How To “Bounce back” From Your Misses

On the PGA Tour, there’s a stat called “Bounce back”, which in my option is a great statistic to show the strength of a player’s mental game. It measures what a player scores on the hole following a bogey or worse. The leader in this statistic scores par or better almost 40% of the time after making a bogey or worse. Interestingly, some of these players appear on this list every year (not surprisingly Tiger Woods is in the top 10). So why are some players better at bouncing back that others? It’s highly likely that they are using some of the following 10 mental game strategies:

Strategy 1: Accept That Golf Is NOT A Game Of Perfect

“On a good day, even your best, you’re going to miss some shots.” – Ben Hogan

I’ve intentionally used the word “misses” in this article as I don’t think you need to think of them, at the time anyway, as “mistakes”. Ben Hogan also said that he only hit 5-6 shots in a round that were exactly as he intended, the rest were “misses”. Misses are an inevitable part of the game – it doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong or reason to worry. Sure, we can learn from our misses and reduce them over time, but on the course we’re best to move on quickly.

You’re never going to be immune to bogeys or worse and you’re likely to have them in any round, no matter how good you become. If you play to avoid them, you’re likely to make more of them. Accept that misses will happen and it will be easier to accept them and move on when they do.

Strategy 2: Avoid Outcome Goals and High Expecatations

If you’ve set goals for your score or you have expectations of playing well, misses are going to feel worse. Avoid setting “outcome goals” for your rounds such as avoiding 3 putts, hitting a certain number of fairways or shooting a certain score. Outcome goals only add pressure and increase the frustration from misses. Instead, set “process goals” that you have complete control over.

Strategy 3: Separate You The Person From You The Player

If you have an ego-mindset and believe that your level of golf says something about you as a person, it’s going to make your misses harder to deal with and you will fear making them. To avoid playing “Ego Golf” (in addition to mindfulness of this type of thinking), I suggest to my students that they “act as if” they are their best player “Alter Ego”. By playing this role, it can help separate you as a player from you as a person.

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Strategy 4: Use Self Talk

One you’ve anticipated that you are going to miss some shots, prepare for them with some “Self-talk Scripts”.

What would your best coach say to you when you make a big number or 3-putt? The key is to move on from it as quickly as possible, not stay stuck there which can change your mood and affect your confidence. Plan some effective self-talk to give you a lift back up after a miss.

Strategy 5: Be Self Aware

During your rounds, it’s important to be aware of how you are thinking and behaving, and shift your attention away from unhelpful thoughts. You can’t change any negative habit or thinking pattern without self-awareness.

However, whatever you are thinking and feeling at any moment is acceptable, they are never “wrong”. You can just get better at letting them pass, or not. Whatever you feel right after a shot is acceptable, whether it’s joy, dissappointment or frustration. You can’t control that initial feeling (primary emotion), but you can control what happens after that. Once you notice how you feel, you can accept it and move on. This is what the practice of mindfulness is about – the awareness of your thoughts and feelings gives you the control to choose what happens next instead of reacting.

Strategy 6: Use Distraction

You don’t want to anchor a miss in your memory, you need to move on quickly from it. With more self-awareness, you can choose to direct your attention to something constructive afterwards to help you get ready to play the next shot as best you can. This could be counting, looking around and noticing what you see, hear and feel or thinking about something outside of golf that makes you feel good. Otherwise the mind can fixate on what just happened and worry.

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Strategy 7: Find A Positive In Every Shot

Positve re-framing is an effective psychological strategy. A great challenge is to find something positive to say after a miss (as difficult as this might be). This strategy will divert your attention away from the negative consequence of the shot and prevent a negative reaction. Optimism and finding the good in any situation is a mental toughness trait and exercises like this will train it and make it more automatic.

Strategy 8: Score The Shot By The Routine

As you will know if you’ve been reading my emails or purchased any of my training products, the shot routine should be the measure of success for the shot.

Suspending your judgement of the outcome and doing a quick review of whether you went through a good routine will keep you objective instead of being emotional. Where was your focus before, during and after the shot? How was your strategy? Were you focused on the target and the shot you were intending to hit or what you didn’t want to do? Were you 100% committed to the shot? How was your tempo?

Without over-analyzing, treat every shot as a learning opportunity to improve your process.

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Strategy 9: Replay the shot as you would have liked

What was the swing or process that you would have liked to make? Would there have been something different in your thinking or your swing? Play the shot again (with an imaginary ball, obviously) and move on.

Strategy 10: Reflect and learn

It’s important to do some honest reflection after a round about how you dealt with the challenges. What might have caused your misses and how well did you respond? Create an action plan for limiting them and a better way to process them on the course. How well you re-bounded from setbacks is something my students score themselves by in their post round review (which they have to share with me).

Thanks for reading. I hope you experiment with these techniques and find out which are most effective for you.

Helping golfers perform better and enjoy the game more is something I’m very passionate about. If you feel like this article was of benefit to you, please share with others. You can also follow me via @golfstateofmind on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

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