success, time after time.

You can intend to make good putts or you can intend to make your putts.  We would encourage you to work on the latter.

This is a dogleg left par 5 that makes a 45 degree bend to the left at 260 yards off the tee.  From the tee it seems that there is a wide landing area.  There is a fairway bunker on the right side that would seem out of play.  The problem;  there is out of bounds on the left side of the hole all the way to the green.  The out of bounds characteristic of this hole tends to force you to the right, however, the right hazard pinches in at the landing area so accuracy is paramount.

If we frame the hole with safe margins based upon what we know now, this is what we should consider as a safe landing area (green).  We want to stay left of the right margin (red) and right of the left margin (white).

The key to playing great golf is to play using pictures.  You must learn how to create a sense of feel and a design for the intended shape of the ball flight to hit your best golf shots.  Great players call it visualization.

The brain responds better to pictures than words.  Picking targets is critical to giving the brain a sense of what needs to be accomplished.  If you were standing on this tee box and thought to yourself, "I’ll aim at the fairway in the direction of the apartments", you are defining an area that is far too large.

The smaller the target the better.  Small targets are much more specific.  You give the brain a very exact area that we are hitting the golf ball to.  Typically if you aim at a small target you will have a very good picture of what the shape of the ball flight will be; left to right, right to left, straight, high, or low.

Depending upon the intended ball flight we would pick one of these targets.  If we intended to hit a draw we could aim at the corner of the apartment.  Unless we don’t have a choice we would prefer to aim at targets that are close to the ideal landing area.  In this case if we intend to hit a draw and the ball goes straight we will still be in or close to the landing area.

If our preferred ball flight is left to right, the corner of the red roof in the distance would be a good selection.  A good straight shot target would be the tree top in the distance.

Occasionally you will hear a pro on TV say that he was not committed which led to a bad shot.  In many cases it’s because the target and shape of the shot were not pictured.