Beating The Dirty Dozen

‘Beating The Dirty Dozen’ is an article by guest author Bill Beausay, President and Technical Director at MindRev™ Golf.

The Problem

Not long ago I saw one of the greatest shots of my life. A fellow golfer in our foursome, a highly strung, perfectionist type was trying to hit a wedge across a pond onto a slightly inclined green. No big deal. He addressed the ball, did his little waggle and swung. As he did, he arched up slightly at impact and chunked the ball right into the water about 20 feet in front of him.

He stood there, slightly bent at the waist, his club dangling in his hands, staring at the spot where the ball plunked into the water. Then, in a quickly rising fit of frustration, he took his wedge, reared back and chucked it clear across the pond!  It bounced on the shore across the pond and up onto the green!  I cringed at the sight: this lunatic golfer and his perfect 100-yard approach shot with a pitching wedge!

We’ve all been there in one form or another.  A bad shot sends us spiralling into disgust, frustration, anger and worse. And when that happens, getting yourself back under control is the hardest thing in the world.

The Dirty Dozen

We focus on helping golfers beat ‘The Dirty Dozen’: the top 12 mental problems golfers complain about. The dirty dozen are:

• anger/frustration
• inconsistency
• lack of competitiveness
• lost or absent focus
• mental imbalance
• cracking under pressure
• mental clutter
• crazy nerves/yips
• inability to let go of a bad shot
• lost feel
• wandering mind
• inability to find the zone

See yourself in this list anywhere? You’re not alone.

The good news is that these dirty dozen problems are created by your brain, not you, literally without you knowing it. That’s right: your brain acts on its own. Your brain learned how to create these ‘states’ and you never even knew it was going on. And what you can’t see, or what you don’t know is going on, you can’t fix. Since you can’t see what your brain is doing (and are oblivious that it’s even happening) your only option is to get mad, blame yourself or the course or the weather, your clubs or whatever.  And blaming won’t help.

The Fix

I’d like to suggest a radical departure from anything you’ve ever heard, and it’s built on the idea that your brain is not you and that it learned to create these dirty dozen problems by itself, and can easily learn to do new things. Using this brain-based system you can change what your brain is doing below your awareness and get positive results.  And it’s not mindfulness, mindset training, hypnosis or Zen. This is teaching your brain to create new peak performance states ‘in the moment’, on the spot when you need them. It’s the next generation of peak performance training previously reserved only for pros.

In a quick conversation with our wedge-tossing friend, we discovered that he suffered from a dirty dozen problem that was pretty easy to fix. His brain was running a straightforward, invisible process (outside his awareness) that was creating this frustration at himself that came out in the form of nasty inner verbal abuse.

Here’s how it worked: Have you ever seen a mental image of something that really makes you mad, then you felt real anger actually well up inside you? It’s a pretty common experience and it’s exactly what he was doing, without knowing it. Because he couldn’t see what was going on, he couldn’t change it. He ‘just got mad’. Anger happened for him every time he sensed those pictures in his mind, especially after a bad shot. I showed him how to change those pictures by lowering their visual intensity and rearranging their order. Then we ‘ran’ that sequence a few times till it felt natural and strong. We changed his brain ‘recipe’ that created anger, and he literally could not get mad as he had before. It was that easy and straightforward to fix.

We’ve stayed in touch and he’s told me his short game has improved dramatically as he has a new tool to fight his dirty dozen problem. Moral of the story? Don’t let the dirty dozen beat you! Find out what your brain is doing outside your awareness and change your game!