New Video: Inside the Mental Game of Tiger Woods

In golf, the mental game has been determined to be anywhere from 50-90% a factor in determining your performance. Knowing the right techniques for utilizing its power will have a huge impact on your scores.

Having a good process in place to switch from being relaxed and enjoying the present moment with your playing partners to a focused, in-flow state of mind is a key part of giving a shot 100%. Good preparation for a shot is achieved using your conscious, analytical mind, but then you need to transition into a clear, “quiet-minded” state and become completely focused on nothing but a positive visualization. This is how top athletes reach the state of peak performance. Once the shot has been decided and committed to the rest should be almost trance like.

Tiger Woods has achieved his greatness in the game, not because he is the best athlete out there, but because he has the most powerful and creative mind and he knows how to channel it.

Tiger Woods Mental Game comes from his ability to be able to enter this highly focused state where he’s completely absorbed in the shot seems to increase the more intense the situation. How many miracle shots have we seen him hit over the years to win tournaments or force play-offs? This is not a coincidence. It’s because he uses the power of the mind to the maximum and the more pressure there is on a shot, the greater the intensity of his focus. The short game is invariably the area where this manifests itself most predominantly.

He says when he’s playing at his absolute best he has “black out moments” – he remembers preparing for the shot, but he doesn’t remember playing it. External interferences and conscious control disappear, opening his mind to be completely in the present moment and at its most creative. He sometimes doesn’t even hear the sound of the crowd.

We can all learn a great deal from this that transcends golf. If in our daily lives we can start to live more in the present and allow our minds to just absorb our experiences without conscious thinking, the more open and creative our minds will become.

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