Marlin M. Mackenzie - Golf: The Mind Game

A DELL TRADE PAPERBACK
Published by
Dell Publishing
a division of
Random House, Inc.
1540 Broadway
New York, New York 10036

Quotations taken from Golf in the Kingdom by Michael Murphy, copyright 1972 by Michael Murphy, all rights reserved, are reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc.

Copyright 1990 by Marlin M. Mackenzie

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

The trademark Dell is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

eISBN: 978-0-307-79673-8

v3.1

To my brother,
Ken, for auld lang syne.

Selected References: Neuro-Linguistic
Programming

Appendix C Guide to Selecting Metaskills
Techniques

Lots of people shared directly and indirectly in the development of this bookathletes from many sports, my students, my agent, my collaborating author, my editor, and most of all my wife, Edna.

Several dozen outstanding golfers were exceedingly helpful because they allowed me to rummage around in their brains to find out how their minds work. And they provided the true test of the validity of my techniques when they actually performed better after using them.

My graduate students at Teachers College, Columbia University, contributed as they constantly challenged me to clearly describe and justify what I did with my clients. Their analytical minds and healthy skepticism enabled me to refine and expand my techniques.

My collaborator, Ken Denlinger, a good golfer in his own right, was a constant source of humor, understanding, encouragement, practicality, and skepticism.

My agent, Faith Hornby Hamlin, had the insight and confidence to recognize that my earliest draft of a book for athletes in general contained the seeds of a publishable book; and she obviously convinced others to agree with her.

My editor, Jody Rein, with the force of her logical analysis and organization, and with her interest in the uniqueness of my approach, guided my collaborator and me in transforming our original manuscript into a better organized and more succinct piece of work.

Edna, my wife and companion on and off the golf course, deserves a hearty hug and unmeasurable thanks for her emotional support and for her hours of careful editing of draft after draft after draft of this book. She demanded clarity, logic, and good grammar without imposing upon me her own ideas about competition and play, about hitting a golf ball, or about mental processes.

To all of these people I say Thanks. To the golfers among them, I say Have a good time, and hit em long and straight.

MMM
Washingtonville, New York
July 1989

People pay dearly to play golf. They wear the most expensive shoes in their closet, and they kill grass with implements that can run over a thousand dollars a set. Some pay a small fortune to determine where to play golfand with whom. At those prices the civilized sport becomes an investment. Yet nearly all golfers, from humble hackers to elite touring pros, in dogged pursuit of enjoymentand parrarely invest as much as a thought on what will help them more than any hunk of high-tech equipment:

Their own minds.

I propose to change that. In this book I explain the ways your mind, more marvelous than any computer, can be tapped to improve your golf. Wouldnt you prefer feeling the ball jump from the sweet spot on your club, flying long, high, and straight rather than short, skidding dubs? Wouldnt you prefer more matches won and fewer payoffs at the 19th hole? Sure you would.

What I offer is a practical, down-to-earth system that uses the mind and emotions to regulate skills in golfand it works, whether youre a weekend enthusiast or a world-class professional, a 30-handicapper playing from the white tees or a scratch player. The system works because it quiets the conscious mind and engages your unconscious resources. An active conscious mind acts like the hazards on the golf coursetrapping, drowning, or blocking balls from their flight to the cup because youre thinking too much about your swing while playing. My techniques get you to do all your thinking about your swing on the practice tee so that your mind stays out of your way as you swing on the course.

Although golf is a complex mind game, its also supposed to be fun. So are the exercises in this book. In I describe the fundamentals of the mind gamehow your mind operates, how to deepen awareness of your mental processes, and how to improve your game by capitalizing on your inner resources.

contains descriptions of specific techniques, about thirty in all, that can be applied to your method of thinking and the unique way you respond emotionally to competition. These techniques are designed to help you achieve better concentration, heightened motivation, consistency of performance, increased self-confidence, recovery of lost skills, and more enjoyment. A few of them focus on the mobilization of energy when tired, faster healing after injury, and pain control.

Ive coined a word that describes my perspective of how the mind worksMetaskills. It refers to the interaction between emotions and thoughts that regulate skillful athletic performance, most of which are out of conscious awareness. After years of coaching and thinking about the unity of mind and body, I became dissatisfied with the methods of coaching that stressed conscious thought. The methods are okay up to a point, but they dont fully represent what superb athletes really do in their minds to control their behavior.

To eliminate my dissatisfaction I studied psychology and counseling in a search for knowledge that I knew existed although I did not know exactly where to look. Finally, I decided to go to the source. I asked athletes directly how they used their minds and emotions to develop and control their skills. My training as a master practitioner in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) provided me with the knowledge to ask the right questions and the refined skills to uncover their conscious and unconscious processes.

I then created counseling techniques out of what the athletes told me. I combined their information with what Id learned from psychology and from my coaching experience. To refine my metaskills techniques I worked directly with eighty elite athletes (male and female, ages eight to thirty-five) in eleven sports over a two-year period. The model that evolved has been working successfully for about seven years with all kinds of athletes. This book contains those techniques that are most appropriate for golfers.