Very few of us put much thought into golf psychology and how we can improve our mental game. We might buy a new driver or a new set of irons every now and then, but a much easier way to knock a few shots off our rounds is to think and talk to ourselves more helpfully.
Mental performance coach Duncan McCarthy works across all the main professional tours. We caught up with him to ask how we can improve our thinking and psychology on the golf course to help lower our scores.
Read on the find out what he had to say.
5 golf psychology tips for success
1. Self-Talk: The quality in between shots
We’re always talking to ourselves—whether it’s about things around us, judging, analysing, looking to the future or the past, and so on. So, when we step on a golf course, self-talk is normally going on inside our heads, either about the last shot, what’s coming up, what we need to do, or what we shouldn’t have done before.
This will always happen—it’s part of being human. But many people have a bad relationship with the voice inside their heads, as it’s normally more hurtful than helpful.
When thinking in the context of golf psychology, the top piece of advice I’d give to any amateur golfer is to go out there and set a goal purely related to self-talk, i.e. today’s goal is to have good self-talk. So, we’re thinking less about the obvious, such as shooting a number, and more about being better towards ourselves internally.
Good self-talk is where we talk ourselves up with compliments, give ourselves a break, and don’t berate ourselves for a bad shot. It’s not false positives, it’s more about being kind to ourselves.
When we get off the course later on, that’s the time to be honest. It’s really important to go out there and pat ourselves on the back and say that was a really good effort, we committed well to that, and we’re proud of the decision we made. Then, when we get on the next tee, we’re going to really commit to our target. These are all helpful statements and ones we should also make to our playing partners.
We don’t often say these kinds of things to ourselves, but I think it’s really important that we do because they have a big impact on our performance. When we get off the course, then it’s time to look more in detail at what was good, what wasn’t so good, and how we can improve next time.
2. Intention: Be clear with our instruction
We take this for granted, especially nowadays with equipment like rangefinders. Amateurs all have yardage devices, which is great, but they’re always zapping the flag, and without even realising it, they end up playing to the flag. We don’t see the top players going at flags—instead, they’re playing away from it. Many amateurs end up just aiming at the flag rather than picking an intentional target, so we need to be clearer on that. Golfers should identify a target beyond where they’re actually going so it’s easier to commit to it.
The main reason it’s important to have that target in mind is so that we can send our brain clear messages. The brain waits for us to instruct it, but amateur golfers usually don’t instruct it well enough. They instruct it with ‘don’t go left’ or ‘don’t do this’, and our brains get confused. It doesn’t know exactly what we want, so being clearer with our intentions from the start makes everything easier.
Every golfer has a different method when it comes to setting targets. For me, though—if I know I want to hit the ball down the right side of the fairway—great, that’s a clear intention. Now, I need to identify a target beyond that, on that line, where I want to aim.
When standing over the ball and having a last look at the target before playing a shot, it’s much easier to look at a target in the distance rather than one on the ground. I always want my players to have their heads up, and having a target in the distance will help ensure they do.
3. Do golf, not don't golf
Most amateurs (and even some pros) often use unhelpful self-talk phrases such as ‘don’t go left’, ‘don’t go in the water’, ‘don’t fat it’, or ‘don’t three-putt it’. As we touched upon earlier, these are confusing messages for the brain. The subconscious mind can’t always interpret ‘don’t’ and will only hear the words after it.
So, if we were to tell our brains ‘don’t go left’, all the brain might hear is ‘go left’. With this in mind, remember that we’re the ones who instruct our brains, so let’s instruct it well. If we were caddying for a player, we would say, ‘I want you to hit this here,’ but we never say that to ourselves.
A good golf psychology tip is to eliminate the word ‘don’t’ from your course vocabulary and heighten your use of ‘do’.
I do want to do this. I do want to do that. Let’s instruct ourselves better.
4. Acceptance: Draw the line
Acceptance is such an important part of golf and golf psychology. Too many of us get upset at hitting poor shots and we then get frustrated. We give ourselves a hard time for hitting a poor shot, but the fact is we’re always going to hit poor shots. Nobody ever plays a round of golf in which every outcome is exactly what they want—and that’s the same at every level of the game.
So, instead of giving ourselves a hard time, let’s focus on the skills required to get better for next time and just accept the poor outcome. Acceptance allows us to move on, and time that we’re not accepting is time when we can’t move on, and we’re dragging bad energy with us.
Acceptance doesn’t mean that we like the shot or that we’re OK with the outcome, but that we are willing to accept it and move on, and that’s massive.
Whether we’re on the fairway or the tee, it’s really important to stand still, take two or three deep breaths, and draw the line. That’s the beauty of golf. There’s always a new challenge ahead, so being able to slow ourselves down in that moment is a great skill to have and develop.
5. The game within a game: Three-hole loops
We all normally view golf as one round of 18 holes, but we don’t always have to see it like that. We can change the lens through which we see it and reduce the timeframe that we’re competing on. Eighteen holes is a lot of time to remain focused on, and there’s so much that can happen during that time. However, if we break things up into smaller, more achievable sections, we can make our time on the course more manageable.
A great way of doing this is to play three-hole loops in our heads. My tour players do it, and if they play the loop in under par, then they’ve ‘won the loop’. Level is a half, and over-par is a loss, so it’s easy to adapt to when we receive strokes on a hole.
The beauty of this is that we get a reset walk after each third hole. Then, we start a new loop, which takes us away from the bigger picture and keeps us closer to the present moment and challenge at hand. We might be thinking of the front nine or the chance of finishing off a good round, and this makes us focus on starting again. If we’re truly bought into this mindset, we’ll step onto the 16th tee playing to win that final loop of three.
About Duncan
Duncan McCarthy is a mental performance coach who works with golfers across all tours, including Marcus Armitage, Mel Reid, and Major champion Ashleigh Buhai.
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