Michael Lardon - Mastering Golfs Mental Game: Your Ultimate Guide to Better On-Course Performance and Lower Scores

Mastering
GOLFS
Mental Game

Dr. Michael T. Lardon

with Matthew Rudy

Foreword by Phil Mickelson

Copyright 2014 by Michael Lardon

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Crown Archetype and design is a registered trademark of Random House LLC.

All graphs copyright by Michael Lardon, MD

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lardon, Michael.
Mastering golfs mental game: your ultimate guide to better on-course performance and lower scores / Dr. Michael T. Lardon with Matthew Rudy; foreword by Phil Mickelson.
pages cm
1. GolfPsychological aspects. I. Rudy, Matthew. II. Title.
GV979.P75L37 2014
796.352019dc23
2014021023

Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-553-41791-3
eBook ISBN: 978-0-553-41792-0

Book design: Ellen Cipriano
Cover design: Gabriel Levine
Cover photography: Dan Thornberg/Shutterstock; V Stock LLC/Tetra Images/Corbis

v3.1

To my beautiful wife,
Nadine,
and my children,
Lexi,
Lindsay,
and Theo

by Phil Mickelson

My first interaction with Doc Lardon didnt have anything to do with golf. Mike and my brother Tim had become friends through Mikes work helping the mens golf team Tim coached at the University of San Diego. My brother knew about Mikes table tennis skill, and he thought it would be good fun to set me up for a match with a player who was out of my leagueand who happened to live nearby. We met at a small gym at the Bridges Golf Club, where a Ping-Pong table had been set up. Tim had asked Mike to come in and teach me a lesson, so to speak.

Mike showed me some pretty cool things that day, and we had a good laugh. I had a few Ping-Pong scores I wanted to settle out on tour, and clearly Mike was a good guy to know. He helped me with the high toss serve and gave me footwork advice while playing me sitting in a chair. I followed by offering to help him with his short game. It wasnt until laterafter I had learned more about Mikes work with Olympic athletes, NFL and MLB players, and other professional golfersthat we started talking about golf and the mental approach I used for my game.

My goals every season are to play my best golf and win major championships, and Im always willing to try something different if I think it will help me toward those goals. Ive been extremely fortunate to be surrounded by terrific people with expertise in many aspects of the game. About two years ago I was frustrated because I wasnt getting the results that the work I had been putting in on my game should have produced. Thats where Mike came in. He helped me find some intangibles that make good golf great golf. His ideas about scoring the execution of each shot and redefining goals were particularly helpful.

Coming so close to winning a U.S. Open is unfortunately something I had experienced before 2013, but Merion was especially tough. Mike helped me see that in spite of that very difficult finish, my game was in a great place and I was continuing to play better and better. I went to Muirfield with more confidence than I had going into previous British Opens. I played the Scottish Open the week before and won in a playoff, which confirmed many of things that we had talked about. Then I played some of my best golf to win the Claret Jug. Its one of the most satisfying victories of my career.

Doc Lardons Mental Scorecard is a simple way to incorporate his best strategies into your game. It will help you create a system that allows you to organize and evaluate the way you think on the course and give you a game plan to improve. Give it a try. Youll think better and play with more confidence, which leads to better scores.

Rancho Santa Fe, California

F OR THE BETTER part of thirty years, Ive been fortunate to work withand compete againstathletes at the pinnacle of their sport. As a practicing medical doctor and sport psychiatrist, my twin specialties are mood disorders and the science of human performance. Ive helped hundreds of professional and Olympic athletes strengthen their mental focus and achieve more favorable results, and Ive talked about it in medical journals, in magazine articles, and on CNN. In my own athletic career, Ive competed at a national level in table tennis since the late 1970s. Outside of the sports world, Ive helped businesspeople, politicians, and members of elite military units think more efficiently on the joband learn techniques that help them prepare for when things go wrong.

Simply put, I help people under pressure think better.

I help them find The Zone.

At the highest levels of human performancewhether were talking about professional athletes, world-class musicians, or elite surgeonsmental skills are the ones that separate the very best from the merely great. Mental skills are the ones that let the greatest use the physical skills they already have.

In my first book, the national bestseller Finding Your Zone, I described the concept of The Zone, how it works, and how it applies to peak performance in sports and in life. Its essentially a technical manual to performance-related functions of the human brain.

That book did very well, but it wasnt golf specific, and it didnt address what I believe to be the two main misconceptions about performance coaching: that its only useful for highly skilled athletes, and that true treatments cant be generalized in a way that will work for a wide variety of players.

Theres no question that elite athletes get tremendous benefit from mental coaching. Helping Phil Mickelson process his heartbreaking loss at the 2013 U.S. Open and turn around and win the British Open a month later was certainly exciting for me, both professionally and personally. But what is even more exciting is that the mental playbook Phil has used over the last few years to improve his thought processes is something any golferwith any handicapcan use to shoot better scores.

And thats the true power of Mastering Golfs Mental Game . There may not be enough time or talent left in the world to physically hit the ball like Phil Mickelson can, but you can use Mastering Golfs Mental Game to develop a simple, powerful system for improving the way you think. Its a step-by-step how- to guide to thinking better on the golf course. It works for anyonefrom a tour player to a 25-handicapperand it answers the questions many of the other books in this genre either leave unanswered or cover in an overwhelming layer of science-speak. This isnt a pop psychology book and it isnt a medical journal. Instead of simplistically asking you to just think differently, Im going to show you how, step by step, in straightforward, nontechnical language.