One of the keys to playing good golf is feeling confident. If you feel confident before and during the round, you're relaxed, your body moves fluidly in a coordinated and smooth way, and your mind is calm and can focus on key elements of each shot, ......if you don't feel confident, you won't be able to play to your potential. Your body will be tense; it will move in rough, jerky movements; and your mind will be in a state of panic, unable to focus on the task at hand.

 

Therefore, we must strive for a state of confidence before and during a golf round, right?

 

But what is confidence, really?

 

I like this definition from Wikipedia:"Confidence is generally described as a state of being certain either that a hypothesis or prediction is correct or that a chosen course of action is the best or most effective."When it comes to golf, we feel confident if we feel pretty certain that we will win or that we will be able to hit all shots called for. That's how our mind works. It constantly looks into the future and compares our PERCEIVED abilities against the PERCEIVED difficulty of the task we face.

We must create a new perception in our mind in order to feel confident. We must perceive ourselves as good golf players who can handle many different and difficult shots and situations on the course, and we must perceive the task at hand - beating the course - as not that difficult.

This perception creates a feeling of confidence.

Feeling confident allows you to play your best golf (because you are relaxed and calm); and thus increases your chances of wining an event.

And when you do win an event, this proof will reinforce both your beliefs about your abilities, and your beliefs that your competitors are really not that good, that they all have weaknesses, that they all mentally faulter here and there, and that you ALWAYS have a chance to win.

This will create a POSITIVE, image, instead of a negative one; and you'll win more and more.