Saturday, June 5, 2010

How To Focus Part 2

Another great video with Shawn Clement on how to focus on your golf shot.



I get asked this a bit because one of things I'm probably best at in my game is hitting clutch golf shots.

My friends and family chalk it up to playing baseball as a teenager at a high level and lots of experience. I chalk it up to much of what Shawn Clement talks about in the video. And a lot of it is just breaking it down to 'if I do this, I'll hit a good shot. If I don't, I'll hit a bad shot. If I do what I want in my swing and I somehow hit a poor shot, there is nothing I can do about it.'

But, I'm supremely confident that if my mechanics are sound, my impact will be sound and the results will be good.

And I hate to harp on it, but D-Plane does come into the picture as well. For instance, sometimes I may be having a good round but remember earlier on in the round I hit some face hooks. I then get up on a hole with a tough tee shot and O.B. left, I now open the clubface up a tad at address and think of what I want to do and what to avoid (closing the face in this instance). Then I just give it a rip.

I talked to a former D-1 college placekicker who played some Arena football and he stated it very similarly. His thoughts were breaking things down to 1 mechanical thing that he's been working on and saying to himself 'if I do this right, that's all I can really do.'

And I've talked to a current PGA Tour star who is a good putter and says he uses the same mental approach to putting. It's not so much about the result, but the process. Did he read the putt as well as he could? Did he feel the pace of putt? Did he take a decent stroke? If he did and still missed...even if it was a 3-footer, in his mind there's nothing else he could do and if he keeps executing that process, the putts will fall.

I've talked about focusing on the 'process' instead of the result for better scores, but I get the feeling from talking to this Pro that the PGA Tour pros tend to have a process within the process that they focus on.





3JACK

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