Leaving Negative Thoughts Behind when You Head to the Tee Box

By Jim Bebbington

They had a packed agenda at the Colorado Golf Association’s annual women’s golf summit in February for an audience of veteran women golfers who run golf leagues all over the state. These are serious golfers.

And yet, even among these amazing and accomplished players, what was one of the most attended workshops of the entire day? A talk by PGA teaching pro Elena King “Stop Worrying – How Self-Talk Undermines Performance.”

Just goes to show you – even the experts wrestle with how to keep our brains from getting between us and performing our best.

About half the attendees at the entire event filled a crowded hall to hear King take the audience through a clear conversation: golf is simple – thinking is hard. “Why do we worry? How does worry impact our performance? What are strategies we can use to manage worry?”

King is a longtime teaching instructor at CommonGround Golf Course in Aurora. Colorado AvidGolfer voters just named her one of the top instructors for women golfers in the state.

She said her talk was intended to help her audience realize how normal negative thoughts are to all of us, but also how it is possible to manage them.

“Worry is the anticipation of a negative event,” she said. “It creates doubt. It creates fear. It creates anxiety. It creates tension. What happens between the range and the first tee? There’s a lot of negative people talking in my head.”

King recommended that players work to recognize when their brains are filling with negative thoughts. “As a golfer, no one cares about what you’re doing; we’re all worried about what we’re doing,” she said. “It’s important to manage what we say to ourselves and each other.”

She armed her audience with some resources if they wanted help in more positivity and success on the tee box and in life:

• Michael Gervais’ Finding Mastery: It is a book, a website and a podcast but centers around curtailing the amount of time we spend focusing on what other people think of who we are and what we do.

• Brene Brown’s TEDx Talk on The Power of Vulnerability: She discusses her research into how people accept their vulnerability.

• Fred and Pete Shoemaker’s Extraordinary Golf

• Rick Jensen’s Easier Said Than Done

• Joseph Parent’s Zen Golf

“We can change mentally what we say which changes our emotions which changes our physical reaction,” King said.