Golf is a compromise between what your ego wants you to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.” -Bruce Crampton
You can’t do physically well what you don’t understand mentally’ – Philo Brathwaite
“The will to win is not as important as the will to prepare to win” – Mike G.
Decide your shot before you take your throwing stance and commit to it. – Me
Your opponent is the course. – Me
Respect each throw when you are competing.
Play your game & don’t let other player’s shots influence yours.
If you are paying money to compete, don’t treat it like a round of practice.
It’s the person who plays best during a round that will win it… not the one who has played best in the past.
A better score is more valuable than getting the tee box.
The grip is the “quarterback” of disc golf.
Grip a sport sack to keep your throwing hand warm during a delay.
Perform the process of playing disc golf – Disc Golf Strong
“The cave you fear to enter, holds the treasure you seek” – Joseph Campbell
If you are angry on the course, it may be caused by off-course issues.
Golf is not a Game of Perfect
Great golf is learning to think in the most effective and efficient way possible every day.
The challenge lies in thinking properly every day on every shot.
Golf is a game and it has to be played.
When physical talent between players is essentially equal…. the mental side of the game is at least 90 percent of the margin between winners and losers.
Find what thoughts are advantageous and keep them. Discard the destructive thoughts.
A person with great dreams can achieve great things.
Golfing potential depends primarily on a player’s attitude, how well he plays his short game, and on how well he thinks.
Champions are all strong-willed, have dreams, and make long term commitments to pursue those dreams.
Improvement take patience, persistence, and practice.
Big improvements require working and chipping away for years. A golfer has to learn to enjoy the process of striving to improve.
The process of something, not the end result, enriches life.
Your thinking during a round shouldn’t depend on how you played the first few holes.
Take control of your thoughts and use them to influence events.
You’re going to have to learn to think consistently if you want to score consistently.
Decide before the round starts how you’re going to think and do it on every shot.
You have to be mentally disciplined every day in practice if you wanted to be disciplined on game day and that attitude would always win out over ability.
People by and large become what they think about themselves.
Winners and losers are self-determined. But only the winners are will to admit it. ‘John Wooden’
Have a routine and follow it on every shot.
You cannot throw a disc consistently well if you think about the mechanics of your swing as you play.
The human organism performs a throw better if you look at a target and reacts rather than looks, thinks, and reacts.
To be successful, a golfer must blend work on mechanics with work on the mental approach to the game.
The time to worry about swing mechanics must be limited to practice time.
If you step onto the course with the intention of shooting your best possible score, you cannot think about mechanics.
You have to believe that you’ve practiced your throws and putts enough to have faith in them.
Winners learn to accept the throw they bring to the course on any given day and to score with it.
Trust that your body will produce the throw needed for the shot you envision.
The hot streak represents the golfer’s true capability. It results, essentially, from trust.
Staying out of your own way is letting nothing from his mind interfere with his physical capabilities.
Strategy and course management, not perfect throws, have a lot to do with success.
Before your throw, visualize your shot and wait for your mind was relaxed and focused before throwing a shot.
There are three stages for a player: unconsciously incompetent, consciously competent, and unconsciously competent.
Before taking any shot, a golfer must pick out the smallest possible target.
The smaller the target, the sharper the person’s focus, the better his concentration, and the better the results.
The target helps prevent distractions.
Your eyes shift backward during your backswing, but with the third eye, you still see the target.
The brain tries to be an accommodating mechanism. It will try to send the disc in the direction of the last thing you look at or think about.
The brain, at some level, cannot seem to understand the word “don’t”.
Be intent on learning what you have to know to get better, not what people will think about you.
A sound preshot routine is the rod and staff of the golfer under pressure, a comfort in times of affliction and challenge.
The foundation of consistency is a sound preshot routine.
A good routine enables a golfer to be trusting, decisive and focused on the target. It fits your personality.
Good players feel that when their routines start, they are stepping into a bubble, a small private world in which nothing can distract them.
If you step up to your lie still uncertain whether you have the ride disc, your routine is not sound.
The mental side of the routine requires you to resolve any doubt or anger from your mind before taking your shot.
Your brain and body work best together when the brain reacts to a target.
“Nice and slow” is a good swing thought.
The best routines are often the simplest and take the least time.
If your first thought to a shot is disc A, you will be better off 99 times out of a hundred if you throw disc A decisively, rather than waffle about using disc B.
You can never putt well without feel.
To become a good putter, you must make a commitment to good thinking.
You have to decide that, come what may, you love putting and you’re glad that every hole gives you a chance to use your putter because that’s where you’ve got a big advantage over all the players who dread putting.
A great putter has foolishness believing they can make a one in ten putt.
A good putting attitude is free of fear. A golfer has to believe the putt will go in the hole, but he must not care if he misses. He has to find a balance between determination and nonchalance.
Playing golf weel demands honesty.
A decisive attitude is much more important in putting than reading the minute details of the putt.
Remember that the goal of a putt is to make it.
The heart of a putting routine is… Look at the target. Look at the disc. Let the putt go.
Think when you’re behind the ball. Don’t think when you’re over it. Do.
When putting, always aim to make it. It gives you the biggest margin of error.
A successful player does their best to accept his board shots, shrug them off, and concentrate completely on the next one. He has accepted the fact that “golf is not a game of perfect”.
Understand that while striving for perfection is essential, demanding perfection on himself on the golf course is deadly.
No matter what happens with any shot you hit, accept it. Acceptance is the last step in a sound routine.
A good golfer has to learn to enjoy winning ugly and that entails acceptance of all the shots they hit, not just the good ones.
The best golfers strive to minimize mistakes, but they don’t expect to eliminate them. They understand that it’s most important to respond well to mistakes they inevitably make.
The first thing to do is to throw away your expectations as soon as you step onto the golf course, and just play.
Expectations are great if you confine them to long-range considerations. But expectations can hurt you if they are narrowly focused on the results of a particular stroke, hole, or round.
On the first tee, you should have two immediate goals. one is to have fun. The other involves the process of playing, not the results. This goal is to get your mind where it’s supposed to be on every shot. If you do that, you’ll shoot the best score you’re capable of shooting that day.
You have to be nonjudgmental. You have to forgive and forget and be compassionate toward yourself.
If you must have expectations about results, expect to make some mistakes.
Acceptance allows a golfer to be patient, and patience is one of the necessary virtues in golf.
Remember that golf is not a game of justice.
A golfer can’t force results to happen. He can only do everything possible to give those results a chance to happen.
You have to attend to the process and not concern yourself with the results.
Confidence is what you think about yourself and your golf game.
Confidence at the level of any single shot is nothing more than thinking about the disc going to the target. If you’re thinking about the disc going to the target, you’re confident.
But look at it another way. If you’re not thinking about your driving going to the target, what are you thinking about? Obviously, you’re thinking about it going somewhere else… into a lake, maybe?
You have to learn to monitor your thinking and yourself whether an idea that springs to mind are likely to help them or hurt them in the effort to grow more confident.
Try to develop a long-term memory for your good shots and short-term memory for the bad ones.
A game plan can allow you to execute decisions made in advance, calmly, outside the heat of competition. You must play every significant round with a game plan.
A professional creates a plan so they have to do as little analyzing and improvising as possible once they are on the course. He wants to leave his mind clear and free to focus on each target.
If a change must be made to a plan, make a decisive disc or shot selection when the time comes. Once you make up your mind, you have to believe in your decision.
For each shot, you must pick a target, a disc, and a route and believe in all of them.
Your game plan must also prepare you for adversity.
The important thing is to be prepared for both bad shots and the bad breaks the course can dish out even on good shots. Whey they happen, as they inevitably will, you’ll maintain your equilibrium.
Keep your thoughts on your current position on the course.
If you alter your gameplan, change it in a conservative direction. Any time you’re not sure, make the more conservative choice.
A golfer chokes when he lets anger, doubt, fear, or some other extraneous factor distract him before a shot.
When you are tight and careful, your body must work against gravity, rhythm, and flow.
If the putt or shot is missed in spite of good thinking, the golfer simply has to accept his misfortune as part of the game and move on.
Keep your mind off of golf between shots. It’s easier for most people to concentrate totally for a minute or some at a time, as they execute their shotmaking routines.
A golfer should always assume that his opponent will hit the best possible shot. Then, if it happens, he’ll be prepared to cope with it.
One of the most common mental errors committed by golfers under pressure is letting the score distract them from what they out to be thinking about.
Your first opponent is the game itself. The course and the discs are all idiosyncratic and unpredictable foes and they will humble the best golfer more than occasionally. The second opponent is the golfer himself. Only after those to foes have been confronted do the other people on the course come into the picture.
Never decide that you can’t stand another golfer, because you might find yourself paired with that golfer for the most important round of your life.
You’ve got to go in there with the attitude that you’re better than they are until they prove otherwise… put the burden of proof on them.
To improve, you must practice. But the quality of your practice is more important than the quantity.
To understand how to practice you must first understand that there are two states of mind in practice… the training mentality and the trusting mentality.
The trusting mentality is essential for getting ready to play competitively.
The dominant training habit is the one an athlete practices most… therefore you must spend at least 60 percent of your practice time in the trusting mentality.
You need to accustom the mind to the style of thinking that works on the golf course… to thoughts of the target, of routine, of acceptance.
Good putting is primarily a function of attitude and routine. Once a player masters those two, he really doesn’t need to hit a lot of practice putts.
Prepare your mind for shooting lower scores so you will have an easier time staying focus and making even more birdies the next time you get off to a quick start.
To play the best golf you can play, you have to make a healthy balanced commitment to the game and to improvement.
More often than not, good things come to people who stop trying to force them to happen.
During the hours you set aside to pursue the dream, give golf you’re undivided attention and energy. Put in the hours every time regardless of the weather Put them in when you seem to be stalled on an infinite plateau as well as the days you feel the gratification of noticeable improvement.
Even at your best, you will not come close to mastering the game.
Golf will challenge you, will give you a chance to test yourself. If you take the ability you have and do the best you can with it, you’ll be happy.
In the end, you will realize that you love golf because of what it teaches you about yourself.
Odedge 