Golf and Your Brain

Don’t grip the club too tight.
Tension prevents performance.  Tension stems from expectations to try hard, to push for outstanding performance, to effort at executing a skill equal to an imagined outcome. Tension comes from work and effort to reach a goal. Excellent performance actually occurs when relaxed, with an easy acceptance of my current level of skill, without judgment, and timing rather than force and effort is used to create a powerful result. This is the same as working from your natural gift: Accepting yourself for who you are, you approach others with an open curiosity rather than expectations and judgments. Stress disappears. Synergy results with better outcomes than you imagined.

Use the club appropriate to the situation.
...but keep the fundamentals the same.  I have the same gifts to apply in all situations.

Keep the focus on the future.
A sports psychologist once told me that the best professional players (Phil Mickelson, Tiger Woods, for example) use their mistakes to learn from, spend between 60 and 90 seconds thinking about what went wrong, and then focus totally on the next challenge and how well they are equipped to handle it.  Becoming aware of your own defensiveness and resistance to feedback is the difference between enjoying the process of the Game of Living and tension and stress.

Correct and improve.
Use feedback to correct and improve, to find the core of the game that is the best game that you can play.  Ultimately you are the best judge of what works for you, not the teacher, with immediate feedback from where the ball ends up.

Keep the focus on the game, not the shot.
So many times as a beginner I would be devastated by horrible shots and elated by a great shot.  Golf is engaging because it is such a mental game, played against yourself.  Professionals hit shots so that they can hit another thousand shots in the same day.  No one shot is more precious than another, no day more special than another, all is a part of the grand game of lifelong learning.