John Richardson (of BreakParBlueprint) pointed me to this video on Youtube and it's a great lesson in how to control your mind on the golf course.

Nick Faldo was giving a lesson when someone asked

"How do you train concentration?"

That's a fair question because Faldo, in his prime, demonstrated tremendous mental strength.

A little like Tiger today he was often accused of being aloof but the results speak for themselves.  14 majors for Tiger and 6 for Faldo..  In every success story there are clues and here Faldo reveals his mind-set and approach to this key issue.    

With a lot of humour Nick demonstrates the typical thoughts that go through the mind of the average golfer (the likes of you and me) as we set-up to strike the ball. As golfers we tend to worry relentlessly about all the things we shouldn’t do.

Faldo explains how important it is to ignore these and not think:

“Don’t hit it in the water!”

or

“Don’t hit it in the trees”

... this simply encourages our mind to think more about the hazard than the target. Sadly it’s not as easy as just saying there is no water, or there are no trees ... we can SEE the water and can SEE the trees –  and these kind of thoughts attack us at EVERY stage of our game.

Unfortunately Nick doesn’t give you a cast iron way to banish these thoughts.  Trying to have the mind-set of Faldo and Tiger is too tough for most normal golfers because we simply don’t have the mental fortitude that these guys have.  Tiger was being taught advanced hypnotic techniques in his teens and his father gave him huge mental fortitude in a variety of ways.   You and I didn’t have Earl Woods standing over our shoulder when we were teenagers and neither do we have the  focus that Nick Faldo has.

But there is a clue. Close your mind to everything except the target. Concentrate totally on that vision, let it FILL YOUR MIND to the exclusion of everything else