There is a department in the game growing in popularity and effectiveness known as elite performance. It’s a nursery from where many of our champions now rise and where much of golf’s funding is directed.
Everyday golfers might feel like these top-tier programs and pathways form a part of the game that resides ‘over there’ – in other words, ‘not for golfers like you and me’. So when we lob a term in your direction like ‘neuro-mechanics’, you might be forgiven for flicking to the next page with a dismissive thought like, What good would that do me? I play off 18… Conversely, perhaps you’ve watched a top player and wondered, What were they thinking as they played that shot?
Anyone who works in recruitment or who has tried to find work through a recruitment agency might be familiar with the neural-modelling tool AbilityMap, which takes guesswork out of hiring employees by providing objective, scientific and scalable technology that matches candidates to roles. Kevin Chandler, a leading organisational psychologist and former president of The Lakes Golf Club, is AbilityMap’s co-founder and has brought the same concept to golf by breaking down ‘mental strength’ into tangible capabilities that can be identified and improved. He recognised that to get the best from a golfer you needed to be able to coach neuro-mechanics as well as biomechanics.
Commonalities with the research of AbilityMap quickly began to surface. From a mental standpoint, those seeking to recruit and develop players all possessed different ideas of what drove performance and had no framework to subjectively identify capabilities. Now, sport neuro-mechanics is available as a way to define, discover and develop the mental attributes required to succeed at the highest level.
Chandler and golf specialist Tony O’Rourke, with the assistance of Golf Australia and the PGA, recruited a team of high-performance coaches that have personally coached international winners. Utilising their knowledge and the AbilityMap model, they were able to aggregate the coaches’ views on the desired mental characteristics of high-performance players. The Elite Golfer Profile details the eight most important characteristics (or capabilities) possessed by players that rise to the occasion rather than crumble. AbilityMap allows the assessment of golfers in relation to these capabilities via a comprehensive series of questions that establish intellectual and personality-based criteria.
The last, and most critical, piece of the puzzle was identifying how these strengths and weaknesses manifest in a player’s game. O’Rourke designed a series of scenario-based questions pinpointing specific components within each competency that link mental attributes and behaviours and decisions on the course. Players now have a quantifiable insight that can be used as a starting point to improve mental performance, just as biomechanics has done for physical performance.
“The objective is to design remedies and techniques that negate the deficiencies exposed in the evaluation,” says O’Rourke, a long-time scratch golfer himself. “We can identify a person’s ‘mental handicap’ and work on the competencies that are lacking so that they rely on awareness to improve how they react in situations that are mentally problematic.”
The cognitive portion of the game is considerable – for all golfers. Much like we all swing the club and approach the game in different ways, golfers also take a broad variety of approaches to the mental game, goal-setting and improvement.
‘A 24-handicapper might actually be much closer to a 12-marker for mental acuity or in the way they process swing changes. Or the reverse might be true.’
Some golfers won’t make a major swing change because they’re not prepared to take one step back in order to move two steps forward. Viewed through the Elite Golfer Profile, these players are probably lacking in the ‘Committing to Goals’ competency and are unlikely to make it to the next level. Other golfers, of course, can – and do.
“Sergio Garcia at the [last October’s] Sanderson Farms Championship was a classic example of someone who set a goal and stuck to it,” O’Rourke says. “He was determined to close his eyes when he putted and reap any benefits that change brought to his game. He stuck with that approach, that goal, and he won.
“And Bryson DeChambeau might be the best example of a goal-setter right now. He has set some incredibly high, even unconventional goals, and he’s absolutely determined to achieve them.”
While those two represent the highest of echelons of golfer, the relevance of the process trickles down to all players. A 24-handicapper might actually be much closer to a 12-marker for mental acuity or in the way they process swing changes. Or the reverse might be true.
Golf, with its many layers, is perhaps the most complex of activities in which to attain completeness. And while you might feel like you don’t have the time or inclination to improve your physical game through lessons with a PGA professional or by hitting hundreds of balls at the practice range, you might well shave shots off your scores by honing your mental approach.
“To be the best you can be, just practising the biometric skills will only take you so far,” Chandler says. “You also need to be aware of your mental strengths or weaknesses and work on those as well.”
An AbilityMap report and initial feedback costs $299, while further discussion is available. Visit abilitymap.com for more.
