Stop moaning! A top mental health coach reveals four tricks to staying positive on the golf course

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In the latest series of Golf365 columns, psychology coach Duncan McCarthy looks at how we can improve our behavior and performance on the golf course.

We all know someone who moans and groans during a round of golf and puts a damper on what should be the highlight of the week. Almost by osmosis, they manage to make everyone on the team play poorly and, more importantly, have a trash time.

Sometimes, though, it’s you or I who put everyone’s fun down and throw up our arms like we’re on the PGA Tour, complaining about the course, the weather but, mostly, our shortcomings. Here is a guide to cut them and save them to keep the lid on our blasts and save our golf buddies.

1) Don’t complain about lies

There is nothing worse than a bad lie on the rough, and even worse a bad lie on the fairway. But we play a game outside, in the elements, on uneven ground and sometimes on a course that has been around for centuries and played by thousands of golfers. Bad lies will happen, it’s part of the game.

The reaction of many is to inform their playing partners of this or to mutter inwardly that the golf gods are against them today. But we don’t need to tell our teammates on the other side of the fairway that our ball is sitting in a divot or we don’t need to say something as soon as we attempt the shot to make sure everyone is OK. knowing where our ball is.

In theory it is what it is and one thing that many golfers lack is the ability to be accepted. In my opinion this is one of the greatest skills we can learn in golf and in life – embrace the power lie to allow the mind to focus on the task at hand.

We will go through our process physically but most importantly, the mind, sitting in the past, still complaining about poor lies and, guess what, the result is poor.

So the next time we hit our ball with a bad lie, don’t blame the golf gods – accept it, refocus and hit the best shot we can at that moment. The good thing is that we will get a good break like everyone who plays this game.

2) Don’t whine about a missed putt

We all miss putts. Players who play for a living, the best players to ever pick up a putter, we all miss short putts. It’s not fair, it doesn’t help our scorecard and it would be a shame but it happens.

We didn’t miss that putt but the way we missed it is different than just missing it. Did we do our best to try and roll the ball into the cup? If our answer is ‘yes’ then we have done everything we could. We saw the line, we made the putt clearly in mind but it missed. Process and result are two different things.

If we find ourselves living this way in a lesson, just ask the question ‘Was my process correct?’ If the answer was yes, then go ahead. If it was no, then we can take steps to properly focus on the next topic. We should never try to fix something because we can’t. We can’t make a bogey at the end with a birdie on the next. That bird is a bird, that’s all. It doesn’t mean we’re doing it for the last time, we just didn’t pay for it.

So when we find ourselves sitting on the last putt, we ask ourselves if the technique was good, and we look forward to the next opportunity to roll the next putt.

3) Don’t complain about our clubs

We all have our favorite bands in the bag. Part of this is based on feel and part of it may be based on the fact that the club doesn’t suit our swing – which may be the former. But we’ve bought clubs and tested them before we bought them – and we’re very disappointed when a club doesn’t perform well on the course with the card.

How can a group do this? Well, it’s not. We do though. Our mindset has completely changed from the relaxed state we were in naturally while shooting it down the range or netting on the launch monitor. We now have expectations, high or low, for our new club so we put pressure on ourselves to capture the best images we’ve hit in the tests that led to the purchase of the club.

What we want to do is to recreate our country. So move away from the outcome and expectations and go back to the shooting process by choosing our target and making a committed throw, the swing we repeated when testing.

4) Don’t complain about the game

I have heard this said by many, especially young people…. ‘I hate golf!’ However, I have never met a person who was forced to play this game. It is a decision made by us alone to play this game. Yes, we may have a day that presents challenges due to a poor swing or an out of sync swing or other breaks that we think about but we still have two important things that we need to play golf – mind and body.

Go from solving our swing problems to making a conscious effort to make the best smart decisions with every shot.

Playing golf with a loose mind is not recommended. Yet many of us play 18 holes and struggle with many things; weather, playing partners and the game. Unfortunately, we don’t realize that we are fighting against one thing, ourselves. Find peace there by enjoying our place and all that comes with it.

We don’t hate the game, we’re not firing on all cylinders today but how many good rounds are there in a year where everything is good? There are not many so we better learn the ability to accept our challenges any day rather than fight them. It’s a game to be played, not fought.

About Duncan McCarthy
Duncan works with golfers across the tour including Marcus Armitage, Erik van Rooyen and women’s British Open winner Ashleigh Buhai

READ MORE: Duncan McCarthy: how to score goals when you’re playing badly