I played in a tournament and wanted to succeed, and I didn’t. It sounds simple, but it’s golf, so I’m finding it pretty complicated right now. This isn’t the first time I’ve played poorly. And it won’t be the last. But usually when I have a bad tournament, I feel this obligation to try and get something out of it. I should learn something from the experience. Historically, I’ve looked at bad play as exposing something wrong with my game, or me. And it’s an opportunity to get better.
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But to be honest, with this one, I don’t want to think about it.
I don’t want to think about the good shots I hit because they’re just a reminder of how many more of them I could’ve hit. I don’t want to think about the bad shots and try to figure out why they happened. Was it technical? Mental? I thought I felt calm and confident, but maybe I didn’t? I don’t want to think about that draw I hit into the trees, because I haven’t hit a draw with a driver since Obama was in office, so those trees shouldn’t have been in play.
It’s my personality to want to dig into the round. I like analysing sports, obviously; look at what I do for a living. I also play very few competitive rounds these days, so each one feels disproportionately important. I have two little kids; getting away to play a tournament round is a significant effort. The coordination of childcare, the guilt of leaving them to spend a night in a hotel just to see how few times I can hit a ball with an assortment of sticks … it’s a lot.
If I’m investing so much into so few rounds, I should try to learn as much as I can from each one, right? I like getting better, and usually when things go wrong, I dissect them to figure out how and why exactly they went wrong, so it won’t happen again.
But I’m having a different feeling this time. This time, I feel like a bad score was just a bad score. And that I might be best off leaving it at that.
This is new territory for me. So I reached out to performance gurus Pia Nilsson and Lynn Marriott to ask if I’m allowed to let this one go. They work with PGA Tour and LPGA Tour pros, along with running a golf school, Vision54, for average golfers. When I texted them, I felt like a kid asking a teacher if it was OK to skip an extra credit assignment. I’m a 35-year-old mother of two, but this is what tournament golf can reduce you to.
To my relief, they said I don’t have to examine this one.
“Sometimes it’s good after a round or shot to just close the door and move on,” Nilsson texted. “You just know you didn’t have it, and no need to overanalyse.”
Instead of letting bad thoughts and feelings about the round creep in, they advised me to redirect my thinking to times when I felt good on the golf course. In their studies of neuroscience, Marriott and Nilsson have learned that the more you replay a memory, the more prominent it becomes. And the more likely it is to arise when you’re in similar scenarios.
So, if I sit here and replay the bad shots and frustration over and over, those memories are going to become a much bigger deal than they actually are, and they’re going to revisit me next time I’m on the course. But if I choose instead to replay moments from rounds I felt good about, that’s going to promote feelings of confidence. And I’d much rather have that association on the golf course.
“In general, the tendency is to not pay enough attention to what we do and feel when we play well. You want that to be a very strong memory to draw from,” Nilsson said.
With Nilsson and Marriott’s blessing, I’m letting this tournament go. I’m going to go for a run. I’m going to have a beer. Maybe two. Which will prompt me to complain a bit to my husband about the round—A draw. How did I hit a draw, off the tee, with a driver?
And then I’m going to get ready for the next round.
