Just Trust It?

How many times have you heard or been told, especially after a poor shot, to “just trust it”, or “just swing the club and don’t think about it so much”? Quite a few, I’d be willing to bet. Think back on how that advice affected your next shot, or series of shots for the rest of that round. Perhaps you started hitting it better, at which point you might have come to conclusion that mindlessly swinging was the way to go, and that complicating matters with swing thoughts was detrimental to your ability to strike the ball effectively. You probably liked the feeling of not caring so much how you swung the club, concentrating instead on a sense of rhythm and how the ball was going to travel to your target. You may have felt that your timing was better, and that you weren’t as restricted in your motion. In short, you achieved a better flow, and whatever you had been working on was more able to work for you and give you better results.
 
Then reality set in. The next time you teed it up, or maybe on a hole later in the round, the ball didn’t magically go where you wanted it to, even though you kept the idea of “just swinging”. You were trying to “trust it”, but your technique didn’t seem worthy of your trust. It kept jilting you, offering up miss-hits and misdirected shots that turned out just as bad or worse than before when you were “thinking”. Now the question arises, “where do I go from here?” If you aren’t going to think of how to make a good swing, how are you going to improve upon what is causing the poor results? If you keep “not thinking” what is there to change what you are doing?
 
It seems to me that when the question of trusting your golf swing arises too many of us, teachers and sport psychologists as well as everyday golfers, relate to the problem in terms of faith. Religious faith is based on an acceptance of things that you cannot be positive are true, at least not in a scientific sense where “evidence” is required. Do you have to see it to believe it, or do you have to believe it to see it? It is one of the overwhelming questions inherent in the human condition. Anyone who is not an atheist demonstrates the ability to have faith in things they have no particular reason to believe are true, other than the fact that they have made a personal decision to believe in whatever “truth” they have decided upon. Whether or not that particular “truth” is really “THE truth” is the crux of much of the conflict between groups of peoples and cultures over the course of our history.
 
In terms of the golf swing, we are often asked to “have faith” in our ability to play the game. In religion, faith has little objective consequence. In other words, there is no measurable difference between having faith or not having faith, and certainly no measurable difference in precisely what faith you have. No one has returned from heaven to report on the correctness of a certain system of beliefs. If following the principles of your belief makes you a better person or helps you live a better life, then the choice is obviously a good one for you. If the same adherence to the principles of your faith makes you hate every other member of every other faith to the point where you would have no problem killing them, then while you may think your faith has made you better, it is certainly up for discussion as to whether your faith is truly desirable.
 
The point of this digression is that when we speak of faith in religious terms we are always looking at it subjectively: it means different things to different people, and there is no evidence that one set of beliefs is better than the next, or that having none is a horrible thing. Golf is anything but subjective. The ball knows only how it is struck, and the manner of striking it, while certainly open to almost unlimited variation, has to follow certain rules of geometry and physics to come up with a desirable result. The ball really doesn’t care how you “feel” about the shot you are about to attempt. If you make a mistake, the shot is not going to magically go where you wanted it to, no matter how much you “believed” you were going to be successful.
 
I often hear my students speak of “confidence”, and how the presence of confidence or the lack thereof directly affects their results. I hear phrases that range from “I felt so confident and I played great”, or “I was confident that I could hit that shot and sure enough I pulled it off”, to “I felt so confident but I went out and stunk up the joint”, or “I stood over the shot feeling as confident as I’ve ever felt and proceeded to snap it out of bounds”. Most of the time I hear something like “I started hitting it bad, and after a while I just lost all confidence in what I was doing, and it was downhill from there”. The question I pose at this point is “does confidence breed success, or does success breed confidence?” From my own reading I am sure that most sport psychologists would fall in the category of having confidence leads to success. In my line of work, which is teaching people to hit the ball who can’t really do it very well, I have come to the belief that success is what breeds confidence, and that in order to “trust” your swing or your putting stroke to hit the shot you need to hit your mechanics have to be in order. In other words, in order to have trust, or confidence, in what you are doing, you have to have a reason to have that trust.
 
Let’s say that you are a 20 handicap, and you find yourself on the tee of a par three with an island green, perhaps like the famous one at the TPC Sawgrass where the Tournament Players Championship is held each March. As you stand over your shot, what should your swing thoughts be? What is your best bet to hit the ball on the green? If you just clear your mind and swing away, the odds are, based on your handicap, you may be able to hit a 140 yard shot within 10 yards of where you are aiming a few times out of 10. Does this inspire confidence? It wouldn’t for me. I have watched the Tour pros wrestle with that little hole in their tournament and have seen some remarkable shots as well as many disasters, all with an 8 or 9-iron. For even the best players, who should have more trust and confidence than anyone, hitting a shot with trouble all around makes the heart pound faster, the breath more rapid, the hands and arms feel jumpy, and the mind generally disconnected from the body.
 
When asked how they combat such feelings, the pros respond with similar answers. “I concentrate on my routine, and I try to do exactly what I have been doing on every other shot I have hit.” “I always see the shot flying onto the green before I hit it. I visualize only positive things, and never think in terms of avoiding trouble.” “I focus on relaxing and swinging smoothly, and I just let it happen, knowing that is my best chance to make a good swing.” Certainly all sound advice, at least for someone whose swing mechanics are sound. The pro can trust his swing because he has worked on it relentlessly for years, and probably has loads of experience in pressure situations. Every tournament player has had many chances to hit difficult shots under pressure. Their results are going to vary wildly, from horrible to sublime, but they have learned from every experience. With each failure comes the nugget of an idea about how to cope the next time, and each success becomes an addition to the arsenal of positive images that the player can use to help realistically build his or her confidence, and I say realistically because thinking back on a shot you have actually hit is far more effective than trying to invent a positive image when you don’t have any to remember, which is precisely the situation the 20 handicapper finds himself in when facing such a shot.
 
So what is there to do? It’s simple: you just have to get better. It is ludicrous to think that you should be confident and should trust your swing when it isn’t good enough to hit even an easy shot with any consistency. But then again, who says you have to just get up and hit the ball without any thought? It has always been my contention that in order to improve you have to change things from the way they are to something better, and that requires conscious thought. Swinging without thought is fine if that swing is just what you would like it to be, and your only struggle is to get out of your own way and to let it happen. But there are so few who are at that level that it’s not even worth considering for anyone else. For those of us who tend to hit worse shots when the penalties are greater on one or both sides of the hole, we are left with trying to organize our thoughts so that we can help ourselves make better swings.
 
Yes, I am supporting the radical notion that it is better to think than not to think when it comes to hitting the golf ball, at least until you can look at your swing on a video and find it generally flawless, or until you have hit the ball well enough under pressure to dispense with all thought. Unless you are already on the Tour, that is not you. What you have is a swing that makes mistakes, probably from start to finish, and in order to hit better shots you need to rectify some or all of these mistakes. Doing so is a long process of practice and play. You practice so you can play better, and you play so that you can get a better idea of what you need to practice. If you don’t know what you should be practicing, you need help. You also could probably use some help when it comes to playing. Some of the most effective lessons I give are on the course just going over the thought involved in approaching each situation that comes up, of which there are and infinite variety.
 
But before a playing lesson is even possible the player must be able to hit the ball, and hitting the ball is all about swing mechanics. Is it technical? Yes, absolutely. Is it complicated? Yes, absolutely. Is it extremely difficult? Again, the answer is yes. Are you going to “get it” quickly and without much frustration and disappointment? Not if you are like the vast majority of everyone who tries to learn the game. Unless you are a freak of nature the game will not come naturally to you. Its fundamentals are counter-intuitive. To hit the ball up into the air when it lies on the ground you have to hit down. In order to hit any ball straight you must swing in an arc, and continuously open and close the clubface as well. I can tell you from experience that not many will get these concepts correct from the beginning, and the longer it takes before someone explains and demonstrates how they work the more errors build into the swing. It is much more difficult to change a swing that has achieved even a level of mediocre efficiency than it is to teach a pure beginner, for the simple reason that the act of striking a ball is so difficult that once the mind and body have come up with a way to hit the ball at all, even if that method is fraught with mistakes, the brain will resist all efforts to change, fearing a return to the hideous first results of the beginner.
 
If I sound a bit morbid here with all my talk of difficultly and pain, let me say that golf is the greatest game because it is the greatest challenge. It should be the goal of all golfers to someday step up to that island green with positive thoughts, thoughts that are based on hard work and experience. In other words, trust that is engendered by success, success that has been earned over time. You dig trust out of the dirt. You will more than likely need some help, but in the end it is the work you put in that gives you the confidence to pull the trigger when your heart is racing and the tournament is on the line. It won’t always come off the way you picture it, and there are bound to be many disappointments, but with each effort and failure come a redoubled effort to take that experience and grow from it, to focus on your weaknesses and attack the conundrums of the game with even greater enthusiasm.

Join the forum discussion on this post